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The Biden administration has upgraded its traveladvisory for India to an outright ban as the COVID-19crisis in the country continues to spiral out of control — something President Biden once said would “not stop” coronavirus.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki announced the ban Friday afternoon, saying the decision was made on the advice of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
“The administration will restrict travel from India starting immediately,” Psaki told reporters. “The policy will be implemented in light of extraordinarily high COVID-19 caseloads and multiple variants circulating in India.”
President Biden has previously been critical of travel bans implemented by then-President Donald Trump as a tool to fight the spread of COVID-19, saying they “will not stop” the disease.
“Banning all travel from Europe — or any other part of the world — will not stop it,” Biden tweeted in March 2020 at the very start of the pandemic.
“A wall will not stop the coronavirus,” he wrote. “Banning all travel from Europe — or any other part of the world — will not stop it. This disease could impact every nation and any person on the planet — and we need a plan to combat it.”
The U.S. will restrict travel from India beginning May 4, as COVID-19 ravages the world’s second-largest country.
The White House announced the new policy on Friday afternoon. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has already declared India “very high risk,” and recommended that Americans avoid all travel to India.
“On the advice of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Administration will restrict travel from India starting immediately,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki’s office said in a statement. “The policy will be implemented in light of extraordinarily high COVID-19 caseloads and multiple variants circulating in the India. The policy will take effect on Tuesday, May 4.”
According to a presidential proclamation, the restriction applies to “nonimmigrants” and “noncitizens” who were in India during the 14-day period prior to attempting to enter the U.S. The restrictions do not apply to U.S. citizens, permanent residents, among other exceptions.
The United States’ first shipment of emergency medical aid supplies arrived in India on Friday, as the country has reported more than 300,000 new cases each day for the last week. India’s health care system received more than 400 oxygen cylinders, nearly a million test kits and other supplies.
Vice President Kamala Harris addressed the new restrictions Friday.
“So, on the issue of India, the – we have announced that there’s going to be a travel restriction starting on Tuesday on the advice of the Centers of Disease Control,” she said. “Our COVID-19 experts, medical experts, our national security advisers. It is important to note, as I said earlier, that we have a responsibility as the United States in particular as it relates to the people that we have partnered with over the years.”
India reports that more than 200,000 people there have died from COVID-19, but the real figure is believed to be higher. The U.S. has still not agreed to release doses of AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine or any other vaccine to India, although President Biden said earlier this week he’s discussed the matter with India’s prime minister.
Eli Broad made his billions building homes, and then he used that wealth — and the considerable collection of world-class modern art he assembled with his wife — to shape the city around him.
Dogged, determined and often unyielding, he helped push and prod majestic institutions such as Walt Disney Concert Hall and the Museum of Contemporary Art into existence, and then, that done, he created his own namesake museum in the heart of Los Angeles.
With a fortune estimated by Forbes at $6.9 billion, the New York native who made California his home more than 50 years ago flourished in the home construction and insurance industries before directing his attention and fortune toward an array of ambitious civic projects, often setting the agenda for what was to come in L.A.
Active and still looking ahead until late in life, Broad died Friday afternoon at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, Suzi Emmerling, a spokesperson for the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, said in a statement. A cause of death was not given.
“We join the city of Los Angeles in mourning the loss of Eli Broad. The city and the nation have lost an icon,” Los Angeles Times Executive Chairman Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong and his wife, Michele, said in a statement.
“Eli’s life story is an inspiration and a testament to the possibilities America holds,” they said. “The Broads’ support and leadership of the cultural, educational and medical institutions that sustain us have been transformative. Our thoughts are with Edye and their family and we’re forever grateful to her and Eli.”
Civic transformation was “his driving force,” Barry Munitz, a longtime Broad associate and former chancellor of the California State University, told The Times in 2004.
Eli Broad, philanthropist, art collector and builder, has died at 87.
Broad spent millions to endow medical and scientific research programs, including stem cell research centers at UCLA, USC, UC San Francisco and Harvard. He was also a deep-pocketed booster of public education reform who funded charter schools, a training academy for school district executives and, for a dozen years, the annual $1-million Broad Prize for high-achieving urban school districts.
But he left his most visible legacy as a cultural philanthropist and broker, whose money and world-class modern art collection made him a powerful and often controversial force on the local arts scene.
In the late 1970s, he became the founding chairman of the Museum of Contemporary Art, and he bailed it out of a financial scandal three decades later with a $30-million grant.
In the 1990s, when the effort to build Disney Hall was falling apart, he took charge of a $135-million fundraising campaign to complete construction in 2003.
That year, he also pledged $50 million to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to build the contemporary art wing that bears his name.
Calling himself a “venture philanthropist,” he expected his benefaction to bring more than a pat on the back and naming rights. He regarded his donations as investments, the success of which he would judge by their returns, whether in the form of scientific breakthroughs, improved test scores or higher museum attendance.
“I am a builder,” the tall, white-haired Broad once told The Times. “I don’t like to preside over the status quo and simply write checks.”
His demands made some potential recipients think twice about accepting money from Broad. “Too many strings,” said the leader of a major Los Angeles nonprofit, who asked not to be named. Others put it less politely. “Eli is a control freak,” Disney Hall architect Frank Gehry said of his former client in a 2011 segment of CBS’ “60 Minutes.”
Broad was known not only for aggressive involvement in his philanthropic projects but also for a tendency to withdraw his support when developments failed to go his way. These traits were well known in L.A.’s art world, in which he was an unavoidable force.
“The truth is that Eli is L.A.’s most prominent cultural philanthropist, and if you run a museum in this city you have a relationship with him one way or another,” Ann Philbin, director of the Hammer Museum, where Broad once sat on the board, said in a 2010 Vanity Fair article.
Broad’s relationships with the institutions he enriched were often vexing.
In 2010, as a dominant member of the MOCA board, he steered the museum toward the controversial choice of Jeffrey Deitch, a New York gallery owner from whom he had purchased art, to be its new director. In 2012 he forced the resignation of the museum’s longtime chief curator, Paul Schimmel, who had clashed with Deitch over shows involving celebrity artists such as Dennis Hopper that seemed to pander to popular tastes. Several board members resigned in protest, including Ed Ruscha, John Baldessari, Barbara Kruger and Catherine Opie.
