The World Health Organization called on Wednesday for a moratorium on coronavirus vaccine booster shots until the end of September to help all countries vaccinate at least 10 percent of their populations, appealing to the world’s wealthiest nations to address dramatic disparities in global vaccination rates.
“I understand the concern of all governments to protect their people from the Delta variant,” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director general of the W.H.O., said in a briefing. “But we cannot — and we should not — accept countries that have already used most of the global supply of vaccines using even more of it, while the world’s most vulnerable people remain unprotected.”
Of more than 4 billion vaccine doses that have been administered around the world, more than 80 percent have been used in high- and upper-middle-income countries, which account for less than half of the world’s population, Dr. Tedros said. High-income countries have administered almost 100 doses for every 100 people, he said, while low-income countries have administered just 1.5 doses for every 100 people, mainly because of a lack of supply.
“We need an urgent reversal, from the majority of vaccines going to high-income countries, to the majority going to low-income countries,” he said.
As the debate over booster shots has heated up, humanitarian groups have pressed the moral and scientific case for doses to be given first to vulnerable people in poorer nations. African countries have administered 5 doses for every 100 people, compared with 88 doses per 100 people in Europe and 85 in North America.
As deaths have surged in African nations in recent months, some health workers and elderly or vulnerable people have remained entirely unprotected. The urgency of vaccinating more people globally has only grown as the Delta variant has run rampant: Delta is considerably more contagious than other variants, and may also cause more severe illness.
That made it unacceptable, Dr. Tedros said, for millions of unvaccinated people who could not stay at home to go to work, exposed to transmission, while others in wealthier nations could be eligible for booster shots.
Scientists have still not come to a consensus on whether booster shots are necessary. But as worries emerge about continuing pandemic waves and future lockdowns, an increasing number of countries like Germany, Israel and France are preparing to give part of their population booster doses, or have already started.
Studies have indicated that the immunity generated by the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines is long-lasting. Researchers are still working to understand recent Israeli data suggesting that the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine declined in efficacy months after inoculation.
The W.H.O.’s appeal on Wednesday largely put the onus of fixing the world’s vaccine gaps on the world’s wealthiest nations, saying that the leadership of G-20 countries would determine the course of the pandemic. Dr. Tedros asked health ministers of those countries, who are meeting ahead of a planned summit in October, to make “concrete commitments” to reach the organization’s global vaccination targets.
Wealthier nations have a clear incentive to fill vaccination gaps in a continuing crisis that has gripped every corner of the world, because the pandemic will not end “unless the whole world gets out of it together,” Dr. Bruce Aylward, a senior W.H.O. adviser, said on Wednesday. “With the huge disparity in vaccination coverage, we are simply not going to achieve that.”
In the battle against the coronavirus, few places seemed as confident of victory as China.
The country of 1.4 billion people had eradicated the virus so quickly that it was one of the first in the world to open up in spring last year. People removed their masks and gathered for pool parties. The government has swiftly stamped out fresh outbreaks by mobilizing thousands of people to test and trace infections.
That model is now looking increasingly fragile.
China is facing its biggest challenge since the virus first erupted in the Chinese city of Wuhan last year: The Delta variant is spreading through the country. Chinese officials have acknowledged that this outbreak will be much harder to curb than the others, because this variant spreads so quickly, often without symptoms.
New cases in cities such as Nanjing, Wuhan, Yangzhou and Zhangjiajie are showcasing the limitations of China’s zero-tolerance approach. They may also undermine the ruling Communist Party’s argument that its authoritarian style has been an unquestionable success in the pandemic.
Although the government had to stamp out a Delta flare-up in June in Guangdong Province, the spread has been far wider this time, with 483 cases since July 21, more than the total for the first five months of the year. By Tuesday afternoon, the virus had spread to 15 of the 31 provinces and autonomous regions in China.
“Once it reaches so many provinces, it’s very hard to mitigate,” said Chen Xi, an associate professor of public health at Yale. “I think this would be surprising and shocking to the rest of the world. Such a powerful government has been breached by Delta. This will be a very important lesson — we cannot let our guard down.”
