Covid-19 Live Updates: Trump Halts Plan to Prioritize Vaccine for White House Staff

President Trump said on Sunday night that he would delay a plan for senior White House staff members to receive the coronavirus vaccine in the coming days.

The shift came just hours after The New York Times reported that the administration was rapidly planning to distribute the vaccine to its staff at a time when the first doses are generally being reserved for high-risk health care workers.

Mr. Trump, who tested positive for the coronavirus in October and recovered after being hospitalized, also implied that he would get the vaccine himself at some point in the future, but said he had no immediate plans to do so.

“People working in the White House should receive the vaccine somewhat later in the program, unless specifically necessary,” Mr. Trump tweeted, hours after a National Security Council spokesman had defended the plan. “I have asked that this adjustment be made. I am not scheduled to take the vaccine, but look forward to doing so at the appropriate time. Thank you!”

It was not immediately clear why Mr. Trump decided to change the policy, or whether he had even been aware of it ahead of time. But White House staff members who work in close quarters with him had been told that they were scheduled to receive injections of the coronavirus vaccine soon, two sources familiar with the distribution plans said.

The goal of distributing the vaccine in the West Wing was to prevent additional government officials from falling ill in the final weeks of the Trump administration. The hope was to eventually distribute the vaccine to everyone who works in the White House, one of the people said.

It was not clear how many doses were being allocated to the White House or how many were needed, since many staff members had already tested positive for the virus and recovered. While many Trump officials said they were eager to receive the vaccine and would take it if it were offered, others said they were concerned it would send the wrong message by making it appear as if Trump staff members were hopping the line to protect a president who has already recovered from the virus and bragged that he is now “immune.”

Trucks and cargo planes packed with the first of nearly three million doses of coronavirus vaccine fanned out across the country on Sunday as hospitals in all 50 states rushed to set up injection sites and their anxious workers tracked each shipment hour by hour. The inoculation effort, set in motion after the Food and Drug Administration’s emergency authorization of the vaccine on Friday night, comes as the U.S. coronavirus death toll approaches 300,000. Rollout of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine is less centralized in the United States than in other countries that are racing to distribute it.

Across the country, according to Gen. Gustave F. Perna, the chief operating officer of the federal effort to develop a vaccine, 145 sites are set to receive the vaccine on Monday, 425 on Tuesday and 66 on Wednesday.

A majority of the first injections are expected to be given on Monday to high-risk health care workers. In many cases, this first, limited delivery would not supply nearly enough doses to inoculate all of the doctors, nurses, security guards, receptionists and other workers who risk being exposed to the virus every day. Because the vaccines can cause side effects including fevers and aches, hospitals say they will stagger vaccination schedules among workers.

Residents of nursing homes, who have suffered a disproportionate share of Covid-19 deaths, are also being prioritized and are expected to begin getting vaccinations next week. A vast majority of Americans will not be eligible for vaccinations until the spring or later.

Five of the first vaccinations will take place at what the Department of Health and Human Services is calling a national ceremonial “kickoff event,” scheduled for Monday afternoon at George Washington University Hospital.

The five people were selected with an algorithm the hospital is using to assign the first doses, the result of a survey hospital employees filled out that asked about age, underlying medical conditions and the risk they carry in their jobs, according to a federal health official familiar with the planning who was not authorized to speak publicly. The event is intended to demonstrate the way many health workers will be vaccinated this week, the official said.

The kickoff is part of what the official said will be a series of vaccination events featuring top health officials.

In Canada, the first shipments of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine arrived on Sunday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced on Twitter. He called it an “important step in our fight against the virus.”

On the snowy plains of Fargo, N.D., Jesse Breidenbach, the senior executive director of pharmacy for Sanford Health, which operates hospitals and clinics across the Upper Midwest, refreshed his email again and again on Sunday, waiting to receive a FedEx tracking number that would confirm that some 3,400 doses were en route.

The Sanford hospital in Fargo was converting its Veterans Club into a vaccination site, and officials said they would start inoculating a first group of emergency and critical-care doctors and nurses within hours after the vaccine arrived. But when would that be?

The answer came on Sunday afternoon: Expected vaccine delivery, 10:30 a.m. Monday, with vaccinations starting early in the afternoon.

Global Roundup

The New Zealand government intends to establish a travel bubble with Australia in the first quarter of next year, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced on Monday.

The arrangement would allow people to travel freely between Australia and New Zealand without needing to quarantine for two weeks on arrival. Passengers arriving from New Zealand are already exempt from quarantine requirements in Australia.

The travel bubble was “pending confirmation” from Australian officials, Ms. Ardern said during a news conference, and would be contingent on “no significant changes in the circumstances of either country.”