In 2013, with MOCA struggling financially, Broad tried to broker a merger between the museum and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, a match that made little sense to many in the museum world. The proposal died amid sharp questioning by critics, including the New York Times’ Roberta Smith, who wrote: “The combination of the domineering Mr. Broad and unusually passive trustees has forced to its knees one of the greatest American museums of the postwar era.”
At LACMA, Broad insisted that the much-needed modern art wing be called the Broad Contemporary Art Museum and personally recruited architect Renzo Piano to design it and a board to govern it. LACMA agreed to his terms without a solid pledge from the multibillionaire to donate works from the 2,000-piece contemporary art collection he had built with his wife, Edythe.
Just before the 80,000-square-foot building’s formal unveiling in 2008, Broad stunned much of the museum world by announcing that he would not be giving LACMA his treasure trove of Warhols, Rauschenbergs and Lichtensteins. Instead, he said he would lend works to the museum from the private art foundation he founded in 1984, an arrangement that he believed would ensure the art he and his wife had amassed over decades would be seen and not stored away.
His decision brought pointed headlines, such as the one accompanying a New York Times story: “To Have and Give Not.” Time magazine’s Richard Lacayo was most blunt, writing on his blog, “LACMA got screwed.”
Although Broad had said over the years that he would not go the way of Armand Hammer and Norton Simon, he ultimately did decide to build his own museum. He settled on a prime downtown lot adjacent to MOCA and Disney Hall for the Broad, the eponymous museum and art lending library that opened in September 2015, part of his vision to cement Grand Avenue as the cultural heart of L.A.
“We believe we have reinvented the American art museum,” he wrote in a 2019 L.A. Times essay on Los Angeles’ cultural evolution.
Broad was a major architecture patron, who over the years supported projects by many of the world’s top architects, including Zaha Hadid — who designed the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University, Broad’s alma mater — Cesar Pelli and Richard Meier.
Closer to home, he and his wife made major gifts to UCLA for a fine arts complex and to Caltech for a biological sciences center. He also supplied a $10-million endowment for programming and arts education at Santa Monica College’s performing arts center.
Born in New York on June 6, 1933, Broad was an only child who grew up in Detroit, where his Lithuanian immigrant father, Leon, worked as a house painter before operating several five-and-dime stores. His mother, Rita, was a seamstress who later worked as a bookkeeper for her husband.
The family name was spelled Brod and pronounced like the slang term for a woman, which made young Eli the butt of many jokes. This grew tiresome, so in junior high he added an “a” to his last name and told people “Broad, rhymes with ‘road.’“
“Some of the teasing continued,” he recalled in his 2012 memoir, “Eli Broad: The Art of Being Unreasonable,” “but it didn’t really sting anymore. I had changed myself.”
He graduated with a degree in accounting from Michigan State University in 1954, the same year he married Edythe “Edye” Lawson. In 1956 their son Jeffrey was born, followed three years later by another son, Gary. His wife and sons survive him.
At 20, Broad had become a certified public accountant — one of the youngest in Michigan history. He shared office space with Donald Kaufman, a carpenter-contractor who was married to his wife’s cousin. In 1957 he and Kaufman borrowed $25,000 from Broad’s father-in-law and launched a home-building company, Kaufman & Broad (now KB Home).
Broad had heard of a company in Ohio that beat its competition by building houses without the customary basement. “I didn’t understand why you couldn’t do that in Michigan,” he said in a 2006 Vanity Fair profile. “So we came up with a product, which I modestly called the Award Winner, which sold for $13,740, and vets could move into it for, like, 300 bucks. My idea was if they could move out of garden apartments into three-bedroom houses for less than rent and have equity and the tax benefits, it worked.”
His hunch proved correct. The houses sold quickly, and Kaufman & Broad became the biggest independent builder of single-family homes in the country. The company expanded into Arizona and California. Broad was a millionaire before he turned 30.
In 1963, after Kaufman retired, Broad moved the company from Phoenix to Los Angeles. He and his wife bought a home in Brentwood.
At first, Los Angeles, with geographic sprawl unlike Detroit or Phoenix, baffled him. But gradually he became a master of the metropolis, joining civic boards and elite social circles. Richard Riordan, the venture capitalist and future L.A. mayor, became a close friend.
“Los Angeles is a meritocracy,” Broad told Los Angeles magazine in 2003. “It’s one of the few cities you can move to without the right family background, the right religious background, the right political background, and if you work hard and have good ideas, you’re accepted.”
He got involved in politics, running California Democrat Alan Cranston’s first winning campaign for the U.S. Senate in 1968. Four years later, afraid that Democratic Sen. George McGovern was too soft on the Soviet Union, he served as vice chairman of Democrats for Nixon. Broad later led the successful effort to bring the 2000 Democratic National Convention to Los Angeles.
While he was building Kaufman & Broad, his wife, Edythe, immersed herself in L.A.’s gallery world. Before long her husband became an ardent collector too.
Their first major purchase came in 1972 when they paid $95,000 for a Van Gogh drawing. Broad eventually found modern art more to his liking and began accumulating works by such artists as Lichtenstein, Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Cindy Sherman, Jeff Koons, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Damien Hirst.
In the late 1970s, he led a campaign that raised more than $10 million to launch a museum dedicated to modern art. With a personal donation of $1 million, he became founding chairman of the Museum of Contemporary Art and influenced the selection of Japanese modernist Arata Isozaki to design it.
In 1984, he stepped down as MOCA chair after disagreements with the board but remained one of the city’s most powerful art patrons.
In 1994, Riordan enlisted him to resuscitate the fundraising campaign for Disney Hall, which had been stalled by an economic recession. Riordan and Broad each contributed $5 million to the effort, and with Broad leading the charge the $135-million goal was reached by 1998. Despite a major tiff with architect Gehry, with whom Broad had a troubled history (Gehry designed his Brentwood home but was fired when Broad thought he was taking too long), the concert hall opened in 2003 to jubilant reviews. Broad received the lion’s share of credit for its completion.
His role in reviving the Disney Hall project established him as Los Angeles’ most formidable philanthropist. Los Angeles magazine put him on the cover in June 2003 with the headline, “He has more pull than the mayor, more art than the Getty, and more money than God. Does Eli Broad own LA?”
He acknowledged that people often questioned his motives. He liked putting his name on buildings and always sought the best return on his investments.
In 1995, he purchased a Lichtenstein painting called “I … I’m Sorry” for $2.5 million and paid with his American Express card, reportedly so he could rack up frequent-flier miles. He later donated the miles to California Institute of the Arts in Valencia for student travel. But the real reason for putting a seven-figure tab on his credit card, he said in his memoir, was to keep earning interest on the $2 million until the bill was due.
