Enlarge / If you've been vaccinated, the CDC now says you can skip the mask and spacing. (credit: Luis Alvarez/Getty Images )

As part of an ongoing press conference, the Centers for Disease Control responded to recent data on the effectiveness of vaccines and updated its guidance on mask use and physical distancing. Under the new guidance, anybody who is fully vaccinated (meaning two weeks after the final dose of their vaccine) can now skip mask use and social distancing both indoors and outdoors.

"Anyone who is fully vaccinated can participate in indoor and outdoor activities—large or small—without wearing a mask or physical distancing," said CDC Director Rochelle Walensky. There are some limits to the locations where this applies, like hospitals, airplane, and other forms of public transport. But, for the most part, people who have been vaccinated can return to normal activities.

The press conference is ongoing, and we'll update this story once it's over.

Enlarge / The Emergent BioSolutions plant, a manufacturing partner for Johnson & Johnson's COVID-19 vaccine, in Baltimore, Maryland, on April 9, 2021. (credit: Getty | Saul Loeb )

States will not receive shipments of Johnson & Johnson’s one-shot COVID-19 vaccine next week, according to a report by Politico .

White House officials told governors in a call Tuesday that there are no new doses available for order. It’s unclear if the federal government will be able to distribute doses through other channels, such as those that provide vaccines directly to pharmacies and community health centers.

The dried-up supply is just the latest trouble for Johnson & Johnson, which has consistently struggled to produce its vaccine in the US.

Enlarge / A health worker exits an ambulance outside a quarantine center in the Goregaon suburb of Mumbai, India, on Tuesday, April 27, 2021. (credit: Getty | Bloomberg )

As the pandemic coronavirus continues to ravage India, doctors are reporting a disturbing uptick in cases of a rare, potentially fatal fungal infection among people recovered or recovering from COVID-19.

The infection is called mucormycosis , or sometimes “black fungus” in media reports, and it appears to be attacking COVID-19 patients through the nose and sinuses, where it can aggressively spread to facial bones, the eyes, and even the brain (rhinocerebral mucormycosis). In other cases, the fungus can also attack the lungs, breaks in the skin, and the gastrointestinal system or spread throughout the body in the blood stream.

A classic feature of mucormycosis is tissue necrosis—the death of flesh, essentially—which, in the rhinocerebral form of the disease, can lead to black, discolored lesions on and in the face, particularly on the bridge of the nose and the roof of the mouth. Mucormycosis is fatal in around 50 percent of cases.

Enlarge / Vials with COVID-19 Vaccine labels showing logos of pharmaceutical company Pfizer and German biotechnology company BioNTech. (credit: Getty | Photonews )

The European Union has declined to renew orders for AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine, an EU official said Sunday. The decision comes after a series of production and safety troubles with AstraZeneca’s vaccine—and news on Saturday that the EU signed a deal to have Pfizer and BioNTech provide up to 1.8 billion doses of their vaccine between 2021 and 2023.

Last month, the EU took legal action against AstraZeneca, alleging that the company had failed to live up to its contract to supply the bloc with doses. The contract ends in June.

"We did not renew the order after June,” European Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton said in a Sunday French radio interview, which was reported by Reuters . “We’ll see what happens," he added, leaving open the possibility of future orders.

Enlarge / Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis speaks during a press conference about the opening of a COVID-19 vaccination site at the Hard Rock Stadium on January 06, 2021, in Miami Gardens, Florida. (credit: Getty | Joe Raedle )

As large swaths of the country face snags in COVID-19 vaccine distribution due to crippling snow and ice, some communities in Florida may face snags due to political windstorms from their governor, Ron DeSantis.

DeSantis was criticized this week after the Sunshine State unveiled plans to open a “pop-up” clinic near Tampa that would offer vaccine doses only to residents in affluent, mostly white, mostly Republican areas of Manatee County. The clinic will vaccinate 3,000 residents of just two ZIP codes in the county, which were reportedly hand-selected by DeSantis and County Commissioner Vanessa Baugh—instead of being selected using the state’s vaccine lottery system.

Plans for the clinic were born from a deal struck between DeSantis, Baugh, and real estate developer Rex Jensen, according to the Bradenton Herald. DeSantis reportedly reached out to Jenson, who agreed to host the clinic on his development, Lakewood Ranch. The master-planned community covers much of the two selected ZIP codes served by the clinic. The ZIP codes also overlap with Baugh’s district.

