On Saturday night, President Donald Trump failed to sign the $900 billion coronavirus relief bill extending key provisions from the CARES Act. The consequences are immediate and many: an at least temporary lapse of unemployment benefits, the loss of the $300 unemployment federal bonus for this coming week (that the bill planned to roll out), and another looming government shutdown. The bill included vaccine distribution money, emergency rent assistance, and small business aid. As my colleague Hannah Levintova reported, when the COVID-19 relief bill passed the Senate, the unemployment measures alone would keep nearly 5 million from falling into poverty in January 2021.

Despite the $600 stimulus checks being negotiated by Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, Trump criticized the amount for being too little and called on Congress to cut “pork” from the measure. Democrats happily joined Trump in attempting to bump the checks to $2000. But the new measure failed in the House.

This morning, Republicans have urged Trump to sign it on talk shows. “You don’t get everything you want, even if you’re the president of the United States,” said Senator Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania. But the money is still waiting, in limbo.

In the meantime, millions will suffer. What are the consequences of a lag in this aid? “Foreclosures, hunger, homelessness, suicide,” Michele Evermore, a senior policy analyst for the National Employment Law Project, told the New York Times.

But let us take this from the abstract.

For Rockie McMahan, the last day of unemployment relief was dolled out on Christmas Day, according to reporting by the Texas Tribune earlier this week. “I’m flat broke,” said the Amarillo, Texas woman, who was sleeping in her 2007 Ford Fusion. In Austin, Texas, another woman told a local TV station that she is down to her last $100. “I lost so much weight because I don’t eat. I can’t afford nothing,” a woman in San Antonio said to the Tribune.

In the next few months, tens of millions face potential eviction. An Ohio woman, Jo Marie Hernandez told USA Today she and her child “can’t wait a few weeks for help. We’re starving and will be out on the street soon.” According to data collected in a national survey by the Census Bureau, over 6 million Americans fear eviction or foreclosure is somewhat to very likely. In North Carolina, Washington D.C., and South Dakota, this number is highest—around 50 percent are worried about not making rent. In Arkansas, over 15 percent of households said they did not have enough food over the last seven days. Over 80 million say it has been difficult to pay basic household expenses. Food banks, and organizations that track hunger, say that over 50 million will have experienced food insecurity by the end of this year. Just last week, over a million Americans filed new unemployment claims.

On December 23, the New York Times reported that Nicole Craig spent the last $7 in her bank account on tinsel for a small tree for her child’s first Christmas.

“I’m really afraid of what’s going to happen,” she said, worried that the pandemic relief wouldn’t be coming.

The weekend before Christmas was a busy one for the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP). On Saturday, in an emergency session, they unanimously approved the second COVID vaccine, this one from Moderna. On Sunday, ACIP held another emergency session during which they attempted to resolve a subject of intense debate: namely, who would be included in the next phase of the CDC’s coronavirus vaccine distribution recommendations. 

The advisory committee is made up of pediatricians, epidemiologists, and vaccinologists from across the country. They look at the scientific data from FDA vaccine trials and recommend who should get which vaccines, when and how they should get them, and then follow up with official written guidelines. They had already determined that the people at the front of the vaccine line, also known as Phase 1a, should be healthcare workers and long-term care facility workers, and they’ve already been injected with the first shipments of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines. But who should be included in Phase 1b? On Sunday, they announced that frontline essential workers—first responders, food and agriculture workers, public transit workers, teachers and school workers— and people 75 years and older are up next. 

“The goal of the ACIP is to provide recommendations that maximize benefit, minimize harm, that address inequality and disparity,” says José Romero, a pediatrician and the chair of CDC’s ACIP. Romero is also Arkansas’ Secretary of Health, meaning that he helps write the guidelines and implement them at the state level. 

Teachers were not a shoe-in for the next phase of vaccinations. While they certainly play an important role in America’s social infrastructure, both as educators and childcare providers, throughout the debate about which Americans do and don’t count as “essential workers,” teachers have occupied ambiguous space. Some states, like Alabama and Arizona, designated teachers as essential workers in the early days of the pandemic. Other states, like New York, did not. Now, the rollout of the coronavirus vaccine has re-upped the questions and controversies surrounding the essential workers’ designation.

Right now, with 2.9 million doses of Pfizer’s vaccine and 6 million doses of Moderna’s vaccine sent out in the first shipments, the coronavirus vaccine is a scarce resource, and state and local public officials are the ones who must prioritize who gets the vaccine first. Vaccinating teachers and school could mean the beginning of the end school closures, which has been one of the most disruptive aspects of the pandemic. Public schools across the nation serve over 50 million children. Students across the country have spent most of the past year doing school in front of a screen, but studies and analyses have noted the potential long-term academic, emotional, social, and physical effects. TL;DR: they aren’t good.

Ricardo Colon is an instructional coach and teacher at PS/IS 30, a K-8 public school that’s home to about 900 students in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. This year he’s teaching English Language Arts to two classes of seventh graders, with about 30 students in each class. Though Colon goes into the school building, his students’ classes have been virtual this year. Some of Colon’s middle schoolers get shy about turning their cameras on, which can be challenging for English language learners who rely on facial cues to understand what their classmates are saying. 

“It was always awesome to just shut your computer, push everything to the side, and just walk into the classroom and enjoy the kids—to hear their conversations, to see a teacher genuinely at work promoting student discussion and student thought,” says Colon. “And that’s what I miss most.” 

In-person schooling provides structure that is especially important for kids who are English-language learners or have Individualized Education Programs (IEPs). “I am worried that we might see some gaps that were widened a bit,” he says. The teachers and school staff at PS/IS 30 get tested once a week, and the school was forced to shut down for two weeks before Thanksgiving, and again the week before the winter holidays after staff tested positive for the virus.

Teachers across the country have balked against the pressure to return to their classrooms without appropriate safeguards, like access to PPE, frequent testing, and vaccinations. President Trump categorized teachers as essential workers last August in an effort to resume in-person education in the fall. In some states where teachers were forced to return to in-person teaching, like Tennessee and Florida, they were told that they should keep working after being exposed to the coronavirus instead of quarantining. Others participated in protests against unsafe in-person teaching and voiced concerns that teachers were being treated as “sacrificial.” 

Can someone explain why teachers are not considered essential workers? https://t.co/T2Gyi4K8xa

— Joe Nocera (@opinion_joe) July 7, 2020

Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), says that she stopped using the term “essential workers” after it became so dangerously politicized by the Trump Administration. “Teachers have always been essential, whether or not there’s a moniker or nomenclature placed on them,” says Weingarten. “The way in which Trump and [Secretary of Education Betsy] DeVos politicized this issue made most of us completely distrustful of their motives and intentions, and their actions showed they were not to be trusted.”

According to an AFT survey conducted in June 2020, 76 percent of their members were comfortable with going back to in-person teaching if provided with the proper safeguards. But as teachers saw the way in which the Trump administration was handling the pandemic, their confidence dropped. Weingarten heard constantly from teachers, via text, email, phone calls, and town halls, that the Trump administration made them feel expendable. They saw how the CDC watered down their guidance for the safeguards necessary to reopen schools. They saw that schools were being told to reopen without receiving any resources to purchase the PPE or do the testing that would make it possible to reopen safely. So in August, when President Trump announced that the federal government was designating teachers as essential workers, the trust was already broken.

“Their push on this was for political reasons,” Weingarten says, “whether to polarize teachers versus parents, or whether it was because they wanted good economic numbers for Trump going into the election.”

Jen Kates from the Kaiser Family Foundation, who has been analyzing the vaccine distribution plans across all 50 states and D.C., explains that the CDC’s decision to include teachers in Phase 1b of the vaccine distribution will have a big impact on what states decide to do.