Strategic planning, as well as keeping a sharp eye on the bottom line, was what got him to the top of two industries. He had taken Kaufman & Broad into the life insurance business in the 1970s, when the housing market was in a slump. In the 1980s, he expanded into annuities and other financial services, which he eventually spun off into a separate company, SunAmerica. In 1993, he stepped down as chairman of Kaufman & Broad to run SunAmerica, his second Fortune 500 company.
In 1999, he sold SunAmerica to American International Group for $18 billion, and he retired in 2000 to become a full-time philanthropist.
Flush with cash from the sale, he committed $2 billion to his philanthropies, including $100 million to create the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, which supports school reform. It has spent more than $600 million since 1999 on a variety of initiatives.
As with the arts, Broad demanded a hands-on role in improving education.
He played a prominent role in the development of the Los Angeles Unified School District’s downtown arts high school. He personally helped recruit two superintendents, former Colorado Gov. Roy Romer and veteran educator John Deasy. But his ambitions ranged beyond L.A. and California.
In 2002, his foundation began to fund the Broad Prize, which targeted urban districts with large achievement gaps. It exemplified its founder’s philosophy of tying monetary awards to concrete results such as gains in student test scores. Disappointed in the slow pace of improvement, he suspended the prize in early 2015.
He also founded the Broad Superintendents Academy, the largest training program in the nation for urban school superintendents. Its more than 150 fellows, many of them from business, the military and other fields outside education, undergo a 10-month program heavy on corporate-style management techniques and have gone on to leadership positions not only in Los Angeles (Deasy is a Broad graduate) but also in New York, Chicago and other major city school districts. In 2019, Broad announced he was moving the academy to Yale University.
The wealth and vision that created these initiatives also made Broad a target of scorn by some education experts. One of his most prominent critics was education historian Diane Ravitch, who assailed Broad along with Microsoft’s Bill Gates and others as members of “the billionaire boys’ club” of business titans whose top-down reform efforts weaken the voices of parents and teachers unions.
“His Broadies are leading districts and states,” Ravitch wrote in her blog in 2012. “Some are educators, some are not. Some are admired, some are despised. But the question remains, who elected Eli Broad to reform the nation’s schools? He is like a spoiled rich kid in a candy shop, taking what he wants, knocking over displays, breaking jars, barking orders.”
None of this discouraged Broad. “Our role is to take risks that government is not willing to do,” he told Newsweek in 2011. “The fact that I don’t concern myself about criticism or pushback helps.”
Broad made an offer to buy the Los Angeles Times and San Diego Union-Tribune in 2015, saying he believed the papers should be owned by a Californian. His offer, which had reportedly been solicited by Tribune Publishing, was rejected. The newspapers were later purchased by Soon-Shiong, a Los Angeles biotech billionaire.
Notoriously impatient — ”Let’s move on” was his favorite way of telling people they were wasting his time — Broad liked to stay busy, multitasking even during his leisure time. The only regret he expressed about an extraordinarily successful life was that he spent too much time building his businesses and not enough time being a father to his sons, neither of whom has sought the public spotlight.
“I was serious, focused, demanding, and not much fun,” Broad wrote in his memoir. “I took the boys with me to tour subdivisions, and now I realize that’s not exactly how kids want to spend their weekends. I missed too many moments.”
“I am unreasonable,” he wrote. “It’s the one adjective everyone I know — family, friends, associates, employees, and critics — has used to describe me…. But I believe that being unreasonable has been the key to my success.”
Woo is a former Times staff writer. Times staff writer Steve Marble contributed to this report.
One hundred million adults in the United States are now fully vaccinated, White House coronavirus response director Jeff Zients announced Friday.
“That’s a hundred million Americans with a sense of relief and peace of mind, knowing that after a long and hard year, they’re protected from the virus,” Zients told reporters at a White House Covid-19 briefing.
He continued: “Knowing their decision to get vaccinated protects not just themselves but also protects their families, their friends and their communities.”
“A hundred million Americans who can follow the new CDC guidance released this week and enjoy going to the park with their family, dining and socializing with their friends outside and many more outdoor activities without needing to wear a mask,” Zients said.
The news comes as CNN reported that Biden’s coronavirus advisers are moving into the next phase of their response, from ramping up availability of Covid-19 vaccines to reaching those who have not yet gotten the shot.
White House officials have three overarching goals for the next 100 days: increasing accessibility, combating misinformation and assisting those without the resources to get vaccinated.
The US has administered approximately 237 million shots of the three Covid-19 vaccines as of Friday morning, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The Biden administration doubled and surpassed its initial goal of 100 million Covid-19 vaccine doses administered in its first 100 days, reaching the 200 million benchmark on April 21. It has been racing to get shots in arms as variants spread throughout the country.
The White House has poured resources into educating the American public about the safety and efficacy of the three Covid-19 vaccines that have received emergency use authorization by the US Food and Drug Association.
The Biden administration has launched TV ads to encourage vaccinations and increase public confidence in the vaccines as it ramps up distribution.
It also announced nearly $10 billion would be allocated toward increasing vaccine access and confidence in hard-hit communities across the country, which includes $3 billion of CDC funding to support outreach efforts in the states through community-based organizations and trusted community leaders.
Biden has said there will be enough vaccine for every adult American by the end of May. Every American over the age of 16 is now eligible for a Covid-19 vaccine across the country.
White House chief medical advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci on Friday urged Americans to make sure they receive their second dose of the Covid-19 vaccines, saying the second shot provides “dramatic” benefits.
Pfizer‘s and Moderna‘s Covid vaccines require two doses given three to four weeks apart. Both vaccines are about 95% effective against the virus, but that strong protection doesn’t kick in until two weeks after the second dose, officials say.
Fauci said Friday that about 8% of Americans who received one dose of the Pfizer or Moderna Covid vaccines have not returned for their second shot. But skipping the second dose could cause problems for those Americans, he said, because a single shot of the vaccine triggers a weaker immune response compared with two.
Fauci cited numerous scientific studies, including a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report published Wednesday that found the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna Covid-19 vaccines are 64% effective at preventing hospitalizations in the elderly after one shot, but 94% effective after two doses. The study evaluated 417 hospitalized adults across 14 states from January to March.
“If you’re having a two-dose regimen, make sure you’re getting that second dose,” he said during a White House briefing on the coronavirus pandemic.