Last week, Sun Chunlan, a vice premier of China, blamed “ideological laxity” for the Delta outbreaks and urged officials to step up their prevention efforts. “We cannot relax for a moment,” Ms. Sun said.
Some public health experts in the country say it is time for China to rethink its Covid strategy. In a recent essay, Zhang Wenhong, who advises the Chinese government on dealing with Covid-19, floated the idea of following a model similar to that of Israel and Britain, in which vaccination rates are high and the authorities are willing to live with infections.
For now, China has stuck to its strict playbook. Across the country, the government has instructed people not to travel unless necessary. In the cities of Zhangjiajie and Zhuzhou, 5.4 million people have been barred from leaving their homes. Roughly 13 million residents in the city of Zhengzhou, the site of deadly floods in July, had to stand in line for virus testing starting last weekend.
In Nanjing, where the first recent Delta cases appeared, millions of residents have endured four rounds of testing.
“It’s just torturing the masses,” said Jiang Ruoling, a Nanjing resident. Ms. Jiang, who works in real estate, said she understood the need for testing, but was still critical of officials for failing to control the latest outbreak. “The leaders are actually wasting resources and everyone’s time,” she said.
Yanzhong Huang, a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations, said China’s “containment-based” strategy would not work in the long run, particularly as new variants continue to emerge. “It will become extremely costly to sustain such an approach,” he said.
With a surge of coronavirus infections ripping through much of the United States, the Food and Drug Administration has accelerated its timetable to fully approve the Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine, aiming to complete the process by the start of next month, people familiar with the effort said.
President Biden said last week that he expected a fully approved vaccine in early fall. But the F.D.A.’s unofficial deadline is Labor Day or sooner, according to several people familiar with the plan. The agency said in a statement that its leaders recognized that approval might increase public confidence and had “taken an all-hands-on-deck approach” to the work.
Giving final approval to the Pfizer vaccine — which has been used in the U.S. under an emergency authorization granted late last year — could help increase inoculation rates at a moment when the highly transmissible Delta variant of the virus is sharply driving up the number of new cases.
A number of universities and hospitals, the Defense Department and at least one major city, San Francisco, are expected to mandate inoculations once a vaccine is fully approved. Final approval could also help mute misinformation about the safety of vaccines and clarify legal issues about mandates.
Federal regulators have been under growing public pressure to fully approve Pfizer’s vaccine ever since the company filed its application on May 7. “I just have not sensed a sense of urgency from the F.D.A. on full approval,” Dr. Ashish K. Jha, the dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, said in an interview on Tuesday. “And I find it baffling, given where we are as a country in terms of infections, hospitalizations and deaths.”
Although 192 million Americans — 58 percent of the population and 70 percent of adults — have received at least one shot, many remain vulnerable to the ultracontagious, dominant Delta variant. The country is averaging nearly 86,000 new infections a day, an increase of 142 percent in just two weeks, according to a New York Times database.
Recent polls by the Kaiser Family Foundation, which has been tracking public attitudes during the pandemic, have found that three of every 10 unvaccinated people said that they would be more likely to take a fully approved vaccine. But the pollsters warned that many respondents did not understand the regulatory process and might have been looking for a “proxy” justification not to get a shot.
Former President Barack Obama has canceled his 60th birthday party, which had been scheduled for Saturday at his island mansion on Martha’s Vineyard, with hundreds of former administration officials, celebrities and Democratic donors invited.
“Due to the new spread of the Delta variant over the past week, the President and Mrs. Obama have decided to significantly scale back the event to include only family and close friends,” Hannah Hankins, a spokeswoman for the former president, said in a statement Wednesday morning.
The party had been months in the making and some guests had already arrived on Martha’s Vineyard. Others were en route on the ferry or scheduling the required coronavirus tests whose results they had to submit to a medical “coronavirus coordinator” to gain entry to the Obama compound. The New York Post reported that George Clooney, Steven Spielberg and Oprah Winfrey were all expected to attend.