“When we did our review that was released last week,” Kates says, “some states had mentioned teachers, but they hadn’t gotten that specific yet because they were waiting to get more guidance from CDC.”

The ACIP has been giving advice on how to administer vaccines— from smallpox to rubella to influenza— since 1964, but this is the most highly anticipated mass vaccination campaign in history. Over 300,000 people in the United States have died from the coronavirus. Infection levels continue to climb at catastrophic rates with over 200,000 new cases reported in the last week. As Americans settle in for what is shaping up to to be the pandemic’s dark winter, the spread of the disease will get worse before it gets better. Not to mention the downstream toll the pandemic will continue to take on hospitals as beds and ICUs fill up with new COVID-19 patients. With so much hope pinned on coronavirus vaccines as the golden ticket out of the pandemic and back to some semblance of normalcy, ACIP’s routine work has come under intense scrutiny–and pressure. Romero has been lobbied by associations representing sheriffs, fire fighters, teachers, camp counselors, and mental health providers, who are all trying to ensure their members are as close to the front of the vaccine line as possible.

On November 30, a coalition of teachers’ unions sent a letter to Romero asking that adults working in schools be given “priority access to vaccinations.” Weingarten also sent a letter to Romero asking specifically that teachers and school workers be included in the 1b category.

“Our students need us to be back in the front of the classroom,” says E. Toby Boyd, president of the California Teachers Association (CTA). “That’s the best place for their educational experience, not only academically, but also socially, emotionally.”

California’s vaccine drafting guidelines working group has said that it is using four metrics to decide which professions get the vaccine first: societal impact, economic impact, equity, and occupational exposure. In the first two categories, teachers have a solid argument. Not only are they responsible for training the next generation to be kind, productive, and curious citizens, having children at home has also been seriously disruptive to parents in the workforce—especially women. The unemployment rate skyrocketed for everyone at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, but women were hit hardest of all, with their unemployment rate reaching a high of 15.7 percent in April 2020, hitting the double digits for the first time since 1948. This is partly because many women simply lost their jobs because of pandemic-related layoffs, but also because women bore the brunt of increased childcare duties with children home from school. These forces have led to this recession being known as a “she-cession.”

Weingarten and the Learning First Alliance letter have both pointed to another reason for vaccinating teachers early: schools could serve as vaccination sites. “Schools were vaccination sites for polio, for smallpox,” Weingarten says. “There’s no reason that we could not work with health facilities to do that here. And, frankly, schools are more trusted than most in terms of dealing with vaccine hesitancy.”

According to Kates from the Kaiser Family Foundation, the built-in infrastructure of schools will make this a more straightforward population to vaccinate. Teachers and school workers are an identifiable group with whom it’s easy to get in touch. Other groups, like those with high risk conditions, will be more difficult. This is an area that could be rife for abuse. For instance, the wealthy could use their means to get an advantageous diagnosis that could help them jump the line. 

While the justifications for vaccinating teachers early were plentiful and ultimately persuasive, critics remain. Harvard epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch told The New York Times that teachers shouldn’t be prioritized for the vaccine because teachers “have middle-class salaries, are very often white, and they have college degrees.” Others suggest that if  teachers are moved forward, other essential workers will necessarily be moved back. Truck drivers, for example, were relegated to Phase 1c. 

Toby Boyd, the president of the California Teachers Association, emphasized that as important as the vaccine is, it’s only one piece of the puzzle. California—with one of the highest infection rates per capita in US—is a state where infections are high and on the rise. Boyd says vaccinations will have to be supplemented by other safety measures, like frequent testing and social distancing. At the same time, he suggests that the process of reopening schools can present an opportunity to fix some of their systemic problems. 

“They need smaller class sizes where they can sit six feet apart, ventilation where they can breathe in clean air, and robust testing in order for us to truly feel safe in the classrooms,” he says. “There are so many things that we can do to push the reset and say, okay, this is our chance to make it better.”

While making it into Phase 1b feels like a victory for Weingarten, she points out that it’s only the very first step toward getting schools reopened. Teachers are one group within the 30 million people in Phase 1b, which means that many logistical hurdles remain, including producing enough vaccines, getting them to people, and making them free and accessible. “None of those questions are answered; we still don’t have a national plan,” she says. “The fact that the vaccines got out to so many health care facilities in the last two weeks is remarkable, but that’s only the first step.”

Of course, states don’t have to listen to the CDC recommendations at all, and the inclusion of teachers in the essential workers category has been hotly contested throughout the pandemic. So what if states just refuse to cooperate?

“That is always a possibility,” says Romero.  “But we will provide a scientific rationale based on the current epidemiology of the disease that will inform the governors, and hopefully convince them that our recommendations are sound and are the best way to deliver vaccine to the populations at high risk.”

Despite the complications and the risks, Colon is optimistic that in-person schooling will resume eventually, with the added benefit that he and his fellow teachers will bring the technological skill they’ve acquired over many months of remote teaching back to the classroom with them. 

“There’s something about a vibrant school building that really makes makes someone want to be a teacher, ” Colon says. “It’s the relationships with the children, it’s the seeing them in the hallway. Those interactions weigh just as much as the learning that happens in the classroom.”

A federal advisory panel to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended Sunday that frontline workers—grocery store workers, teachers, day-care staff, police, firefighters—and adults aged 75 and older should be next in line for the coronavirus vaccine.

The recommendations follow FDA approval Friday of the second vaccine, from Moderna. The vaccine from Pfizer and the German company BioNTech was approved December 11. It’s hard to know for sure how many people have been vaccinated thus far, but the New York Times estimated Friday that the total was at least 128,000 people across the country, many health care workers since the first vaccinations took place on December 14.

One of the first coronavirus vaccines was just administered to a Black woman, by a Black woman, both of who are frontline healthcare workers.

"I hope this marks the beginning to the end of a very painful time in our history." pic.twitter.com/M0j1GxQeGC

— Mother Jones (@MotherJones) December 14, 2020

Even as optimism around the COVID vaccines offer some hope, news from the United Kingdom is there to remind us that 2020 isn’t quite done with us yet. The latest: Countries across Europe are restricting travel from the United Kingdom as that country grapples with an apparent surge in cases resulting from what appears to be an even more virulent coronavirus mutation. “The new variant is out of control,” British Health Secretary Matt Hancock told the BBC on Sunday. “This news about the new variant has been an incredibly difficult end to, frankly, an awful year.”

The Washington Post reported that Austria, Belgium, Italy, Ireland, Germany, France, and the Netherlands all announced travel bans on Sunday, with other nations expected to follow suit. The new variant, the Post reported, apparently speeds transmission of the virus. Hancock said this week that it was “highly unlikely” that the new strain would fail to respond to a vaccine. Meanwhile, Reuters reported Sunday that US health officials are monitoring the new strain. As of Sunday afternoon, the US State Department advised travelers to “reconsider travel” to the UK, but the travel advisory did not ban it.

All of this is happening while Congress edges closer to a COVID relief deal, which reportedly will be voted on as early as Sunday night. The deal includes $600 payments to adults and children (an amount that will be reduced for incomes over $75,000 and eliminated altogether at $99,000 annually). It also includes enhanced unemployment benefits through mid-March, and some relief for small businesses. It’s unclear how the relief deal handles funding for vaccine distribution, but earlier in the week reports suggested that $6 billion would be included for this, a figure lower than what groups representing health departments say is needed, CNBC reported on Monday.

The Food and Drug Administration authorized a second coronavirus vaccine made by Moderna on Friday, clearing the way for about 5.9 million more doses to become available in the United States to front-line health care workers. Pfizer, the company behind the first vaccine to be approved, says it shipped 2.9 million doses this past week. 