Early on, officials and public health experts said they worried it would be difficult for some Americans, especially working-class people who cannot as easily take time off, to return for a second dose. Still, officials have said the uptake of second shots is better than expected.
On Friday, Fauci also urged health-care providers to make sure they quickly reschedule canceled visits for second shots.
Fauci’s remarks come as the U.S. is experiencing its first true slowdown in the rate of daily vaccinations after months of a steady climb. The country is averaging 2.6 million reported vaccinations per day over the past week, CDC data shows, down from a peak of 3.4 million reported shots per day on April 13.
His comments also come as the U.S. is tracking highly contagious new variants of the virus. Fauci has previously said two doses of Pfizer’s or Moderna’s Covid vaccines are better than one to protect against variants.
Earlier this month, Fauci offered advice for those who have reported being diagnosed with Covid after receiving their first vaccine shot and before receiving their second shot.
He said people who get infected with the coronavirus between Covid-19 vaccine shots can get their second dose after they’ve recovered from the illness and are no longer considered contagious.
WASHINGTON (AP) — From John Kennedy to Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump, American presidents have taken aim at corporate America’s tax-avoidance schemes before — and mostly missed.
Now, President Joe Biden is training the government’s sights again on the loopholes, shelters and international havens that have long allowed multinational companies to dodge taxes in ways that ordinary households cannot.
The idea is twofold: First, to help pay for Biden’s trillions in proposed spending — for everything from roads and bridges and green energy to internet access, job training, preschool and sick leave. And second, to shift more of the federal tax load onto companies and narrow America’s vast income inequality. Affluent investors reap the biggest windfalls when after-tax corporate profits accelerate.
“The burden,” said Thornton Matheson, senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center, would “fall predominately on wealthier individuals.”
Biden, in effect, wants to swing the pendulum back. At one time — the early-to-mid-1950s — corporations accounted for 30% of federal tax collections. Last year, their share barely topped 7%.
As corporations have generated an ever-smaller share of federal tax revenue, the burden has fallen more heavily on individuals, through the income tax and the levies that pay for Social Security and Medicare.
The president wants to stop companies from stashing profits in countries with low tax rates. To do so, he’s proposed a 21% minimum tax on multinationals’ foreign earnings and is urging other countries to follow suit. His plan would also rescind what the administration sees as international loopholes in Trump’s 2017 tax legislation.
To strengthen its ability to root out tax cheating, the administration has proposed adding $80 billion to the IRS budget over a decade to bolster the agency’s underfunded enforcement team. As part of his effort to reduce America’s wealth gap, he’s also proposed raising the tax rate on long-term capital gains for Americans who earn over $1 million a year.
Many analysts see Biden’s corporate tax plan as a gamechanger — if Congress embraces it.
If adopted, the 21% minimum global tax “effectively spells the end of the tax haven as we have come to know it,” said Alexander Arnon, an analyst at the nonpartisan Penn Wharton Budget Model, a research organization associated with the University of Pennsylvania.
Penn Wharton’s analysts estimate that a 21% minimum global tax and other international provisions of Biden’s tax plan would raise $987 billion from 2022 through 2031 — nearly half as much as Biden’s overall corporate tax plan would produce. Biden would collect an additional $892 billion from the centerpiece of his plan: an increase in the overall corporate tax rate to 28% from the 21% Trump slashed it to in 2017, the Penn Wharton analysis finds.
“It’s a terrific plan,” said Matthew Gardner, senior fellow at the left-leaning Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. “We cannot have a sustainable corporate tax system until we solve this problem of companies shifting their intangible assets around. This plan should stop that dead.”
Republicans and business groups are already lining up in opposition. The Business Roundtable, an association of CEOs, reported that 76% of the top executives it surveyed said the 21% minimum global tax would weaken their company’s competitiveness by making them pay more tax on global earnings than their international rivals do. Biden’s tax hikes, the roundtable warned, could also limit corporate investment and hiring.
The Chamber of Commerce’s chief policy officer, Neil Bradley, argued that the Biden plan would “slow the economic recovery and make the U.S. less competitive globally.”
In defense of Biden’s tax plan, his Treasury Department says it would target “excess″ corporate profits — unnaturally high earnings that can result from a company’s near-monopoly power. Such companies already have so much cash available for investment that higher taxes wouldn’t dissuade them from, say, building a plant or hiring more workers, Treasury and some academic economists contend.
In the end, many analysts say they think that any agreement on a higher corporate tax rate could settle on around 25% — less than Biden would like but higher than the current rate.
Governments have long been vexed by how hard it is to collect taxes from corporations that run operations in multiple countries. The goal sounds straightforward: “What they’re trying to do is tax where the economic activity takes place,” said Ronald Graziano, managing director of accounting and tax research at Credit Suisse.
But the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development estimates that governments lose up to $240 billion a year to companies that shift earnings among countries to lower their tax bills.
The Biden plan would strengthen provisions aimed at preventing companies from gaming the system — by, say, having their U.S. operations buy supplies from an affiliate in a tax haven, thereby creating a deductible expense in the higher-tax United States while putting profits in a low-tax jurisdiction.
Existing law also lumps all foreign earnings together, giving companies the ability to shift earnings and tax credits among countries to minimize their U.S. tax bill.
“Right now, it’s like a blender approach,” Gardner said. “Companies are allowed to throw all their foreign income into one big bucket in calculating this stuff. And that leaves room for a company that has a bunch of assets in a high tax-rate jurisdiction to throw stuff into the Caymans just for the hell of it.”
The Biden plan seeks to end that by assessing taxes on a country-by-country basis: If a company pays zero tax in a tax haven, its earnings in that country would be subject to the full 21% U.S. global minimum tax.
Overall, corporations would face a tax hike. Among big multinationals, Credit Suisse estimates, the effective tax rate — what companies actually pay — would rise from 14% to 18% for Apple, 17% to 22% for Microsoft, 16% to 22% for Google parent Alphabet and 12% to 17% for Facebook. Part of the higher tax burden would ultimately fall on wealthy individuals, who disproportionately own shares in corporate stock: New York University economist Edward Wolff has found that the richest 10% of Americans own about 85% of stock wealth.
The Biden administration is endorsing an OECD push to get countries to sign on to a minimum global tax like the one it’s proposing for U..S. companies. The idea is to stop countries from slashing corporate tax rates to outbid each other for multinational corporations — at the cost of losing revenue that could help finance public works projects and social spending.