“They’ve been concerned about the virus from the beginning, asking invited guests if they had been vaccinated, requesting that they get a test proximate to the event,” said David Axelrod, a former top Obama adviser. “But when this was planned, the situation was quite different. So they responded to the changing circumstances.”
Mr. Obama’s belated change of plans came days after President Biden conceded that the pandemic had come roaring back, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in an internal document that the Delta variant was much more contagious and more likely to break through vaccine protections than all other known versions of the virus.
Mr. Obama had at first appeared eager to carry on with his plans, but some invitees had already decided it was best not to attend, including Ronald A. Klain, the White House chief of staff.
Alan Dershowitz, a Martha’s Vineyard denizen who served on former President Donald J. Trump’s defense team in his first impeachment trial, said the community in Chilmark, a town on the island, was critical of the party plans and said it was wise for Mr. Obama to cancel or postpone.
“Everyone is talking about it and no one is talking about it positively,” Mr. Dershowitz said in an interview on Tuesday. “Some people are making excuses for it. No one is saying it’s a good idea.”
Pakistan reached a milestone in Covid vaccinations this week, health officials said: The number of people receiving shots surpassed one million a day.
But it took extraordinary measures, and much cajoling, to get there. Among other things, the government has threatened to shut off cellphone service, hold back salaries and prohibit air travel for anyone who isn’t vaccinated.
Officials say they have secured enough vaccine doses to inoculate the entire country by year’s end, and have justified the penalties as necessary for overcoming widespread vaccine hesitancy. Proof of vaccination is required for school employees, and by the end of the month the requirement will be extended to hospitality and transport workers as well as public-sector employees.
In Karachi, the country’s bustling commercial hub and most populous city, long lines formed outside vaccination centers this week, and some fights broke out as people lost patience.
“I do not trust vaccines, not even in the presence of the coronavirus,” said Shahid Khan, a driver at a private company, who was waiting for a shot outside Karachi’s largest vaccination center. “But I am forced to get inoculated so I can get my August salary and prevent my cellphone service from being blocked.”
About 26 million of Pakistan’s 220 million people have received at least one vaccine dose, according to the government. Pakistan has largely relied on Chinese-made vaccines, including those made by Sinopharm and Sinovac, with smaller supplies of the Pfizer and AstraZeneca vaccines available since June.
Vaccine hesitancy is not new to Pakistan. The country has already grappled with disinformation around other long-established vaccines, particularly for polio, which remains endemic in the country.
Coronavirus cases are rising across the country, fueled by the highly transmissible Delta variant. Pakistan is reporting an average of nearly 4,000 infections per day, lower than a previous surge in April but a 56 percent increase from two weeks ago, according to New York Times data.
In Karachi in late July, more than 25 percent of coronavirus tests came back positive, suggesting that a huge number of cases were going undetected. Officially, more than 23,000 people in Pakistan have died of the virus since the pandemic began, and about one million have been recorded as infected, but those numbers are almost certainly undercounts as testing has not been widely available.
At vaccination centers in Karachi, most people were not wearing masks or following social distancing guidelines, raising concerns among health experts that the rush for shots could fuel the spread of the virus. To prevent overcrowding, the government declared that at least 11 vaccination centers in Karachi would operate around the clock throughout the week, and that health authorities would send mobile vaccination teams into neighborhoods.
“After the government’s warnings, it seems the entire Karachi came out to the vaccination centers,” said Shabbir Ahmed, a data entry officer at a vaccination center in Karachi. Keeping their cellphone service, he said, was “more important for people than their lives.”
Pete Parada, the drummer for the pop-punk band the Offspring, says his decision not to get a Covid-19 vaccination for medical reasons has cost him his job.
“Since I am unable to comply with what is increasingly becoming an industry mandate — it has recently been decided that I am unsafe to be around, in the studio, and on tour,” Mr. Parada said on Instagram on Tuesday. “I mention this because you won’t be seeing me at these upcoming shows.”