Dr. Anthony Fauci told the New York Times, “never before has anybody even imagined you would get vaccines to people in less than a year from the time that the sequence was made known.” 

That’s the good news. But the United States passed several new milestones this week. Pandemic fatigue, mask denial, and the holidays have helped fuel the skyrocketing rates of new cases.

The numbers vary slightly because of different methodologies but all the COVID trackers reported new all-time records for a single day of COVID cases: The New York Times says there were more than 250,000 new cases recorded in a single day. According to the NYT tracker there were 1 million new cases in just five days this week. Data from Johns Hopkins University and CNN reported 249,709 new coronavirus cases, while the Covid Tracking Project by the Atlantic found 228,825 new cases, a 9.5 percent increase in a day.

There are now more than 305,000 who have died in the United States. That number will continue to rise as cases climb. According to the NYT: “Three hundred thousand is more than the number of Americans who died fighting in World War II. It is roughly half the number of total cancer deaths expected this year. It is the population of Pittsburgh.” 

As the pandemic’s toll grows worse, Black, Latinx, Indigenous, and other people of color have been hit the hardest.

Meanwhile, Congress’ talks over a relief package have extended into the weekend as unemployment benefits expire for 12 million Americans over the holidays. The president doesn’t appear to be concerned. Based on a Mother Jones analysis as of December 16, out of the 729 tweets Trump sent since Election Day, not a single one acknowledged the death toll of the coronavirus pandemic or encouraged Americans to take any precautions. Just 2 percent of his tweets mentioned the coronavirus at all.

As the first shipments of the coronavirus vaccine are unpacked from the Styrofoam and dry ice and loaded into hospital freezers, the scramble to secure a place in line for the limited supplies is intensifying.

Across the United States, the first doses are earmarked for front-line health care workers; in most states, next will be the long-term care residents who have suffered most acutely from COVID outbreaks. A Centers for Disease Control panel making vaccine priority recommendations appears likely to designate the next wave of vaccinations, known as phase 1b, for “essential workers.” But the definition of “essential” is slippery: By some counts, including a rubric published by a Department of Homeland Security agency, “essential workers” include about 70 percent of the US workforce. That means states, which have final say on vaccine distribution, will need to set priorities—and industry representatives are eager to help them do so.

Who comes next is already the focus of a lobbying frenzy. “Priority 1a for us is getting our employees into that ‘priority 1b’ priority group,” Bryan Zumwalt, the executive vice president of public affairs for the Consumer Brands Association, which represents manufacturers like Colgate-Palmolive and Kellogg’s, told Quartz this week. Other industries lobbying for phase 1b priority include pesticide manufacturers, pharmaceutical firms, and zoo and aquarium operators, according to the Intercept. Same goes for airlines, including companies that either never instituted capacity restraints on flights or dropped social distancing measures.

Some of the other industries that want vaccines sooner rather than later have kept their workers on the job during the pandemic with few workplace protections. Take, for instance, the meat industry, whose executives have been talking about how their workers deserve vaccine priority, according to the Wall Street Journal. In early December, national associations for producers of beef and pork as well as the North American Meat Institute sent a letter to governors requesting meat industry workers receive “very high priority” for the vaccine because they constituted “critical infrastructure.” Those workers—a great many of whom are immigrants—”have been on the front lines ensuring Americans have access to safe, nutritious, and affordable food,” the trade groups said. But keeping meatpackers on the line has come with a steep human cost: at least 51,433 have been infected and 262 have died from COVID-19 as of mid-December, according to the Food & Environment Reporting Network.

COVID-19 spread so rapidly in meatpacking plants in part because their employees spend physically demanding 8- to 12-hour shifts often working shoulder-to-shoulder. Matters weren’t helped when President Donald Trump, following weeks of lobbying by meat companies, issued an executive order drafted by the industry that kept plants open even as their case rates were spiking. Company policies also played a role. “Some employees were incentivized to work while ill as a result of medical leave and disability policies and attendance bonuses that could encourage working while experiencing symptoms,” said a May CDC report. This fall, OSHA fined Smithfield Foods for “failing to protect employees from exposure to the coronavirus” at one South Dakota plant that became country’s top coronavirus hotspot. At a Colorado plant run by JBS, the largest meatpacker in the world, one worker was told she would lose her job if she took two weeks off to follow a doctor’s order to quarantine, according to a Mother Jones investigation; the company also gave bonuses to employees with good attendance records even after its first confirmed infection. 

Also lining up for a shot at early shots are the gig economy giants Uber, Lyft, and Doordash. This month, Uber and Doordash sent letters to the CDC and every governor asking for early access to the vaccine. A representative for Lyft said it was working on the issue with state and local policymakers. Earlier this year, on-demand delivery and ride-hailing companies spent about $205 million on a successful California ballot initiative exempting them from a law that reclassified their workers as full employees eligible for overtime pay, health benefits, and paid time off—benefits that would be even more crucial during a pandemic.

Meanwhile, COVID-19 has made gig work even more precarious. Under pressure from gig worker advocacy groups, companies rolled out programs to provide payments to drivers who got sick even as they were incentivizing workers to keep taking gigs, my colleague Jacob Rosenberg reported. And workers reported being unable to access the extra funding touted by the companies. (“Instacart has still not provided essential protections to Shoppers on the front lines that could prevent them from becoming carriers, falling ill themselves, or worse,” the Gig Workers Collective wrote during an Instacart strike in March. “Instacart’s promise to pay Shoppers up to 14 days of pay if diagnosed or placed in mandatory quarantine not only falls short, but isn’t even being honored.”)

As more corporations tout the “essentiality” of their workers, it’s worth remembering what make them essential: their critical contributions to the economy—or their employers’ bottom lines?

On Wednesday, as the United States hit new records for the number of daily deaths from the coronavirus pandemic and the number of people hospitalized with COVID-19, President Donald Trump was, as usual, tweeting about the election he lost more than a month ago. While he was typing a flurry of false claims about “massive FRAUD,” the country’s total death toll was passing 300,000.

Reading Trump’s recent tweets, you would never know the United States is in the midst of a surging pandemic that is killing more than 2,000 people a day. Of his 729 tweets between November 3 and December 16, more than two-thirds were about his attempts to reverse his election loss through baseless claims of voter fraud and far-fetched lawsuits. The pandemic was just a blip: Four percent of his tweets were about vaccines and just two percent mentioned the coronavirus at all—without ever acknowledging its human cost or encouraging Americans to take precautions to protect themselves or others from getting sick. 

 

November 16 was typical: After nearly a dozen tweets about his recent defeat (“I won the election!”), he bragged that news of the Moderna vaccine’s efficacy had boosted the stock market. “For those great ‘historians’, please remember that these great discoveries, which will end the China Plague, all took place on my watch!” he gushed. That was followed by a quick dunk on the nation’s allies: “European Countries are sadly getting clobbered by the China Virus.” Then it was back to normally scheduled programming: more angry tweets about the effort to undo President-elect Joe Biden’s win.

Since December 1, as the pandemic has entered its most deadly period in the United States, Trump has mentioned the coronavirus just three times on Twitter. Two tweets were about getting kids back to in-person school. The other was an announcement that his lawyer Rudy Giuliani—”who has been working tirelessly exposing the most corrupt election (by far!) in the history of the USA”—had tested positive for “the China Virus.”