For the United States, though, international cooperation is “not strictly necessary to make the Biden plan work,” Gardner said. “If we put this into place unilaterally and gave the IRS the tools it needs to enforce the laws — that’s all you need.”
As early as 1962, the Kennedy administration sought to collect more tax from multinationals. But history suggests that corporate giants — and their armies of accountants, tax lawyers and lobbyists — are endlessly creative at finding ways to keep earnings away from the IRS.
“Just as there is no limit to the ingenuity of 12-year-old boys getting into trouble,” Gardner said, “there is no limit on the ingenuity of companies finding their way around these regulations.’’
An Israeli police official who oversaw the security arrangements for the massive religious celebration where 45 people were killed in a stampede on Friday said he took responsibility for the disaster, according to a report.
“I bear overall responsibility, for better or worse, and am ready for any investigation,” Shimon Lavi, commander of the Northern District, told reporters hours after the tragedy, the Times of Israel reported.
Eyewitnesses accused police of blocking a key exit route at the bottom of a narrow passageway, which had for years been seen as a dangerous potential bottleneck, but Lavi said the exact cause of the tragedy is under investigation.
Early indications were that the fatal crushing occurred when large numbers of people, mostly ultra-Orthodox men, moved through the slanting walkway on the exit route from the Mount Meron site during the annual Lag Ba’omer festivities.
Commander Shimon Lavi reportedly said that he bears “overall responsibility” for the tragedy.Wikimedia
People began to trip and fall on each other, creating a catastrophic domino effect.
Police for a period blocked stairs at the bottom of the passageway, according to the Times of Israel, which cited a Channel 12 report.
Mourners gather around the body of Rabbi Eliezer Goldberg, who died during Lag Ba’omer celebrations.AP/Ariel Schalit
There is an ongoing “complicated effort to gather evidence to reach the truth,” Lavi said, adding that cops saved lives during the stampede, pushing through the crowds to rescue people.
The Israel Times reported that police officers temporarily blocked stairs at the bottom of the passageway during the stampede.AP/Sebastian Scheiner
Public health chief Sharon Alroy-Preis, who had warned earlier this week that a massive gathering at the site could drive an outbreak of COVID-19, told Army Radio that the tragedy could have been averted if police had enforced the restrictions on the number of people allowed to attend.
Mourners gather for the funeral of Rabbi Eliezer Goldberg, who died during Lag Ba’omer celebrations at Mt. Meron in Israel.AP/Ariel Schalit
“It was not possible to reach an agreement on who enforces the regulations at Mount Meron,” she said. “I remind you that the number of people allowed to gather outside is restricted to 100 — it is the responsibility of the police to enforce the laws of the State of Israel.”
Israeli security officials and rescuers carry an ultra-Orthodox Jew who was injured during the festival of Lag Ba’omer at Mt. Meron in northern Israel.AP
Meanwhile, President Biden said he spoke with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to offer his condolences, and said the US stood ready to offer assistance.
In a statement, he said the US also was working to confirm reports that Americans may have died or been injured in the stampede.
For the past week, Republicans in the state Senate have pushed forward with an audit of the 2020 vote in Maricopa County, a massive undertaking that has pleased Trump and his supporters while stirring outrage among Democrats, who have sought to stop the effort.
Here are five things to know about the audit of the 2020 election results:
Why is this happening?
The audit is the latest effort by Trump loyalists in the state to call the results of the 2020 presidential election into question, even after multiple audits since November determined that vote was tallied accurately.
What’s different this time, however, is that the audit is being carried out by the state Senate itself. Republican state senators used their subpoena power to demand that election officials hand over all of Maricopa County’s 2.1 million ballots, as well as its voting machines and voter registration information.
Despite legal efforts by the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors to block the subpoenas, a judge declared the demands valid and directed officials to hand over the requested materials. State senators are conducting a hand count of the ballots, as well as an examination of the voting machines and voter data.
The state Senate’s audit is widely viewed as a political exercise, intended to placate Trump’s supporters, many of whom remain convinced that the 2020 election was stolen from the former president. In fact, no evidence has been uncovered that backs up those claims.
Who’s behind it?
Arizona state Senate Republicans have hired a little-known Florida-based firm called Cyber Ninjas to run the audit, a decision that critics say is a red flag.
Cyber Ninjas has no experience in elections, and its website describes it as specializing in “all areas of application security, ranging from your traditional web application to mobile or thick client applications.”
Democrats have also raised concerns about past tweets from the company’s chief executive, Doug Logan, spreading conspiracy theories about a stolen election in Arizona. Those tweets were deleted earlier this year.
Cyber Ninjas isn’t the only firm involved in the audit. The state Senate has also hired Wake Technology Services Inc. to conduct the hand count of the ballots. The company previously conducted a hand count of the vote in Fulton County, Pa.
While part of the audit is being financed by taxpayer money, the effort also has some prominent backers. One America News Network, the pro-Trump cable channel that has been livestreaming the audit, has started to fundraise for the effort.
What are Trump and Democrats saying?
The audit has so far proven polarizing.
Trump has repeatedly praised the undertaking as a valiant effort to root out voter fraud and malfeasance, echoing the same baseless claims he has made about the election results for months. In several statements issued through his leadership PAC, Save America, he’s cast the audit as a popular effort while maligning Democrats for fighting it.
“Incredible organization and integrity taking place in Arizona with respect to the Fraudulent 2020 Presidential Election,” Trump said in a recent statement. “These are Great American Patriots, but watch, the Radical Left Democrats ‘demean and destroy campaign’ will start very soon.”
Democrats and elections experts have expressed grave concern about the audit, arguing in particular that the process has so far lacked transparency and warning that partisan elected officials may be sacrificing accuracy and security in favor of speed and political convenience.
Critics have also raised concerns about the audit’s potential effects on voter privacy and the security of their ballots. A group of election security and administration experts sent a letter to the Justice Department on Thursday asking federal officials to dispatch monitors to the audit site.
State Democrats in Arizona, meanwhile, are suing to halt the audit. A judge agreed to do so last week if the plaintiffs posted a $1 million bond, though the Democrats in the lawsuit refused. A new judge took over the case this week after the previous judge recused himself.
Has the audit found any fraud?
That’s still unclear, but it’s highly unlikely that the audit will uncover the scale of mass voter fraud that Trump and his allies have alleged. Again, previous audits of the vote in Maricopa County determined that the vote was counted accurately and that the voting machines used had not been tampered with.