New Zealand, population about five million, has managed to avoid the worst of the pandemic, with 2,096 cases and 25 lives lost, according to a New York Times database. In Australia, which has a population of about 25.5 million, 28,031 people have tested positive for the coronavirus, while 908 have died.

The governments of New Zealand and Australia announced in May that they had reached a formal agreement to form a travel bubble as soon as it was safe to do so. But surges in new cases, most notably in Victoria, Australia, left the plans suspended.

Ms. Ardern said that she would not give a more detailed timeline for when the bubble might be established. Details still needed to be fine-tuned, she said, including how airlines would handle the travel corridor and what the two countries’ contingency plans would be in the event of another outbreak.

Here’s what else to know in coronavirus news from around the world:

• Officials in South Korea have ordered schools in the Seoul metropolitan area to move all classes online starting Tuesday until at least the end of the year. Additional measures may be announced this week as the country struggles to contain its worst outbreak yet. South Korea, which has a population of about 50 million, reported 718 new cases on Monday, down from a record 1,030 the day before.

• Singapore on Monday became the first Asian country to approve a coronavirus vaccine made by the American drug maker Pfizer, announcing that the first shipment would arrive this month and be given free to Singaporeans and long-term residents. In an address to the nation, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong also announced a lifting of pandemic restrictions, saying the government would allow groups of eight to gather, up from the current limit of five, starting Dec. 28. Singapore has also agreed to buy vaccines from the American drug maker Moderna and the Chinese company Sinovac. “If all goes according to plan, we will have enough vaccines for everyone in Singapore by the third quarter of 2021,” Mr. Lee said.

Adding an arthritis drug called baricitinib to Covid-19 treatment regimens that include the antiviral drug remdesivir might shave a day or more off recovery times, especially for those who are seriously sick, according to a study published on Friday.

The findings of a government-sponsored clinical trial were made public more than three weeks after the Food and Drug Administration issued an emergency use authorization for the dual treatment.

Earlier this month, some experts said they were uncomfortable deploying drugs without the opportunity to vet the underlying data supporting their performance. Last month, the World Health Organization also recommended against remdesivir as a treatment for Covid-19 patients because evidence supporting its use was lacking.

Limited results earlier were announced via news releases, showing that hospitalized patients treated with baricitinib and remdesivir recovered one day faster than those who had received remdesivir alone.

Some questioned adopting the combination treatment given baricitinib’s hefty price tag — which may be about $1,500 per patient — and also cited side effects like blood clots. Several doctors also wondered whether adding baricitinib would be worthwhile because steroids like dexamethasone were cheap and widely available. Both baricitinib and dexamethasone are thought to act by tamping down excessive inflammation, which drives many severe cases of Covid-19.

The new paper, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, adds some granularity to the findings, showing that certain groups of patients benefited from the addition of baricitinib far more than others.

The trial enrolled more than 1,000 hospital patients with Covid-19, all of whom received remdesivir. People who were sick enough to require a high dose of supplemental oxygen or a noninvasive form of ventilation recovered eight days faster when baricitinib was included in their drug regimen.

By Sunday, deaths from the coronavirus were approaching 300,000 in the United States, a toll comparable to losing the entire population of Pittsburgh or St. Louis. Reports of new deaths have more than doubled in the last month to an average of nearly 2,400 each day, more than at any other point in the pandemic.

The deaths have been announced in the traditional fashion, in obituaries and notices on websites and in newspapers that have followed the same format for decades, noting birthplaces, family members, jobs and passions.

But in recent months, as the death toll from the coronavirus in the United States grows steadily higher, families who have lost relatives to the disease are writing the pandemic more deeply into the death notices they submit to funeral homes and the materials they share with newspapers’ obituary writers.

They are including pleas for mask wearing, rebuking those who believe the virus is a hoax, and describing, in blunt detail, the loneliness and physical suffering that the coronavirus inflicted on the dying.

Lida Barker, 92, a longtime resident of Gary, Ind., died on Nov. 20 after contracting the coronavirus in the nursing home where she lived. Her death devastated her children, three sisters who met on a Zoom call to write the obituary in the days after she died.

They wrestled with the wording of a mention of the coronavirus, settling on this: “In her memory, please wear a mask in public and take Covid-19 seriously. It is real; it hastened her death.”

Over decades, families have often declined to write in an obituary how their relative died when there was anxiety or fear attached to the cause, whether it was AIDS, an opioid overdose or suicide. But as the public has grown more aware of once-unfamiliar infectious diseases, mental illness and drug addiction, the tendency to conceal has slowly given way to candor.

And with funeral services postponed, and burials often happening without public eulogies or words spoken in memory, the obituary has taken on heightened importance, the family’s turn to deliver their own unfiltered message to the community.