Of course, Trump’s efforts to downplay the pandemic are nothing new, from his initial denial of its risks to his suggestion earlier this fall that deaths in Democratic states shouldn’t be counted. In the past six weeks, the closest Trump’s tweets have come to noting the virus’ impact in the US was an attempt to downplay the death toll in a November 21 message in which he defensively accused the media of not mentioning “that far fewer people are dying when they get Covid.” Within less than a month, Biden’s election victory would be confirmed (again) and another 50,000 Americans would be dead from COVID-19. So far, Trump hasn’t acknowledged either.

It was still dark when Veronica Perez arrived at Primex Farms, a nut-packing facility in California’s Kern County. Crickets murmured in the almond and pistachio groves stretching for acres in all directions. Once inside the building’s mirrored doors, Perez would usually stand next to other sorters alongside a conveyor belt, picking out blemished pistachios. But on June 25, at 4:30 a.m., Perez didn’t go in. Instead, for the next five hours, she and about 40 of her co-workers formed a picket line. More circled and honked in their cars. They held homemade signs with the names of co-workers who had the coronavirus. One sign in Spanish read, “The wise see danger and leave, but the foolish go on and suffer the consequences.” The employees chanted, “¡Somos esenciales!”: We are essential.

Perez, who is 42, had worked in California packing plants ever since she arrived from Mexico City 25 years ago, but she had never joined a walkout or protest. There hadn’t been many to join. But in recent months, things at Primex had become unbearable. In April, after employees requested the right to bring in masks to wear on the job, the company allegedly prohibited it. When it relented and allowed masks, it sold them for $8 apiece, according to several workers. (Primex denies ever selling masks.)

By May, employees at the 400-person plant were falling ill. Sick workers who stayed home went unpaid, so some kept coming to work with hacking coughs. Primex remained tight-lipped about any illnesses. When Perez asked the HR manager about a colleague who had contracted the virus, she recalled, the manager told her to “go home and stay there and not tell anyone about it.”

You can also listen to Julia Lurie's story read aloud:

Remigio Ramirez, a 54-year-old maintenance worker, told his boss in mid-June that he wasn’t feeling well. The supervisor still encouraged him to come in since the team was already short-staffed. A few days later, Ramirez was diagnosed with COVID-19. He stayed home, isolating in his bedroom. “When I got up the next day, I didn’t see anyone—not my wife, not my daughters,” he says. “And I thought to myself, What’s happening? Did they leave me alone? But no, each one was in their room, sick.”

Over the summer, the coronavirus tore through the Central Valley, the vast, fertile interior of California that produces a quarter of the nation’s food, including 40 percent of its fruits and nuts. (Primex processes an estimated 6 percent of the state’s pistachios, most of which are exported.) By late July, the Kern County fairgrounds had been transformed into a federal surge testing site, and more than one in five coronavirus tests in the county were coming back positive. “The problem we’re seeing is not whether you’re going to get infected,” Armando Elenes, the secretary treasurer of the United Farm Workers (UFW), told me at the time. “It’s no longer a matter of if—it’s a matter of when.”

On June 23, Primex told a local news channel that 31 workers had tested positive for COVID-19. Employees who saw the broadcast were shocked: The company hadn’t told them about the cases, which it had confirmed about two weeks earlier. Ramirez seethed at the betrayal. “They said that they were going to let us know if anyone came down with it,” he says, “but they didn’t.” Primex didn’t comment on the alleged lack of communication to employees, but stated in an email: “We began implementing anti–virus spreading steps long before the CDC guidelines were published. We are proud to say that we are one of the cleanest and most sanitized plants in the industry.”

Barely 5 feet tall, with an often-furrowed brow and a quiet voice, Perez never imagined herself becoming a labor organizer. “I’m not the loudest,” she admits, speaking through a translator. “I believe the message can be better communicated with control and poise.” Yet Perez knew what it looked like when a company turned a blind eye to its employees’ health. Years ago, she was injured at an almond packing plant and fired. A single mom of three kids, she suddenly found herself with no job and no medical help. “They use you until you can’t give any more of you—and once you have a problem, they’ll get rid of you like you’re nothing,” she says. She got through that crisis with support from Líderes Campesinas, an advocacy group for female agricultural workers. But it made her realize just how vulnerable she and her peers on the bottom rungs of the food system were. “I figured that if this happened to me, most likely it’s happening to many other women,” she says. Perez started attending Líderes Campesinas’ workshops on immigration law and workers’ rights, eventually volunteering with the group and joining its governing board.

The day the news of the Primex outbreak broke, Perez messaged the UFW’s Elenes, who created a WhatsApp group, called Justicia en Primex Farms, for concerned workers. (Primex isn’t unionized, but the UFW advocates for agricultural workers regardless of union status, Elenes says.) The next day, 100 people—a quarter of the facility’s workforce—had joined. That evening, they gathered on Zoom, many using the video platform for the first time, to plan a demonstration the following morning.

When dozens of her co-workers showed up for the walkout early on June 25, Perez was thrilled at the turnout and terrified of the possible consequences. She carried a sign listing three demands: sick pay, job protection, and respect. Ramirez, who had tested positive the week before, joined the protest from the confines of his car.

“Most workers prefer to always keep quiet for fear of losing their jobs or for fear of retaliation,” Perez said in a text message. “I was amazed myself at the quick response we got from our co-workers. It may be that everyone is tired of always staying silent.”

“¡Somos esenciales!” is a double-edged phrase: an overdue acknowledgment of the economic role immigrants play and a cudgel with which to keep them on the job. As the country went into lockdown in March, President Donald Trump declared that essential workers, including farmworkers, “have a special responsibility” to maintain normal work hours. Pickers and packers, including Primex employees, started carrying cards or letters from their employers identifying them as essential workers. “I am a farm worker helping to protect our food supply during the coronavirus pandemic,” read the letter a berry picker shared with me. “My job is considered essential so that we can produce food.” In theory, these pieces of paper, tucked away in pockets and wallets, could deter curious cops or ICE agents.

The federal government estimates that half of farmworkers are undocumented. The rate for food packers, like Primex’s employees, is thought to be lower than farmworkers’ but much higher than the overall workforce’s. These workers are critical to feeding the country, but deportable at the drop of a hat. The pandemic has only made this contradiction more manifest. Undocumented workers don’t benefit from federal coronavirus relief measures, such as expanded unemployment insurance. While federal legislation and policy expansions by California Gov. Gavin Newsom eventually granted essential food workers two weeks of paid sick leave, or “COVID pay,” enforcement has been spotty. “If an employer is not paying them covid pay, that sends a message to everybody else to not say anything,” Elenes says. And if an undocumented worker loses their job, they don’t get the standard unemployment stipend that federal or state relief promises to citizens. “Most employees accept that they don’t have health insurance. But not having any income? That’s not something they can resolve.”

So begins a potentially deadly feedback loop: The fear of lost wages and deportation breeds silence, which in turn increases the risk of transmitting COVID. The mentality is, “If I feel good, even though I have the virus, I’m not going to tell you,” explains one farmworker in the Central Valley town of Lost Hills. “The farm supervisors aren’t interested in if you have it or not. You might feel sick, but it’s fine—as long as you don’t die.”

“People are scared to say anything—or they take it like it’s a common cold, and they continue going to work,” says a 46-year-old I’ll call Esperanza, who works at a nursery near Oxnard. The nursery wouldn’t give out masks, and her co-workers came in sick, knowing they wouldn’t get paid if they stayed home. Esperanza spoke to me over the phone in a quiet, cracking voice; just a couple of weeks before, she had come down with the coronavirus.