And while no state legislature has gone as far as Arizona’s in examining Trump’s claims of fraud, several have conducted their own hearings and reviews on the allegations. None, however, have uncovered credible evidence to back up the allegations.
Cyber Ninjas has agreed to release a report of the audit within 60 days.
What are the implications of the audit?
The audit isn’t going to be used to reverse the election results in Arizona. It can’t be, and state senators have said as much.
The election results were certified by state officials months ago, effectively solidifying Biden’s win in Arizona. What’s more, both the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate signed off on the Electoral College vote in January, two weeks before Biden took office.
Instead, Republicans in the Arizona state Senate say that the audit is simply a means of restoring voters’ confidence in the elections process and is necessary to help them decide whether to craft changes to the state’s election laws — something that GOP-controlled legislatures in other states have either already done or are working toward in the wake of the 2020 election.
Yet it also comes with the risk of eroding faith in Arizona’s elections.
Democrats and voting rights advocates have warned that the audit has put ballots at risk of being tampered with. What’s more, the catalyst for the audit — Trump’s claims of widespread voter fraud and malfeasance — have stirred suspicions that Republicans may be trying to discredit unfavorable election results.
CNN’s Ed Lavandera, Ashley Killough, Dave Ruff, Gregg Canes and Joel De La Rosa reported from the US-Mexico border, CNN’s Catherine E. Shoichet reported from Arlington, Virginia and CNN’s Madeleine Stix reported from New York. CNN’s Priscilla Alvarez contributed to this report.
Ultra-Orthodox Jews look at the scene where dozens of people were killed and some 150 injured in a stampede during the Lag BaOmer festival at Mount Meron in northern Israel on Friday.
Sebastian Scheiner/AP
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Sebastian Scheiner/AP
Ultra-Orthodox Jews look at the scene where dozens of people were killed and some 150 injured in a stampede during the Lag BaOmer festival at Mount Meron in northern Israel on Friday.
Sebastian Scheiner/AP
JERUSALEM — At least 45 people were killed and some 150 more injured in a crush at a religious festival of ultra-Orthodox Jews in northern Israel, where tens of thousands of faithful had convened in one of the country’s largest events since the pandemic began.
The chaos at Mount Meron began early Friday at the festival of Lag BaOmer, which features bonfires and dancing around the Galilee tomb of a 2nd-century rabbi.
According to witnesses, at around 1 a.m. local time, in an area of the complex where the ultra-Orthodox Hasidic community of Toldos Aharon was holding its celebration, participants were pushing through a slippery staircase. Suddenly, a row of people fell to the floor, piling atop of one other.
Witnesses said that people were asphyxiated or trampled in the tightly packed corridor. The stampede occurred in the men’s section of the gender-segregated festival, Reuters reported, quoting medics, who said that casualties included children.
Officials had limited the number of bonfires at the site this year in an attempt to control crowds because of COVID-19 concerns.
“There weren’t a lot of bonfires this year, and I believe that’s why everyone came all at once,” said a young survivor, identified as Avraham, speaking to Israeli Channel 12 television from his hospital bed.
Hezi Levi, the director general of Israel’s Ministry of Health, told NPR that he was concerned about a potential virus outbreak because of the large crowds.
“I expressed yesterday my concern of gathering together of hundreds of thousands of people who are coming to celebrate the Lag BaOmer, and we spoke about a scenario that might be very dangerous regarding corona,” Levi said. “We are not sure that everybody is vaccinated. We know children under 16 years old are not vaccinated. And it’s very dangerous to transfer the disease.”
Despite warnings from Israeli health officials, local media estimated the crowd at this year’s festival at around 100,000 people.
Another witness told Haaretz newspaper, “It happened in a split second; people just fell, trampling each other. It was a disaster.”
Rescue officials put the death toll at 45. Zaki Heller, a spokesman for the Magen David Adom rescue service, said 150 people had been hurt in the stampede, six of them were in critical condition.
Authorities struggled to identify the dead, asking families to bring medical records and photographs of their relatives to Israel’s central morgue.
Relatives continued to search for their missing loved ones Friday morning, after buses evacuated crowds from the site overnight and cellphone service collapsed in the area. Israelis posted photos of their relatives, and the Israeli president’s office set up an emergency hotline to help families searching for missing relatives.
Families of those who died in the stampede are racing to bury the dead before sundown Friday, the start of the Jewish Sabbath when burials do not take place.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visits the site of an overnight stampede during an ultra-Orthodox religious gathering in the northern Israeli town of Meron, on Friday.
Ronen Zvulun/Pool/AFP via Getty Images
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Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visits the site of an overnight stampede during an ultra-Orthodox religious gathering in the northern Israeli town of Meron, on Friday.
Ronen Zvulun/Pool/AFP via Getty Images
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who briefly visited Mount Meron around midday Friday, called the tragedy “one of the worst disasters that has befallen the state of Israel.” He said Sunday would be a day of national mourning.
The death toll is similar to number of people killed in a 2010 forest fire, which is regarded as Israel’s deadliest civilian tragedy, according to The Associated Press.
The Israeli Foreign Ministry said Israel received an outpouring of condolences from Russian President Vladimir Putin, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, and representatives of aboutadozen other countries, including the Gulf Arab kingdom of Bahrain, which established diplomatic ties with Israel last year.
One act of kindness caught local media attention: Despite the Muslim fast for Ramadan, residents of a Palestinian Arab town in the area set up food and drink for Jewish participants evacuating the pilgrimage site.
Presidents have been judged by their performance in their first 100 days for nearly nine decades. Although an arbitrary milestone, the tradition dates back to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who in his first 100 days enacted sweeping measures to recover from the Great Depression and laid out the foundation of the New Deal.
Roosevelt raised the bar for how much a president could accomplish early in their tenure, which each president since has tried to live up to.
President Joe Biden is no FDR, but those comparisons have arisen in his first 100 days. Biden’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, signed into law on day 50, included a plethora of comprehensive policies to blunt the economic effects of the coronavirus pandemic, prompting debate about a new progressive era.
For Biden’s 100th day in office, Insider looked at what his approval ratings were, how many laws he enacted, how many executive orders he issued, how many of his Cabinet members were confirmed, how the economy performed, how many press conferences he held, and for fun, how often he golfed, stacking his performance against presidents Donald Trump, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, and Bill Clinton.