Enlarge / The head office of Janssen pharmaceutical company on February 5, 2021 in Leiden, the Netherlands. The American mother company of Janssen, Johnson & Johnson, has requested quick approval in the United States for the coronavirus vaccine that was developed by Janssen Vaccines in Leiden. (credit: Getty | BSR Agency )

Johnson & Johnson on Thursday announced it has applied to the US Food and Drug Administration for an Emergency Use Authorization for its one-shot COVID-19 vaccine.

If the EUA is granted, the vaccine will be the third authorized for use in the US against the pandemic coronavirus, likely boosting the vaccine supply in the coming months and helping to hasten immunization country-wide.

J&J’s application to the FDA comes just a week after the company revealed top-line results of its Phase III clinical trial , which found the vaccine to be 66 percent effective overall at preventing moderate and severe COVID-19. J&J’s vaccine—made by its vaccine developer Janssen Pharmaceuticals—was 85 percent effective at preventing severe disease. In the trial, severe disease was defined as testing positive for the virus as well as having signs consistent with severe systemic illness, respiratory failure, shock, or organ failure, or being admitted to an intensive care unit, or dying. The company reported that no one who received the vaccine was hospitalized or died during the trial.

Enlarge / Aerial view showing a tractor digging graves in a new area of the Nossa Senhora Aparecida, where COVID-19 victims are buried, in Manaus, Brazil. (credit: Marcio James / Getty Images )

While attention has been focused on the worrying new variants of SARS-CoV-2, there has been some good news: despite the evolution of a number of strains that appear to spread more readily, total COVID-19 cases have been dropping, both in the United States and globally. While there are a number of nations that are still seeing an increase in infections, a combination of reduced post-holiday spread and increased social interventions appear to be getting the surges seen in January under control.

That said, there are worrying signs that, at least in the US, a number of states are making the same mistakes that ensured that the virus never really went away after the first surge in cases. And the spread of many new variants drives home the need to avoid complacency.

Going down

The general fall in cases came up at a recent press briefing from the World Health Organization. "For the third week in a row, the number of new cases of COVID-19 reported globally fell last week," said WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. "There are still many countries with increasing numbers of cases, but at the global level, this is encouraging news."

Enlarge / Masks and distancing work in the classrooms, too. (credit: MediaNews Group/Reading Eagle via Getty Images )

Can schools be kept open safely even as the COVID-19 pandemic continues largely unchecked? So far, the data has been mixed. Studies of spread in schools seem to suggest they're not a major source of infections. But when countries that shut their schools as part of a package of pandemic restrictions were compared to those that didn't, the ones that had schools shut down had a lower overall rate of infection. So, the record on opening schools seems a bit mixed.

Yesterday, the CDC released a detailed look at the spread of SARS-CoV-2 within a single school system in rural Wisconsin. While the results come from a time before the new, more easily spread strains had evolved, they show that some of the measures laid out in guidelines on how to safely reopen schools work. Thanks to those precautions, infections in the school were down by 37 percent compared to infections in the community at large, and there were very few infections that occurred within the school. But it also raises an obvious question: if these measures work, why aren't we all using them?

Appropriate cautions

The study started at the end of August 2020 and continued on through to the end of November. It focused on the schools of Wood County, Wisconsin, and tracked infections that took place among its faculty and staff as well as comparing those to the spread of the pandemic in the county as a whole. Overall, there were 4,876 students and 654 staff members included in the data.

Enlarge / A registered nurse practitioner holds up a sign and a flag asking for another patient to dose with the Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine as well as a more vaccine doses at a vaccination site in Seattle, Washington on January 24, 2021. (credit: Getty | Grant Hendsley )

With the country’s vaccine rollout in utter disorder, health officials in the Biden administration are cautiously trying to both manage expectations and express optimism.

In a series of interviews over the weekend, officials warned that states could face vaccine shortages in the short term, with some states’ supplies already running low—or completely running out. On the other hand, the officials remained convinced that they would be able to achieve the administration’s goal of getting 100 million doses in arms in their first 100 days in office—a goal that has been criticized as being both too ambitious and not ambitious enough.

With 95 days to go until their goal’s deadline, the officials have made clear just how much work they face in getting vaccinations on track.