Even without this shroud of silence, agricultural workers are especially vulnerable to the pandemic. Some live in dormitories for temporary workers, where the virus proliferates. It’s common to carpool to job sites, which include greenhouses and packing houses with limited ventilation. Oil fields and freeways contribute to the Central Valley’s atrocious air quality; Bakersfield and Fresno have the worst particle pollution in the country. Rates of respiratory ailments like asthma and Valley Fever, a fungal lung disease, have soared. And for much of August and September, a ring of wildfires blanketed the fields in a hot, dense smog.

It’s no surprise that farmworker organizing and labor actions are a rarity. Less than 2 percent of farmworkers are unionized. “It just seems like an insane proposition to go out on strike,” says Lucas Zucker, communications and policy director of the advocacy group Central Coast Alliance United for a Sustainable Economy (CAUSE). “Without a union who’s really organizing and providing support and assuring you of your legal rights, it can be really daunting. So it only does happen when people really reach a breaking point.”

As some pickers and packers reached that breaking point, there have been blips of COVID-related organizing up and down the West Coast. In the month before the Primex walkout, hundreds of fruit packers in Washington’s Yakima Valley left production lines to protest a lack of safety precautions and hazard pay. In Santa Maria, California, strawberry pickers walked off the job to protest wages falling just as many families were particularly cash-strapped. Blueberry pickers near Fresno also struck over a wage cut, standing by the fields waving red-and-black UFW flags.

Could the pandemic and the recognition of agricultural workers as essential begin to change the power dynamic between farmworkers and their employers? I took the question to Marshall Ganz, who once worked as the UFW’s organizing director and now lectures at the Harvard Kennedy School. “Where do you find courage to take risk? Grievances don’t generate courage. They generate anger or rage. They generate despair. So unless there’s some hope source, people don’t really engage,” he says. “Hope isn’t about certainty at all—it’s just about possibility.”

“So then the question is, under these conditions, are there unusual or new sources of possibility?”

The demonstration at Primex had an immediate impact: Within 24 hours, the company closed its processing facility for cleaning. Amid a flurry of local news reports about the outbreak, executives announced a plan to set up a mobile testing unit and implement other safety precautions, like installing Plexiglas dividers at the sorting tables, and more outdoor seating areas so employees could spread out during breaks.

When the plant reopened fully after a week, about 60 workers protested outside, alleging that Primex still wasn’t cleaning adequately or providing sick pay. But this demonstration lasted only a few hours. “We went back because we needed the work,” Perez says.

Meanwhile, suspecting that more people had been infected than the 31 that the company reported, employees started a coronavirus census, counting whoever had gotten sick. Primex is a 24-hour operation, and the texts to the group thread started coming in day and night; Elenes recalls waking up and finding message after message from upset employees. One woman reported that not only was she infected, she had exposed at least 16 family members. The youngest person in the Primex cluster was 6 months old.

In late June, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration opened an investigation. (It is ongoing, and OSHA did not respond to requests for comment.) By mid-summer, the employee-led count found that 97 of Primex’s 400 employees had tested positive, along with more than 60 family members. A week later, the mobile testing unit provided by the company would find that a total of 150 employees had been infected.

In mid-July, a 57-year-old Primex employee named Maria Hortencia Lopez was taken off life support. Perez had known Lopez as a lively co-worker who often brought in fruit to share and who asked after Perez’s kids. “I couldn’t believe that a person so full of life, such a happy and a good person, suddenly isn’t with you anymore,” she says.

Perez couldn’t shake the feeling that all of this could have been prevented. “That’s what hurts the most.”

The lack of basic workplace protections for farmworkers is by design. In 1935, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the National Labor Relations Act, securing private sector employees’ right to collective bargaining and catalyzing an explosion of union membership. Under the law, workers could bring complaints of unfair labor practices to the newly created National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), which could sanction offending employers. But Northern Democrats couldn’t pass the legislation without the support of Southern Democrats, who wouldn’t sign on to anything that threatened the racial hierarchy of Jim Crow. So lawmakers made a devastating concession: Packers, canners, and other “mechanical” food workers were covered by the NLRA, but farmworkers and domestic workers were not, effectively excluding two-thirds of the Black workforce from its benefits.

Three years after the passage of the NLRA came the Fair Labor Standards Act, which guaranteed a minimum wage and overtime pay. Again, to appease Southern Democrats, farmworkers and domestic laborers were excluded. These compromises, made to enshrine the legacy of slavery, continue to define conditions in the fields today. As Ira Katznelson wrote in his 2013 history of the New Deal, Fear Itself, “The South permitted American liberal democracy the space within which to proceed, but it restricted American policymaking to what I call a ‘southern cage,’ from which there was no escape.” Nearly century-old decisions are still shaping farmworkers’ lives, says Lori Flores, a historian of Latinx labor and politics at Stony Brook University: “What we’re seeing now is exactly what was happening in public discourse 100 years ago—this idea that farmworkers have always been this separate workforce that doesn’t need to be considered in federal protection.”

The official indifference toward agricultural workers persisted as their demographics shifted. During the Second World War, Mexicans were enlisted through the Bracero program to fill the labor void on farms and railroads. The program encouraged seasonal workers to come to the United States legally and reside in labor camps that were, in theory, supposed to meet health and labor standards, but in practice were unregulated, exploitative, and sometimes lethal. The program coincided with a rise in undocumented migrants, deemed “wetbacks” because many had forded the Rio Grande to enter the country.

For the food industry, the Bracero program was the root of “the arrogance that you will always have this bottomless reservoir of migrant labor,” Flores says. “Whether they are legal guest workers, undocumented, or citizens, migrant workers all feel the same kind of vulnerability to being fired, to losing their jobs, to not being able to advance within an industry or make a living wage.”

A 1951 report by the President’s Commission on Migratory Labor found that undocumented migrant workers suffered appalling work conditions, “grossly inadequate” housing, and “little opportunity to participate in influencing their wage rates.” “Since the ‘wetback’ has no legal rights he can make no demands, so is often preferred by the employer to the alien laborer brought in under intergovernmental agreement,” it stated. The report also noted that health problems disproportionately afflict migrant workers, issuing a warning that reverberates today: “The conditions contributing to this situation endanger not only the health of the migrant but that of the community as well.”

Such was the state of things when Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta, and Larry Itliong established the United Farm Workers in 1966. The farm labor movement is often depicted as taking off thanks to Chavez’s singular charisma, but it also succeeded because it focused primarily on the rights of legal migrants and US citizens denied basic protections that other workers had enjoyed since the New Deal. “They took advantage of civil rights discourse and applied it and extended it to people who the average American wouldn’t normally think was undergoing their own civil rights struggles,” Flores says. Yet Chavez saw undocumented workers as strikebreakers, a threat to the movement he was trying to organize. He criticized growers who relied on them, and called for enhancing the Border Patrol; he also directed UFW workers to personally monitor the border. “As long as we have a poor country bordering California, it’s going to be very difficult to win strikes,” he said in a 1972 interview.

The UFW’s defining moment was its grape campaign: a series of boycotts, marches, and strikes demanding higher wages and union representation for California’s grape pickers. Many Americans first learned of the movement in 1966, when Chavez led hundreds of farmworkers on a 340-mile march through the Central Valley. The march began in Delano, just 15 miles from Primex.

Because farmworkers didn’t enjoy the protections of the National Labor Relations Act, they instead relied on secondary boycotts, encouraging consumers to avoid non-union produce. A vast network of organizers led protests outside grocery stores, distributing iconic UFW grape boycott pins. “It was all about getting the average housewife or the average shopper going into their grocery store to make a choice: not to buy non-union lettuce or grapes,” Flores says. “If they could just make that one choice, then even if they lived in New Jersey, or Minnesota, they could help farmworkers struggling in California.” Even dockworkers in Europe refused to unload American “scab grapes.”