“Over 1,000 people together tried to go down a very, very small place, very narrow road and they just fell on top of each other,” said Yanki Farber, a reporter with the Orthodox Jewish website Behadrei Haredim.
The press praised president Biden’s first address to Congress; reaction from ‘The Five.’
MSNBC reporters apparently had trouble locating many people who watched President Biden‘s address to a joint session of Congress Wednesday night.
As NewsBusters highlighted, NBC News correspondent Priscilla Thompson reported from Atlanta on Thursday ahead of Biden’s drive-in rally to mark one hundred days in office and tout the agenda he presented to the American people during his prime-time address.
“I’ve got to tell you, most of the folks that I’ve spoken to here did not actually watch Joe Biden’s address last night,” Thompson told MSNBC anchor Hallie Jackson. “I’ve spoken to around a dozen folks and only two of them watched and listened to what he had to say last night.”
Jackson then turned to correspondent Ellison Barber, reporting from Coral Gables, Florida, and asked her what “voters” there thought of Biden’s speech.
“Yeah, we’re seeing some of what Priscilla touched on there,” Barber responded. “About two-thirds of the people who we have tried to talk to here said they did not watch the president’s address — not necessarily because they were boycotting it or intentionally not watching it, they just went to bed, they had to work, they had other things. This wasn’t top of their to-do list, though many said they plan to catch up on it some time today.”
MSNBC’s failed attempt to find a sizable number of people who watched Biden’s speech appears in keeping with the poor ratings that the televised address received.
Deadline, citing Nielsen, reported Thursday that just 22.6 million viewers tuned in Wednesday to the seven major networks that broadcast the 46th president pitching his liberal agenda to the American people.
Biden’s viewership pales in comparison to his predecessor, former President Donald Trump, whose first address to Congress in February 2017 drew more than 48 million viewers. Trump’s last and least-watched State of the Union Address, delivered in February 2020 still pulled in 37 million viewers.
Former President Barack Obama’s first address to a joint session of Congress in February 2009 drew a whopping 52.3 million viewers, far outstripping Biden’s ratings.
Rudy Giuliani guilty? That’s what they want you to think! And who are they? The sinister cabal of Hunter Biden, the Lincoln Project and Department of Injustice, of course.
That would have been the impression of Fox News viewers on Thursday night when Giuliani gave his first TV interview since federal agents seized mobile phones and computers from his New York apartment, part of an investigation into his dodgy Ukrainian dealings.
The host was Tucker Carlson, whose smirking sympathy for the white supremacist “great replacement” theory, and insistence that making kids wear face masks is “child abuse”, have made him the true heir to Donald Trump as the rightwing conspiracy-theory king.
A split screen of Carlson and Giuliani was not for the faint hearted. The former maintained his notorious expression, eyebrows furrowed, mouth open just enough to catch a fly. Giuliani, in suit and tie with white handkerchief in top pocket, was in his office, a bald eagle model and books including his own on display. Wearing a ring on his little finger, he played nervously with his spectacles.
What the former New York mayor turned legal hatchet man for Trump had to say didn’t make much sense, but left viewers with the notion that somehow it was all Hunter’s fault, so in that sense it was a great success. Such was the fixation that at one point Giuliani even said “Hunter” rather than “Tucker” by mistake.
First, Carlson tried to coax Giuliani into a poignant, heart-tugging account of having his home raided at dawn. The ex-mayor, who on 9/11 touched everyone with his lament “the number of casualties will be more than any of us can bear”, is less limpid these days.
“Well, about six o’clock in the morning, there was a big bang! bang! bang! on the door and outside were seven FBI agents with a warrant for electronics,” he recalled. “And I looked at the warrant and I said it was extraordinary because I offered to give these to the government and talk it over with them for two years.
“I don’t know why they have to do this. The agents seemed somewhat apologetic. They were very, very professional and very gentlemanly.”
The FBI agents had taken seven or eight electronic devices, he went on, but had not been interested in hard drives that, Giuliani claims, contain evidence of Hunter’s wrongdoing. He offered them over and over but still they refused. Could it be they don’t spend their days watching Fox or diving down rightwing blog rabbit holes?
Giuliani led an effort to dig up dirt on Joe Biden and his son Hunter in Ukraine before last year’s election. Prosecutors are investigating whether he illegally lobbied the Trump administration on behalf of Ukrainian officials and oligarchs while also serving as Trump’s personal lawyer.
Ingeniously, Carlson and Giuliani cooked up the argument that Hunter’s position on the board of a Ukrainian gas company, and his fight against drug addiction, were equally worthy of a dawn raid. “We have a picture of him five days before, smoking a crack pipe behind the wheel of a car and then saying under oath that he’s not an addict.
“And it’s the left that gets all perturbed about people who are mentally unstable having guns. Well, he was unstable, unfortunately and tragically, I feel sorry for that part of Hunter Biden. I think his father exploited him but the reality is he’s still a danger to the public driving an automobile or holding a gun but they don’t care about that.”
Turning back to his own case, Giuliani said the FBI agents had hammered on his door “in a frightening way” but “I don’t get frightened very easily”. He added: “It is an illegal, unconstitutional warrant, one of many that this Department of Injustice tragically has done.”
The search warrant was, he said, “purportedly based on one single failure to file for representing a Ukrainian national or official that I never represented”.
Carlson sneeringly suggested that the Lincoln Project, a group of anti-Trump Republican consultants, had known in advance about the raid but noted that Biden says he did not. Giuliani duly scored more Fox points by mocking the president’s age: “Maybe he doesn’t remember. I’m not sure if he can retain anything for more than about the time it takes to read it.”
And so it went on, deflated campaign slogans for an election that was lost six months ago when Giuliani ended up at Four Seasons Total Landscaping outside Philadelphia. “Thirty years of the Biden crime family violating our laws. That is what’s on the hard drive that they have censored and that’s why they want to put me in jail.”
Giuliani claimed his iCloud account had been snooped upon in the middle of his attempt to defend Trump against impeachment (the first time around, for those who are counting). Cue a rapid escalation to comparisons with the Stasi.
“The prosecutors at the justice department spied on me and that is not taken seriously. If that doesn’t result in their being sanctioned, the case being dismissed and it stopping, this is no longer a free country. We might as well be in East Berlin before the wall fell. This is tactics only known in a dictatorship, where you seize a lawyer’s records right in the middle of his representation of his client.”
