Germany’s BioNTech said it would make 75 million additional doses of its vaccine for the European Union.
The Congressional Budget Office predicted that the U.S. economy will return to its pre-pandemic size by the middle of this year.
Vaccinations are slowly picking up speed in the U.S., averaging about 1.3 million doses per day over the past week.
Get the latest updates here, as well as maps and vaccines in development.

‘No one is safe until everyone is safe’

More than 90 million people around the world have received a coronavirus vaccine outside of clinical trials — but only 25 people total have in all of sub-Saharan Africa, a region of about one billion people.

That has set the stage for a “catastrophic moral failure,” in the words of Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the head of the World Health Organization. But it is also a failure of self-interest for wealthier nations, as a hiccup in one country can quickly become a tragedy for everyone.

South Africa and the variant discovered there offer a powerful example. Recent research suggests that the highly contagious variant is less responsive to at least four vaccines. The variant is estimated to make up 90 percent of all cases in the country, and has quickly turned up in dozens of others, including the United States. The lesson here is that if the world fails to stop the spread in some areas, the virus will keep mutating in ways that could make all vaccines less effective, potentially leaving inoculated populations vulnerable once again.

“This idea that no one is safe until everyone is safe is not just an adage, it is really true,” said Andrea Taylor, the assistant director at Duke Global Health Innovation Center.

Even in the best-case scenarios, Ms. Taylor said, at the current rate of production, there will not be enough vaccines for everyone in the world until 2023. South Africa, which received its first shipment of vaccines today, has secured just 22.5 million doses for its 60 million people, and many nations lag further behind. At the same time, some wealthy countries have secured enough vaccine doses to inoculate their populations many times over.
Cuomo scorns expertise

Morale at the New York State Health Department has plunged during the pandemic and nine top officials have quit in recent months — including the deputy commissioner for public health and the director of its bureau of communicable disease control.

People inside the department told my colleagues J. David Goodman, Joseph Goldstein and Jesse McKinley that senior health officials have felt sidelined or treated disrespectfully, and the focus of their concern was Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who has seized control over pandemic policy from state and local public health officials.

A prime example is the vaccine rollout. Mr. Cuomo blindsided health officials when he cast aside longstanding State Department of Health plans and instead adopted an approach that relied on large hospital systems to vaccinate people. (So far, the vaccine rollout in New York has been troubled and delayed, although inoculation rates have picked up in recent days.) Often, health department officials would hear about major changes to pandemic policy only after Mr. Cuomo announced them at news conferences, and then asked health experts to match their guidance to the announcements.

“When I say ‘experts’ in air quotes, it sounds like I’m saying I don’t really trust the experts,” Mr. Cuomo said at a news conference on Friday, referring to scientific expertise at all levels of government during the pandemic. “Because I don’t. Because I don’t.”

Comments like these reflect a rift that has existed between elected officials and career heath experts throughout the pandemic. Former President Donald J. Trump warred publicly with Dr. Anthony Fauci and officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and across the country, public health officials have resigned in large numbers as they have been vilified or ignored.
Resurgences

Across Europe, public frustration with lockdowns is palpable, with pensioners protesting this weekend in Vienna, restaurateurs taking to the streets in Budapest and demonstrators clashing with the police in Belgium, prompting dozens of arrests. In the Netherlands, the authorities fined more than 10,000 people last week for violating the national curfew.
The police in China arrested more than 80 people who they say manufactured and sold more than 3,000 fake coronavirus vaccines across the country.
A winter storm is forcing New York City to suspend inoculations for a second day.

Here’s a roundup of restrictions in all 50 states.
What else we’re following

Though the U.S. lags on detecting virus variants, the C.D.C. said it’s stepping up efforts to find them.
A group of centrist Republicans outlined their own relief package ahead of a meeting with President Biden. The $618 billion alternative to the president’s $1.9 trillion plan is likely to meet resistance from Democrats.
Japan, South Korea and Hong Kong are vaccinating their populations more slowly, an approach that has advantages as well as risks.
Even as more school districts reopen their buildings, hundreds of thousands of Black parents say they are not ready to send their children back.
Dr. Ricardo Cigarroa, who’s been called “The Dr. Fauci of South Texas,” has become a top crusader and the de facto authority on the pandemic along the stretch of the U.S.-Mexico border near Laredo, Texas.
The $500 billion Paycheck Protection Program has bipartisan support, but academic economists who have studied the program have concluded that it has saved relatively few jobs and that it has been far less efficient than other government efforts to help the economy.
Have you lost someone significant in your life to Covid-19? The Times is asking readers to share their stories and images of those they’ve lost for an upcoming feature on grief in the pandemic.
The New York Times