The late ’60s and ’70s marked a brief golden era for the UFW. At its peak, the union was 50,000 members strong, having lobbied successfully for the 1975 California Agricultural Labor Relations Act, the first state law in the country allowing collective bargaining among farmworkers.

Those days were short-lived. California’s corporate growers found ways around the union contracts, restructuring after they expired so that a new union would have to be formed from scratch. In one common workaround still used today, growers set up trucks in the fields where freshly picked produce is packed by workers who can be categorized as “farmworkers” exempt from the New Deal protections. Free trade agreements, so-called right-to-work laws, and a host of Supreme Court decisions have made it even harder for farmworkers (and all workers) to form and join unions.

Yet much of the UFW’s fall was internal, fueled by Chavez’s increasing paranoia and refusal to decentralize power. After Chavez befriended the founder of the self-help cult Synanon, he subjected union leadership to “the Game,” a practice of spewing personal attacks in the name of therapy. “It began to cut the heart out of the union: purges, witch hunts, all of that stuff,” Ganz recalls. “The worst thing was that worker leadership who wanted to try to step up…were treated as traitors, and they were fired.” The union went into a downward spiral as key members left and fewer contracts were renegotiated. When civil wars in Central America led to mass migration to the United States in the 1980s, the UFW didn’t make overtures to bring the new arrivals into the fold, Flores says. “Its intense anti-‘wetback’ rhetoric was really damaging,” she says. In the following years, wages dropped, fringe benefits dried up, and living conditions worsened, Flores notes in her history of California farm labor, Grounds for Dreaming.

Today, there are roughly 1 million hired farmworkers across the country; the UFW represents just 7,500 of them. In many ways, pickers and packers face the same conditions as the grape strikers did in the 1960s—a model “rooted in plantation economics,” as Zucker, of CAUSE, put it. Only five states entitle farmworkers to overtime pay. In New York, overtime for farmworkers is defined as more than 60 hours a week. Lawmakers “are still pushing the boundaries of trying to make farmworkers seem like they’re not like other types of workers—that they can stay treated differently, and their bodies can stand to undergo more harm,” Flores says.

Even in California, where farmworkers have the right to collective bargaining and overtime pay, “the laws on the books aren’t the laws in the fields,” Zucker says. In theory, workers can complain to the state division of occupational safety and health, but in practice, aggrieved workers, who may be undocumented, poor, and not native English speakers, find the process difficult to navigate. Hazel Davalos, the community organizing director at CAUSE, says her group refers people with complaints to the state agency, but “if the worker doesn’t chicken out the moment they ask for their name, will Cal/OSHA actually come when their nearest office is like three hours away? Probably not. And if they’re strapped for resources? Probably not. And during a pandemic? Forget about it.”

Fixing this undeniably broken system would require legislation to improve and expand federal worker protections. But in the absence of the political will to do that, Flores says, a lot could be gained from taking a page out of the UFW’s old playbook for mobilizing consumer choice. Florida’s tomato industry provides something of a model. A decade of organizing by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers led to the creation of the Fair Food Program, which ensures workers on participating farms a penny-per-pound premium on top of minimum wage and basic safety standards like shade and water. Farm owners are guaranteed business from sellers, who can boast about their ethical practices to consumers. The program has gotten buy-in across the supply chain, including big customers like Taco Bell and Walmart. “I want to see Fair Food programs expand to not only other food items, but to also bring back that idea of visual power,” Flores says. “I’d love to see it more in grocery stores.”

Shoppers already know what labels to look for to make sure their produce is pesticide-free and their chickens had space to roam. What if that same transparency applied to the workers who harvested and packaged their food? And what better time than now—as Americans hang signs thanking essential workers of all stripes—to make amends for the decades that farmworkers have been denied a seat at the table?

In other parts of the food industry, workers have seized this moment to demand—and secure—change. The spring brought a series of deadly, highly publicized coronavirus outbreaks in meatpacking plants across the country. As of mid-December, more than 50,000 meatpacking workers had contracted the virus, 262 of whom have died, according to the Food and Environment Reporting Network. The spring was “horrendous at best,” says Mark Lauritsen, director of the food processing and meatpacking division of the United Food and Commercial Workers, which represents 70 percent of beef workers, 60 percent of pork workers, and a third of poultry workers.

In the calamity—and the outpouring of public sentiment that came with it—Lauritsen and his colleagues saw an opening. They busied themselves pushing through labor standards and wage increases at unionized JBS, Cargill, and Smithfield facilities. Union activists were able not only to secure hazard pay, but to make it into a permanent fixture. Now, the base hourly pay at some union shops has increased by $2; at several plants, the lowest-paid workers make between $18 and $20 an hour. “If these plants were going to be able to attract and retain workers in a pandemic, quite honestly, they just had to do it,” Lauritsen says. “They couldn’t afford a massive wave of disruptions during this time. So it was just a matter of leverage and time.” Still, Lauritsen acknowledges that “those folks on farms have struggled with the same issues that essential workers across this country have—they’ve just been left out because the law is set up against them.”

The challenges farmworkers must surmount to eke out even modest gains were evident during a protest last spring at Rancho Laguna, a raspberry and strawberry farm in Santa Maria, California, that supplies the berry giant Driscoll’s. In May, pickers walked off the job to protest changes to quality standards that slowed workers down, effectively lowering their wages. The action didn’t last long after Rancho Laguna called the local sheriff’s office. No one was arrested, but the sight of uniformed officers in the fields was enough to put an end to the walkout. When workers tried to deliver a petition to a Driscoll’s facility, the company also called the cops.

CAUSE helped the workers, who are not unionized, file a complaint with the state and put together an online petition signed by 60,000 people. The group also warned the farm owner, who happened to be a Santa Barbara County planning commissioner, that they would attend his next public commission meeting if he didn’t meet with them. The petition’s success appears to have done the trick: Driscoll’s president got on the phone with workers, and the farm owner agreed to increase the rate to $2.10 per flat. Driscoll’s noted that it “had limited involvement regarding the wage discussions as that would have interfered with the operations of the separate and independent business of Rancho Laguna Farms.” In a public statement, Rancho Laguna’s owner promised to ensure that workers feel safe, adding that he should have met with his employees before calling the sheriff.

After all that, wages increased by about $13 a day. While the result was ultimately a win, it also underscored how much organizing it takes to “get even the most bare bits of human dignity in the workplace” for farmworkers, Zucker concedes. “It’s unclear to me how long that public sympathy will last after the pandemic—and if that’s long enough to really make systemic change.”

Following the summer’s wins for workers, the atmosphere at Primex became increasingly oppressive. In late July, about a month after the first protest, dozens of workers lost their jobs when Primex ended its contract with a temporary staffing agency. The company attributed the reduction to typical seasonal changes, but according to employees and the UFW, the cuts included many of the employees most critical of Primex’s pandemic response. “Everyone knows why those employees were fired,” Perez says. “They put their health at risk. And even after they got sick, and after they got better, they were fired.”

Primex brought in new workers the same day, according to the UFW, which filed a complaint about the firings with the NLRB. (The case is open; Primex didn’t comment on it but said of the UFW, “all they do is just play the blame game without any accountability.”) When the board decides, the fired workers will likely have moved on, says Elenes. “They just delay, delay, delay, so by the time you actually win, it’s a really hollow victory.”

Perez and Ramirez say they were separately called into meetings that included Primex’s manager of human resources and were instructed to retract statements they’d made to the media. The company would close because of all the bad press, a manager said, and if it went down, it would be because of employees like them. “They said, ‘This company should mean something to you,’” recalls Ramirez, who has worked at Primex for 13 years. The HR manager told Perez that “her head was hurting from hearing me talk so much, and she didn’t want to hear from me anymore.” (A complaint to the NLRB accuses Primex of “making coercive statements to employees.” Other complaints allege that Primex retaliated by giving Ramirez a more demanding schedule, and by demoting Perez to on-call status.)

