Here are some significant developments:
- The coronavirus vaccine developed by Moderna triggers an immune response that protected in laboratory tests against two variants of the virus first detected in Britain and South Africa, the company said Monday.
- Drug maker Merck is giving up on two potential covid-19 vaccines following poor results in early-stage studies, the Associated Press reported.
- California health officials ended regional stay-at-home orders in the San Joaquin Valley, the Bay Area and Southern California, allowing them to return to county-level restrictions.
- Residents of the Netherlands reacted strongly, and in some cases violently, to coronavirus restrictions, prompting the country’s leader to call his citizens “criminals.” In Israel, similar reactions to restrictions took place in ultra-Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods.
- Deborah Birx, coronavirus response coordinator under Trump, alleged he was receiving statistics — “parallel data” clashing with what she provided him — from someone else.
- Google will invest $155 million in supporting education and equitable access for the coronavirus vaccine, including using company locations as vaccination sites and expanding search information for users Googling “vaccines near me.”
- The Chicago Teachers Union voted to refuse in-person instruction, two weeks after the nation’s third-largest school district called teachers and staff into classrooms and started to lock them out from remote work.