After 10 minutes that felt like 10 years, the interview was done, not likely to join the annals of David Frost and Richard Nixon. Even so, it was manna from heaven for a certain viewer at Mar-a-Lago in Florida. For these guys, he’s still the one that counts.
Florida on Thursday passed new voting laws that place restrictions around vote-by-mail and ballot drop boxes.
Florida’s state legislature passed a bill that specifies who can drop off a ballot at a drop box and where drop boxes can be placed. It also stipulates that drop boxes cannot be moved 30 days before the election and that an election official must be around when the drop box is opened, NBC News reported.
Along with drop boxes, voters will have to request to vote by mail more frequently. The bill also gives new powers to election observers and specifies that private funds cannot be used to pay election officials.
A Florida state Democrat, Rep. Omari Hardy, mimicked language used to describe the Georgia voting bill in calling Florida’s bill the “the revival of Jim Crow in this state, whether the sponsors admit it or not.”
“I take some issue with the fact that we’re trying to somehow restrict the vote. There are more ways to vote in Florida and a longer opportunity than just about any state in the nation,” state Rep. Ralph Massullo (R) said.
“Fraud will be reduced as much as we can possibly do it with the work we’re doing today,” Massullo added.
The bill not goes to DeSantis’s desk to be signed.
‘Hannity’ host weighs in on Democrats’ response to the South Carolina Republican’s rebuttal to President Biden’s Congressional address
Sean Hannity blasted far-left Democrats on Thursday’s “Hannity” for attacking South Carolina Senator Tim Scott with a “stream of nasty, racist, despicable comments,” saying the individuals “lecturing America” on being a “racist country” are the “very same people” who insulted Tim Scott with “vile smears and slander.”
HANNITY: Only 26 million people tuned in to Joe’s address. That’s just over half the audience that President Trump received during his first joint speech in 2017. But the star of the night was not even close to Joe Biden. Instead, it was South Carolina Senator Tim Scott. He delivered the Republican response. And instead of vilifying America, Senator Scott, well, he used his own incredible, inspiring life story to lift up everybody.
While Senator Scott made it very clear that America is not a racist country, he did talk about and acknowledge the racism that he faces regularly and described it as much of it coming from so-called progressives on the left… Right on cue, far-left Twitter, they responded to Senator Scott with a stream of nasty, racist, despicable comments. The slur “Uncle Tim” was allowed by “@Jack” to trend on Twitter for a whopping 12 hours. Jack, you want to explain that to us? The same “@Jack” that suspends and then cancels conservative voices all the time.
Over at NBC, the rhetoric was just as bad. Joy Reid attempted to, well, basically just smear Scott’s life experience as an African-American senator… This is the same Joy Reid on NBC News, once referring to Senator Scott as a token in the Republican Party, the same Joy Reid that used a racist slur to describe Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas… Apparently, according to Joy Reid, NBC News. I guess it’s perfectly OK to say racist things about African-Americans so long as they’re conservative, Republican.
The people lecturing America all the time, that America is a racist country filled with racist people, racist institutions, racist police, racist conservatives, the very same people who rushed on to Twitter last night, national TV insulting Senator Tim Scott with vile smears and slander. Senator Scott is a leader in the Republican Party. He has a powerful life story we can all learn from. He has principled values and beliefs. He’s earned his reputation as a US senator, gets things done. Anyone who minimizes Senator Scott on the basis of race is by definition racist, even if they have Democrat beside their name or show on NBC News.
Appointments for the first dose of the COVID-19 vaccine have decreased by about 50% in Los Angeles County, alarming public health officials who call it a worrisome trend that reflects the slowdown in vaccination rates across the state and country.
The slowing demand probably means that, for the first time, the county will not reach its goal of administering 95% of its weekly supply, officials said. The revelation follows the announcement from officials earlier this week that about 18% of residents have missed their second-dose appointments.
“I do know that across the county this past week we saw much fewer people coming in to get vaccinated. For the first time ever, we’ve had appointments at many vaccination sites that have not been filled,” said L.A. County Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer during a news briefing Thursday.
The drop in demand has prompted the county to allow for more walk-ins at vaccination sites, rather than requiring appointments. That flexibility will be allowed through next week, and is likely to extend.
“All of our sites will continue to just take anybody who shows up, even if they don’t have an appointment,” Ferrer said. “I think the strategy moving forward for all of us is going to be to make it as easy as possible for people to get vaccinated. And for some that’s going to mean that we’re going to bring the vaccine close to where you already are at — if you’re at a shopping center; if you’re at a church or a mosque; if you’re at a school.”
Despite slowing demand, millions of people remain unvaccinated in the county. Only about 45% of residents have been partially vaccinated, according to a Times analysis, and more than 30% have been fully inoculated. To date, more than 7.2 million doses — including 2.6 million second shots — have been administered in the county.
Statewide, nearly 30 million doses have been administered statewide, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And 48.2% of Californians to date have received at least one vaccine dose and 29.9% are considered fully vaccinated.
Following months of vaccine demand that exceeded supply, interest has plateaued in recent weeks throughout the state after eligibility expanded to all residents 16 and older. Health experts and officials have attributed the drop to a variety of reasons, including ongoing hesitancy around the vaccine and access issues.
The mobilization of community outreach groups to educate and persuade wary residents has been key to boosting vaccine rates, say some experts. But more is needed, according to Ferrer, who said the county is working with trusted leaders and influencers in the community to spread the word about the efficacy of the vaccine.
While transmission, hospitalizations and deaths related to COVID-19 remain low throughout the state and in L.A. County, health experts have said that ongoing vaccinations continue to be key in the fight against the virus. But a vaccination rate of 100% is unlikely, experts have said, and getting the remainder of unvaccinated eligible residents to get a shot could take some time. That, combined with children who are not yet eligible for a shot, is a substantial amount of the population, experts have said.
Even as demand declines, vaccine supply is expected to continue increasing. California is poised to receive almost 90,000 doses of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine next week as U.S. officials resume supplies of the single-shot COVID-19 vaccine.
The expected allocation of 87,800 doses would be the first direct federal shipment of J&J shots since the week of April 12 — when administration of the vaccine was temporarily halted while health officials investigated reports of a rare blood-clotting disorder among a handful of recipients.
Federal health agencies lifted the pause after 10 days last Friday, clearing the way for the shots to resume.
Along with Johnson & Johnson, California is slated to receive roughly 1.15 million doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine and 857,200 doses of the Moderna vaccine next week.
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