His doctor had advised him not to get vaccinated, Mr. Parada said, because he has Guillain-Barré syndrome, a disorder in which the body’s immune system attacks nerves.
“The risks far outweigh the benefits,” he said, adding that he had caught the virus last year and suffered mild effects from it.
“I am confident I’d be able to handle it again,” he said of the virus, “but I’m not so certain I’d survive another post-vaccination round” of the syndrome. The Food and Drug Administration last month said Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine may be associated with a small increased risk of Guillain-Barré syndrome. There is not yet any data to suggest a link between the condition and Covid-19 vaccines made by Pfizer-BioNTech or by Moderna, both of which rely upon a different technology.
Mr. Parada also said he did not support “those with the most power” dictating medical procedures to others, citing governments, corporations and employers.
It’s unclear whether Mr. Parada was dropped permanently or temporarily from the band. The Offspring became famous in the 1990s with such songs as “Why Don’t You Get a Job?” and “Pretty Fly (For a White Guy).” Mr. Parada joined in 2007 and this year performed on its latest album, “Let the Bad Times Roll,” its first in nearly a decade.
A request for comment from the band was not immediately returned early Wednesday.
An Offspring concert scheduled for Sunday in Los Angeles is sold out, and dozens of other dates across the United States and Europe are scheduled through next summer.
In recent weeks, there have been a deluge of vaccine mandates from companies amid concerns about the spread of the Delta variant. Tyson Foods and Microsoft were the latest to require employees to be vaccinated. Arts institutions have also begun to require vaccinations for people visiting museums, shows and concerts. Mayor Bill de Blasio announced Tuesday that New York City will become the first U.S. city to require proof of at least one dose of a coronavirus vaccine for indoor dining, gyms and other activities.
Mr. Parada said he doesn’t have any negative feelings toward the band, adding, “They’re doing what they believe is best for them, while I am doing the same.”
Most children with Covid-19 recover within a week, but a small percentage experience long-term symptoms, according to a new study of more than 1,700 British children. The researchers found that 4.4 percent of children had symptoms that last four weeks or longer, while 1.8 percent have symptoms that last for eight weeks or longer.
The findings suggest that what has sometimes been called “long Covid” may be rarer in children than adults. In a previous study, some of the same researchers found that 13.3 percent of adults with Covid-19 had symptoms that lasted at least four weeks and 4.5 percent had symptoms that lasted at least eight weeks.
“It is reassuring that the number of children experiencing long-lasting symptoms of Covid-19,” is low, Dr. Emma Duncan, an endocrinologist at King’s College London and lead author of the study, said in a statement. “Nevertheless, a small number of children do experience long illness with Covid-19, and our study validates the experiences of these children and their families.”
The study, published on Tuesday in the journal The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health, is based on an analysis of data collected by the Covid Symptom Study smartphone app. The paper focuses on 1,734 children between the ages of 5 and 17 who tested positive for the virus and developed symptoms between Sept. 1 and Jan. 24. Parents or caregivers reported the children’s symptoms in the app.
In most cases, the illness was mild and short. Children were sick for six days, on average, and experienced an average of three symptoms. The most common symptoms were headache and fatigue.
But a small subset of children experienced lingering symptoms, including fatigue, headache and a loss of smell. Children between 12 and 17 were sicker for longer than younger children and more likely to experience symptoms that lasted at least four weeks.
“We hope our results will be useful and timely for doctors, parents and schools caring for these children — and of course the affected children themselves,” Dr. Duncan said.
The researchers also compared children who tested positive for the coronavirus with those who reported symptoms in the app but tested negative for the virus. Children who tested negative — and may have had other illnesses, such as colds or the flu — recovered more quickly and were less likely to have lingering symptoms than those with Covid. They were ill for three days, on average, and just 0.9 percent of children had symptoms that lasted at least four weeks.
