'Horrible' weeks ahead as India's virus catastrophe worsens NEW DELHI (AP) — COVID-19 infections and deaths are mounting with alarming speed in India with no end in sight to the crisis and a top expert warning that the coming weeks in the country of nearly 1... AP NEWS

NEW DELHI (AP) — COVID-19 infections and deaths are mounting with alarming speed in India with no end in sight to the crisis and a top expert warning that the coming weeks in the country of nearly 1.4 billion people will be “horrible.”

President Biden on Tuesday is set to announce new steps to reach rural Americans in the push to get as many people as possible vaccinated for the coronavirus, a White House official tells NPR. This emphasis comes as rural hospitals are raising alarms about the pace of vaccination — even among their own employees.

The Biden administration is moving into a new phase of its vaccination campaign, one where it knows doctors and health care professionals are often more persuasive than the government.

It has prioritized a list of doctors enrolled in the vaccine system based on a "social vulnerability index" used by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — including doctors in many rural communities — and has been asking state government to send vaccine doses to those doctors, the official said.

The coronavirus vaccine skeptics who changed their minds The White House and public health experts are studying the Americans who went from "no" to "yes." Dan Diamond Washington Post

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More than 20 states not ordering all available doses as COVID-19 vaccinations slow As demand slows, health officials shift from triaging a flood of people clamoring for the shots to targeting harder-to-reach communities. CBSNews

As the pace of vaccinations continues to slow across the country, more than 20 states are not ordering all the available COVID-19 vaccine doses allocated to them by the federal government, according to a CBS News tally. 

NIH to invest $29 million to address COVID-19 disparities

To bolster research to help communities disproportionately affected by COVID-19, the National Institutes of Health is funding $29 million in additional grants for the NIH Community Engagement Alliance (CEAL) Against COVID-19 Disparities. This funding was supported by the American Rescue Plan. The awards will provide $15 million to 11 teams already conducting research and outreach to help strengthen COVID-19 vaccine confidence and access, as well as testing and treatment, in communities of color. An additional $14 million will fund 10 new research teams to extend the reach of COVID-19 community-engaged research and outreach.

“The goal of this effort is to foster community-engagement research in communities which have been hit hardest by the pandemic,” said Gary H. Gibbons, M.D., director, National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI). “The alliance is designed to meet people where they are with the help of trusted messengers, including family doctors, pastors, and community health workers, and to forge lasting partnerships to address health disparities.”

European regulators reviewing Pfizer vaccine for adolescents European drug regulators are reviewing a request by Pfizer and BioNTech to extend the use of their coronavirus vaccine to children as young as 12 years old. Nathaniel Weixel TheHill

European drug regulators are reviewing a request by Pfizer and BioNTech to extend the use of their coronavirus vaccine to children as young as 12 years old.

Moderna will supply 34 million doses of its Covid-19 vaccine this year and Sweden has donated 1 million AstraZeneca shots to the global COVAX program, a small boost as it struggles to get stocks to inoculate the world’s poorest people.

The advance purchase contract agreed with Moderna is for up to 500 million doses, but the rollout will only start in the fourth quarter, with 34 million doses available this year, the GAVI vaccine alliance said on Monday.

The bulk — 466 million — would only become available next year, it said.

The deal expands the program’s pipeline of vaccines to eight and contains options to potentially access doses of variant-adapted vaccines in the future, it said.

The agreement follows the U.S. drugmaker’s shot being approved for emergency use listing by the WHO on Friday, a prerequisite for COVAX eligibility. read more

GAVI runs the COVAX vaccine sharing facility with the World Health Organization.

The Swedish donation is the second by a European Union member after France last month amid mounting concerns about growing inequity in vaccine distribution after wealthy countries built up stocks of shots for its citizens. read more

CVS and Walgreens Have Wasted More Vaccine Doses Than Most States Combined More than 200,000 doses of covid vaccine have gone to waste since December, KHN has learned. Two national pharmacy chains account for most of it. khnhannahn Kaiser Health News

Two national pharmacy chains that the federal government entrusted to inoculate people against covid-19 account for the lion’s share of wasted vaccine doses, according to government data obtained by KHN.