COVID-19

Health care workers in New York rush to get vaccinated, averting a staffing crisis

New York Times

Thousands of health care workers in New York got inoculated against Covid-19 ahead of Monday’s deadline, helping the state avoid a worst-case scenario of staffing shortages at hospitals and nursing homes.

Health officials across the state reported that employees had rushed to get vaccinated before Monday, avoiding being suspended or getting fired. New York has 600,000 health care workers.

New York City can proceed with vaccine mandate for educators and staff, judges ruled.

New York City’s vaccine mandate for nearly all adults working in its public schools can proceed as scheduled, a federal appeals panel ruled on Monday, reversing a decision made over the weekend that paused enforcement of the mandate until later this week at the earliest.

Mayor Bill de Blasio had originally ordered well over 150,000 educators and staff in the nation’s largest school system to receive at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine by tonight at midnight. That deadline was put on hold late Friday by a judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. The three-judge panel was scheduled to take up the issue on Wednesday, but it appears to have ruled early.

It’s not yet clear if the city will decide to implement the mandate tonight at midnight as originally scheduled or wait until later in the week.

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The World Health Organization is reviving its stalled investigation into the origins of COVID-19 with a new team of about 20 scientists. The team—including specialists in laboratory safety and biosecurity and geneticists and animal-disease experts versed in how viruses spill over from nature—is being assembled with a mandate to find new evidence in China and elsewhere. The possibilities that the new team is charged with examining include whether the COVID-19 virus could have emerged from a lab, according to WHO officials.