Recently, a 28-year-old patient died of Covid-19 at CoxHealth Medical Center in Springfield, Mo. Last week, a 21-year-old college student was admitted to intensive care.
Many of the patients with Covid-19 now arriving at the hospital are not just unvaccinated — they are much younger than 50, a stark departure from the frail, older patients seen when the pandemic first surged last year.
In Baton Rouge, La., young adults with none of the usual risk factors for severe forms of the disease — such as obesity or diabetes — are also arriving in E.R.s, desperately ill. It isn’t clear why they are so sick.
Physicians working in Covid hot spots across the nation say that the patients in their hospitals are not like the patients they saw last year. Almost always unvaccinated, the new arrivals tend to be younger, many in their 20s or 30s. And they seem sicker than younger patients were last year, deteriorating more rapidly.
Doctors have coined a new phrase to describe them: “younger, sicker, quicker.” Many physicians treating them suspect that the Delta variant of the coronavirus, which now accounts for more than 80 percent of new infections nationwide, is playing a role.
Studies done in a handful of other countries suggest that the variant may cause more severe disease, but there is no definitive data showing that the new variant is somehow worse for young adults.
Some experts believe the shift in patient demographics is strictly a result of lower vaccination rates in this group.
As of Sunday, more than 80 percent of Americans ages 65 to 74 were fully vaccinated, compared with fewer than half of those ages 18 to 39, according to figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The vaccines are powerfully effective against severe illness and death after infection with any variant of the virus, including Delta. A vast majority of hospitalized patients nationwide — roughly 97 percent — are unvaccinated.
“I don’t think there’s good evidence yet about whether it causes more severe disease,” Dr. Adam Ratner, associate professor of pediatrics and microbiology at the New York University Grossman School of Medicine, said of the Delta variant.
The Greek synchronized swimming team has withdrawn from the Olympics because four of its members tested positive for the coronavirus, requiring the entire team to leave the athletes’ village in Tokyo.
The Hellenic Olympic Committee said in a statement that “there will be no Greek representation” in the duet or group events in synchronized swimming. All members of the team were transferred to a quarantine hotel, the committee said.
Olympic organizers said on Tuesday that one Greek swimmer had tested positive, and on Wednesday three more members of the team were added to the list of athletes who had been found to be infected with the coronavirus. At least 327 people connected to the Games have now tested positive in Japan since July 1, including 31 athletes, according to Tokyo 2020 officials.
The news ended a topsy-turvy run for the Greek swimmers. A key member of the team, Evangelia Platanioti, tested positive for the virus in late July and was thought to be out of the Games. But after a subsequent test turned up negative, she rushed to Tokyo and arrived on Sunday, just a day before the preliminary round of the duet competition in synchronized swimming, also known as artistic swimming.
She and her partner, Evangelia Papazoglou, tied for 10th place and advanced. But they had to withdraw before the next round on Tuesday evening.
Tokyo organizers announced a total of 28 new cases among Olympics personnel on Wednesday, the highest daily count reported so far.
Elsewhere in Japan, virus cases are surging. The country has recorded an average of nearly 10,000 new infections daily over the past week, the most since the start of the pandemic, according to New York Times data. The Japanese government said this week that it would begin hospitalizing only Covid-19 patients who were seriously ill or at risk of becoming so, leaving those with minor symptoms to isolate at home in order to reduce the strain on hospitals.
The Lazio region of Italy, which includes Rome, has been unable to offer vaccination appointments online for three days because of a cyberattack on its website over the weekend, part of what the authorities said was probably Italy’s most serious ransomware case to date.
Ransomware attacks, in which criminals break into a computer system, encrypt the data it contains and demand money to release it, have struck health care systems in many countries, paralyzing hospitals, clinics and testing centers from California to Ireland and New Zealand. The attack in Italy is one of the largest to affect a vaccination campaign, raising alarms about its potential impact.
“It’s hitting one of the things that in 2021 are fundamental,” said Stefano Zanero, a professor of cybersecurity at the Polytechnic University of Milan.
