Coronavirus updates: Travelers from countries where variants have spread will be unable to enter U.S
President Biden on Monday added travelers from South Africa to the list of those barred from entering to the United States — the latest step in an effort to help contain the spread of the coronavirus and fast-moving variants that have surfaced in that country and others in recent weeks.
The move also extends a ban on travelers from Brazil, the United Kingdom, Ireland and 26 other European countries that had been set to expire Tuesday under a proclamation signed by former president Donald Trump shortly before he left office.
“With the pandemic worsening and more contagious variants spreading, this isn’t the time to be lifting restrictions on international travel,” White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki said during a Monday news conference. She said the move was part of the administration’s “science-driven response” to the coronavirus.
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.
