California
California is expecting about 90% fewer Johnson & Johnson (J&J) vaccine doses this week due to a factory error, marking a significant decrease in the total number of doses reducing first-time appointments, even as the state on Thursday, 4/15 is expected to expand eligibility to any resident over age 16…
California is expected to fully reopen its economy 6/15 as long as COVID-19 vaccinations remain widely available and hospitalization continues to be stable, Gov. Newsom said last week…
A possibly worrisome COVID-19 variant first identified in India has been found in the San Francisco Bay Area by scientists at Stanford University….
Coronavirus
Last week, President Biden said he’s bumping up his deadline by two weeks for states to make all adults in the U.S. eligible for the COVID-19 vaccines…
A new University of Southern California (USC) study has found that COVID-19 rapid tests could be the key to reopening schools more safely…
According to a JAMA Pediatrics model, as of February 2021, between 37,300 and 43,000 children aged 0 to 17 years had lost at least one parent due to COVID-19, three-quarters of whom were adolescents…
COVID-19 variants are spreading, carrying mutations that make COVID-19 both more contagious and in some cases more deadly…
A new vaccine for COVID-19 that is entering clinical trials in Brazil, Mexico, Thailand, and Vietnam could change how the world fights the pandemic…
President and Administration
On Thursday, 4/8, President Biden announced that he’s taking executive actions to tighten gun restrictions, including stopping the proliferation of so-called ghost guns…
President Biden released his preliminary spending requests for 2022 on Friday, 4/9, the first step before Congress negotiates the government’s budget for the fiscal year starting in October…
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) revealed last week that she expects the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee to wrap up its work on President Biden’s infrastructure package in May as it seeks to hit a 7/4 deadline for House passage…
Sixty percent of registered voters support Biden’s infrastructure plan, including 34 percent of Republicans, according to a new Politico/Morning Consult poll…
Democrats can pass another major piece of legislation - such as President Biden’s $2 trillion-plus infrastructure plan - by revisiting budget reconciliation, a spokesperson for Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said last week…
The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) is working with the Health and Human Services Office for Civil Rights on a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking to address the changes required by the CARES Act, to the 42 CFR part 2 regulations governing the confidentiality of substance use disorder patient records…
Congress
House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Richie Neal (D-MA) is calling for dramatic expansion in childcare support for American families, saying it “needs to be a guarantee, not an expensive hassle that drives parents out of the workforce or makes them choose between wages and family” in a letter to Democratic members of his panel…
This week, the Senate is expected to hold a vote on the motion to proceed on the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act, which aims to address the surge of anti-Asian hate crimes during the pandemic…
Education
On Friday, 4/9, the Education Department released the COVID-19 Handbook, Volume 2: Roadmap to Reopening Safely and Meeting All Students' Needs to provide additional strategies for safely reopening all of America's schools and to promote educational equity by addressing opportunity gaps that have been exacerbated by the pandemic…
The Education Department is asking for input from students, educators and others as part of a comprehensive review of Title IX — an initial step toward writing a new rule protecting students from sexual harassment and violence…
Students are increasingly relying on professors for mental health assistance…
A new survey by EAB, the education consulting company, has found that 30 percent of both first-generation and low-income students said completing the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) was difficult, a rate that is 10 to 15 percentage points higher than the proportion of other students who said it was…
A new survey by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and Gallup, released last week, finds that many parents want alternatives to college for their children…
The number of students transferring between colleges continued to decline this spring, dropping nearly eight percent across all transfer pathways between and among different two-year and four-year institutions…
Many colleges don’t have a system in place to evaluate emergency aid requests and instead fall back on students’ existing financial aid information from documents like the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA)…
Appointee Update
New federal appointees from the Departments of Education, Labor, and Justice include…