In July, one of Perez’s colleagues tried to record a video inside the plant showing that social distancing and mask-wearing weren’t happening consistently. Primex disciplined the employee, according to another NLRB complaint, and the company required workers to sign a policy prohibiting video recording on-site. Perez refused to sign. “That’s when [the production manager] pulled me into the office. He likes to scream a lot,” she recalls.

“I’m very short, and he’s tall,” Perez said in a virtual panel put together the same day by Líderes Campesinas. She began to weep. “It makes me want to cry because my co-workers…I’ve tried to be really strong in front of them, but I can’t anymore.” When they spoke up, things got worse. “We’re only asking for a safe place to work,” she exclaimed. “What do we have to do?”

In theory, Primex workers could form a union. But with so many vocal workers gone, and others exhausted and afraid of retaliation, there’s not much appetite for the lengthy unionization process. Elenes often runs into this roadblock: Workers put in so much energy to get the basics like masks or an extra 20 cents per flat of strawberries, that the organizing peters out after the first win. “It’s short-term thinking. And employers know this,” he says. “But the issues usually are much bigger and deeper than that. And that requires a much bigger commitment, which sometimes they’re not ready for.”

Fifty years ago, with the farmworkers’ movement ascendant, the conditions at Primex “would have been an invitation to organize,” says Ganz, the former UFW organizer. “There’d be a grievance, and people would call out the union to come and help.” Today, it’s much harder to see how conditions will get better anytime soon. There’s no shortage of reasons for anger or despair. Are there any sources of hope?

When I put the question to Perez, I feel silly even asking it. To my surprise, she responds with a resounding yes. “Hope never dies,” she says, as if stating the obvious. “It doesn’t matter if I get fired. It doesn’t matter if I get yelled at. Nothing will make me quiet my voice.” At the same time, she is clear-eyed about the pace of progress. “I understand that this probably isn’t going to be beneficial for me or my co-workers—probably not even in our generation.” If history is any guide, it could take decades for her labor to bear fruit.

This article was featured in Mother Jones’s January/February 2021 print issue, and has been updated to reflect research and editorial changes.

On Monday morning, a critical care nurse in Queens became the first person in New York—and among the first in the country—to receive a dose of Pfizer’s coronavirus vaccine. At the Long Island Jewish Medical Center, Sandra Lindsay was greeted by a round of applause. “It didn’t feel any different from taking any other vaccine,” she said. “I feel like healing is coming and this marks the beginning of the end of a very painful time in our history. I want to instill public confidence that the vaccine is safe. We’re in a pandemic and so we all need to do your part, and to not give up so soon.” 

Gov. Andrew Cuomo livestreamed the historic moment and compared the fight to control a pandemic that has taken the lives of almost 300,000 people in the United States alone to a modern-day battlefield. “I believe this is the weapon that will end the war. It’s the beginning of the last chapter of the book,” Cuomo said.  

Watch LIVE as the first person in New York gets vaccinated: https://t.co/a3p8QOtK6w

— Andrew Cuomo (@NYGovCuomo) December 14, 2020

Over the weekend, the first trucks transporting the Pfizer vaccine left a manufacturing facility in Michigan after the Food and Drug Administration issued an emergency authorization on Friday night for its use in people 16 years of age and older. Health care workers and nursing home staff and residents are expected to be the first in line for vaccination. 

One of the first coronavirus vaccines was just administered to a Black woman, by a Black woman, both of who are frontline healthcare workers.

"I hope this marks the beginning to the end of a very painful time in our history." pic.twitter.com/M0j1GxQeGC

— Mother Jones (@MotherJones) December 14, 2020

In Ohio, Republican Gov. Mike DeWine also celebrated the administration of the first round of doses in two different hospitals, each of which received 975 doses on Monday. 

The good news comes as a relief after the US recorded a grim milestone last week, which was the deadliest since the start of the coronavirus pandemic in March. But the massive undertaking of the first phase of the most ambitious immunization campaign in US history that involves distributing the first batch of almost three million doses to hundreds of centers across the country has only just begun. On MSNBC, Dr. Anthony Fauci estimated that by the beginning of April people with no underlying conditions should get vaccinated. “At the end of the day, the real bottom line is when do you get the overwhelming majority of the population vaccinated so you can get that umbrella of herd immunity,” he said. 

FDA commissioner Stephen Hahn is pushing back against claims by the Trump administration that his agency slowed down the COVID-19 vaccine approval. Hahn said Sunday morning that there were “no external pressures other than the science” when it came to the rollout of the vaccine. 

Hahn was responding to a tweet from President Trump that suggested the FDA could have greenlit the Pfizer vaccine sooner than Friday, but instead was “playing games.”  

While my pushing the money drenched but heavily bureaucratic @US_FDA saved five years in the approval of NUMEROUS great new vaccines, it is still a big, old, slow turtle. Get the dam vaccines out NOW, Dr. Hahn @SteveFDA. Stop playing games and start saving lives!!!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 11, 2020

The Washington Post reported that White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows told Hahn on Friday “to be prepared to submit his resignation if the agency did not clear the vaccine by day’s end.” Hahn went on the Sunday morning news shows and said Meadows didn’t threaten to fire him. Meadows did call him, Hahn said, but he would not discuss the content of that private conversation.

“Of course we’ve been asked to speed up this process as much as possible,” Hahn said on ABC News This Week. “We do not feel that this could’ve been out a week earlier.” Hahn said the FDA “promised the American people we would do a thorough review of the application,” and that’s what they did.  

NEW: "We do not feel that this could have been out a week earlier," FDA chief Stephen Hahn tells @MarthaRaddatz when asked about President Trump's claim that the COVID-19 vaccine could have been approved earlier. https://t.co/kEzanF2Ysi pic.twitter.com/cAtcDjWuVv

— ABC News (@ABC) December 13, 2020

The lead scientist for the White House Operation Warp Speed said Trump’s claims were not helpful for building public trust in the much anticipated vaccine. Moncef Slaoui said that if the Meadows call to Hahn happened, “I think it was useless and unfortunate, so are some of the tweets.”

The back and forth between Hahn and the White House is happening as the first trucks full of COVID-19 vaccines left a manufacturing facility Sunday, marking the start of the biggest vaccine distribution effort in US history.  

 

As the United States ends its deadliest week since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, the first trucks full of COVID-19 vaccines have left a manufacturing facility Sunday morning, marking the start of the biggest vaccine distribution effort in US history. 

Many people awoke this morning to images and videos of UPS semi trucks full of vaccines pulling out of a Kalamazoo, Mich., warehouse just two days after the Food and Drug Administration’s emergency approval of the Pfizer vaccine. The first batch of about 3 million vaccines is expected to reach high-risk health care workers and nursing homes. 

Watch: Workers at a Pfizer plant in Kalamazoo, Mich., packed boxes of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine on Sunday morning and loaded them onto trucks. Nearly 3 million doses are expected to reach all 50 states this week. https://t.co/WYGjsPE0Yk pic.twitter.com/XaleBwgfxJ

— The New York Times (@nytimes) December 13, 2020

The New York Times reports that after vaccines were packed in dry ice and loaded on to the trucks Sunday, “workers applauded as the first truck left the plant carrying a load of the vaccine.”

UPS and Fedex are working together to handle the staggered distribution of the vaccine getting it 636 locations across the country. The two shipping giants (who usually compete instead of working hand in hand) will monitor and track all vaccine shipments closely, and also alert all delivery drivers and pilots so they know they’re carrying a vaccine package. 