The attack against the regional information technology services began at midnight on Saturday. It came at a fraught time, as the Italian authorities are grappling with vaccine skepticism and the spread of the Delta variant, which is dominant in the country.
Italy’s postal police, who have jurisdiction over cyberattacks, are still investigating the identity of the attackers, but the president of the Lazio region, Nicola Zingaretti, said on Monday that the police knew it had come from abroad. He called the attack “very powerful and very invasive.”
A ransomware attack in May on the Colonial Pipeline, which transports fuel from Texas across the southeastern United States as far as New Jersey, caused a shutdown that lasted several days and prompted panic buying of gasoline in the United States. In Ireland, an attack paralyzed the health services’ digital systems for more than a week in June, delaying Covid-19 testing and medical appointments.
Regional governments have extensive powers over vaccinations in Italy, and the Lazio region, home to nearly 6 million people, prided itself on an efficient campaign. About 70 percent of the region’s adult population is fully vaccinated, the highest figure in the country; for Italy as a whole, the figure as of Tuesday was 53 percent, according to a New York Times tracker.
Vaccinations are going ahead in Lazio, and the 500,000 people who had booked appointments before the cyberattack will still receive their shots, the authorities said. After Aug. 13, though, the region’s vaccination schedule is empty. Alessio D’Amato, the region’s top health care official, said that bookings would become available again by the end of the week.
Several other public services have also been affected by the attack, including health care appointments, but the authorities said personal health and financial information had not been breached or stolen. Residents can still download the health pass that will be required for many social activities starting Friday.
Some vaccination sites in the region are offering shots without appointments, including one at the Rome-Fiumicino International Airport, and officials are sending vans to distribute shots in remote villages. But their capacity is limited.
The pace of Italy’s vaccination campaign has slackened in recent weeks, and many Italians over the age of 60 have not yet completed their vaccinations. “I make an appeal to all the workers and the citizens,” Mr. Zingaretti said, “Let’s go ahead and not slow down.”
Mr. Zanero, the professor of cybersecurity, said that he thought the attack was financially motivated rather than a political or terrorist attack. He expressed hope that the attack would prompt more investment in cybersecurity. “This could be an impulse in that direction,” he said.
As Wall Street workers trickle back into their Manhattan offices this summer, they are noticeable for their casual attire. Men are reporting for duty in polo shirts. Women have stepped down from the high heels once considered de rigueur. Ties are nowhere to be found.
The changes may be superficial, but they hint at a bigger cultural shift in an industry in which well-cut suits and wingtips once symbolized swagger, memorialized in popular culture by Gordon Gekko in the movie “Wall Street” and Patrick Bateman in the film adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’s novel “American Psycho.” Even as many corporate workplaces around the United States relaxed their dress codes in recent years, Wall Street remained mostly buttoned up.
Like so much else, that changed in the pandemic. Big banking firms, including Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup, have realized that their employees are loath to reach for their corporate attire after more than a year of working from home dressed mainly in loungewear, or Zoom-appropriate shirts on top and sweatpants below.
Although banks haven’t sent out formal memos, their informal message is that returning employees should feel free to dress appropriately for the occasion — and that during a summer with few in-person client meetings, more relaxed attire is permissible.
This being Wall Street, casual doesn’t necessarily mean cheap, of course. Many of the sneakers, shirts, watches and other more laid-back accessories spotted in Lower Manhattan last week cost several hundred dollars or more.
Lananh Nguyen and
Vaccines in England were 60 percent effective at preventing symptomatic cases of Covid-19 caused by the Delta variant, researchers reported on Wednesday, a figure lower than most previous estimates that scientists nevertheless said ought to be interpreted cautiously.
The results, drawn from testing a random sample of nearly 100,000 volunteers, offered some of the most extensive evidence to date of vaccines’ performance against the Delta variant, which has driven surges of cases in Britain, the United States and elsewhere. They indicated that vaccines were 50 percent effective at preventing people from becoming infected, with or without symptoms.
But scientists cautioned that the results had an exceedingly high degree of statistical uncertainty, and relied largely on volunteers self-reporting their vaccination status.
The study sent tests to a random sample of volunteers, rather than relying on people to seek coronavirus tests themselves, so its figures include people who may not otherwise have thought much of their symptoms or known they had the virus at all. Estimates of vaccine effectiveness tend to be lower in studies that include mild or asymptomatic cases.
The results also did not distinguish between the different vaccines being used in Britain. By mid-July, roughly twice as many people had been fully vaccinated with the AstraZeneca vaccine as with Pfizer’s, the main two shots in use in Britain. In previous studies, the Pfizer vaccine has appeared more effective against the Delta variant than AstraZeneca’s.
The researchers, led by a team from Imperial College London, said that their estimates of vaccine effectiveness were lower than those reported previously in England, but consistent with data from Israel.
Other studies in England have suggested that vaccines are more than 90 percent effective in preventing people from being hospitalized with a Covid-19 case caused by the Delta variant.
“Participants who reported being vaccinated were at substantially reduced risk of testing positive compared with those who reported not being vaccinated,” the latest study said. It has not been published in a peer-reviewed journal.
The study also compared the viral loads in vaccinated and unvaccinated people who tested positive for the virus, finding that vaccinated people carried less virus. That suggested, the researchers wrote, that vaccinated people who tested positive were less infectious. Other studies, including from the United States, have found similar viral loads in infected people, whether or not they were vaccinated.
Scientists said that it was difficult to tell from the study precisely how much the vaccines reduced the risk of infection or transmission. The findings were drawn from a random sampling of volunteers over late June and early July, part of a routine infection survey known as React-1.
“The React-1 findings, when coupled with other studies demonstrating the impact of coronavirus vaccines on reducing hospitalization and death from Covid-19, are encouraging,” said Dr. Tom Wingfield, a senior clinical lecturer at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine.
But, he said, the results were also “a reminder that, even with extremely high vaccine coverage, we are highly likely to have a further wave of SARS-CoV-infections in the autumn.”
Vanguard, the investment giant, is offering a $1,000 reward to fully inoculated employees, a spokesman for the company told The New York Times. With about 17,300 employees, that could equate to a check of roughly $17.3 million. “The incentive recognizes crew who have taken the time to protect themselves, each other, and our communities by being vaccinated,” the spokesman said.
The Washington Post pushed back its office return to Oct. 18 from Sept. 13, according to a memo sent to staff on Tuesday that was viewed by The New York Times. The Post said last week that it would require all workers to provide vaccination proof as a requirement of employment once the company returns to the office.
Politico’s publisher, Robert Allbritton, told employees in an email viewed by The New York Times on Wednesday that the company was pausing its plans for an office return, which originally had been set for Sept. 7, and did not have a new target date “given the fluidity of the situation.”
All autoworkers will be required to wear masks at unionized plants, offices and warehouses, the United Automobile Workers union, General Motors, Ford Motor and Stellantis said on Tuesday. The requirement will apply regardless of whether workers are vaccinated and is in response to the latest guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The union and automakers said they would not require workers to be vaccinated but were “strongly encouraging” vaccinations.
Tyson Foods, one of the nation’s largest meat processors, said on Tuesday that it would require vaccines for its U.S. workers — about half of whom remain unvaccinated. Vaccinations will be a condition of employment for all U.S. workers, and any new employees must be vaccinated before they start work, the company said. Tyson is offering $200 to frontline workers who verify that they are fully vaccinated. The company already offered employees up to four hours of pay if they are vaccinated outside of their normal shift.
Microsoft will require proof of vaccination for all employees, vendors and guests to gain access to its U.S. offices, the tech giant said Tuesday in an email to employees, adding that it will push back its return-to-office date by a month, to no earlier than Oct. 4. Parents with children who are too young to be vaccinated will be able to work from home until January. The company employs roughly 100,000 people in the United States and had previously planned to return to office in early September, though with flexibility for employees to work up to half of their time from home.