The FAA alerted airports nationwide that they should be fully prepared for aircraft carrying the vaccines. “This includes both those airports identified for shipments that will transition at airports as well as those that that may serve as alternate/divert airports, even if they will not be a primary destination for aircraft carrying COVID-19 vaccines.” 

Pfizer’s vaccine is estimated to be about 95 percent effective, and it has already been approved in the United Kingdom and Canada. It’s one of several vaccines developed in record speed as the coronavirus pandemic expected to be approved for use in the United States. Almost 300,000 people have died of COVID-19 in the United States and more than 16 million have been infected. In the last few weeks the numbers spiked in many states as millions of people continued to ignore CDC recommendations against traveling for the holidays. This morning, former CDC director Tom Frieden took to Twitter to warn that while help is on the way, Americans must still work hard to prevent the spread of the virus:

The virus currently has the upper hand, and it will be many months before there's enough vaccine for most people to get it. At this moment, please stay as safe as you can.

— Dr. Tom Frieden (@DrTomFrieden) December 13, 2020

Update: Dec. 11, 9:30 p.m. ET: The FDA granted emergency use authorization for Pfizer’s coronavirus vaccine Friday night, in a potentially historic turning point for the fight against the global pandemic. Earlier Friday, White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows told FDA commissioner Stephen Hahn that he should resign if the vaccine was not approved by the end of the day. The approval will immediately pave a way for immunizing at least some of the most needy demographics in a country currently beset by rocketing COVID infection rates, with daily fatality rates rivaling that of 9/11.

In a major milestone that brings the United States one step closer to the end of the coronavirus pandemic, a Food and Drug Administration advisory panel recommended on Thursday that the FDA grant an emergency use authorization for Pfizer’s COVID vaccine.

The group of scientists and doctors voted 17–4 in favor of the vaccine’s approval, with one abstaining. The FDA is expected to approve the vaccine within days, the New York Times reports, and within 24 hours after approval 6.4 million doses will begin to be distributed from warehouses.

Pfizer’s vaccine is estimated to be about 95 percent effective, and it has already been approved in the United Kingdom and Canada. It’s not yet clear how many doses of Pfizer’s will be immediately available or when most Americans can expect to be vaccinated. The Moderna vaccine, another option, is under review by the FDA.

As the world watches the United Kingdom roll out the first doses of Pfizer’s much-awaited COVID-19 vaccine, Martin Kenyon, a 91-year-old man living in London, has emerged as the unlikely face of the country’s efforts to instill public confidence in a vaccine. 

“I rang up Guy’s Hospital, which I know very well because I’ve lived in London most of my grown-up life, and I said, ‘What’s this thing you’re doing, the vaccination?'” Kenyon told CNN in a man-on-the-street interview Tuesday, where he described the exceedingly simple process of booking his appointment that very morning. 

The biggest hurdle, according to our hero, wasn’t navigating a patchwork mess of state and federal systems that, as of now, lacks the billions of dollars in funding required to deploy the vaccine. No, the hardest thing was securing a parking spot in London—that and suffering what Kenyon lamented as a “nasty lunch.”

“I’m not going to have the bloody bug now,” he continued. “I don’t intend to have it because I’ve got granddaughters and I want to live for a long time. I’m going to hug them for Christmas.” “There’s no point to dying now,” Kenyon added, “when I’ve lived this long, is there?” 

It’s an incredibly charming segment. Remember it when the United States, without the enormous benefits of a centralized health care system, launches its own vaccine roll-out.

this interview wins the day pic.twitter.com/HtnjnyLZwg

— Oliver Darcy (@oliverdarcy) December 8, 2020

As coronavirus case rates and deaths reach record highs and ICUs across the country near capacity, new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirms the pandemic’s disproportionate toll on people of color. Black, Native, and Latinx people are between three and four times more likely to be hospitalized with the coronavirus than white people, according to data from March through November.

While elderly people are at a higher risk from the virus, the hospitalization rates for Black and Latinx people above age 65 are particularly high. Over the course of the nine-month pandemic, more than one in 100 elderly Latinx and Black people have been hospitalized with COVID-19.

The new numbers on hospitalizations echo data on disproportionate death rates by race. As my colleagues Edwin Rios and Sinduja Rangarajan wrote back in April, there are myriad reasons for the pandemic’s uneven impact:

Black Americans are more likely to work jobs that are considered essential—they’re grocers, fast-food workers, transit and postal workers. As a result, they risk greater exposure to the disease. Black people in the North tend to live in dense, historically segregated cities—Milwaukee, St. Louis, Detroit, Chicago—in which disease can spread quickly. Black people in the South, Louisianans excepted, live in states that did not expand Medicaid, leaving many of them uninsured. (A Mother Jones analysis found that six of the country’s 10 most vulnerable states, according to something called the “COVID-19 Community Vulnerability Index,” are located in the South. In Mississippi, where 90 percent of counties are particularly vulnerable, Black people make up 38 percent of the state’s population and a startling 66 percent of COVID-19 fatalities.) Owing to factors like the siting of toxic dumps and new highways, Black people suffer disproportionately from underlying health conditions such as asthma and heart disease that elevate the risk of death in coronavirus patients. 

According to the APM Research Lab, as of early November, the coronavirus has killed one in 875 Black Americans, one in 925 Native Americans, and one in 1,275 Latinx Americans.

Rudy Giuliani has become the latest member of Donald Trump’s inner circle to test positive for the coronavirus, according to this presidential tweet: 

.@RudyGiuliani, by far the greatest mayor in the history of NYC, and who has been working tirelessly exposing the most corrupt election (by far!) in the history of the USA, has tested positive for the China Virus. Get better soon Rudy, we will carry on!!!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 6, 2020

Giuliani, who has been leading the president’s legal challenges to President-elect Joe Biden’s election win, has been diagnosed with COVID-19 a little more than two weeks after his son, a special assistant to the president. Last month, the former New York City mayor, who is 76, claimed he had been been taking the ineffective therapeutic hydroxychloroquine to ward off the virus.

Like many in Trump’s orbit, Giuliani has maintained a laissez-faire attitude towards the virus since the start of the pandemic. He critiqued Biden for wearing a mask even after Trump was hospitalized with the virus. “People don’t die of this disease anymore,” Giuliani said in October. So far, the coronavirus has claimed more than 272,000 American lives. 

At a rally ostensibly meant to support Georgia’s Republican senators yesterday, President Donald Trump praised himself, continued to deny his election defeat, and said virtually nothing about the pandemic surge that has been killing and hospitalizing Americans in record numbers. Though the virus claimed 11,000 lives in the four days before his rally, Georgia’s hospitals are swamped, and the head of the Centers for Disease Control just warned that this winter would be the “most difficult time” in the history of the country’s public health, Trump told a tightly packed, largely unmasked crowd in Valdosta that “states and cities should open up.”

The grim milestones of the past week made Trump’s routine denial and distortion of the pandemic all the more striking. He again took credit for the vaccines he claimed it would have taken another administration five years to develop. “Even some of the enemies call it a medical miracle, what we’ve done,” he boasted. The only crisis-related number he cited was the Dow Jones Industrial Average, which broke 30,000 points this week. “Can you imagine, if we didn’t get hit by this— this freak, this total freak that came in to our country, can you imagine if we didn’t get hit?”

As he has several times before, Trump downplayed the risks of catching COVID-19, saying that “If you catch it, you’re immune for life”—a claim that, while not necessarily false, attempts to provide cover for his administration’s colossal mismanagement of the pandemic and the disdain for public health guidelines that resulted in the virus’ spread inside the White House. He did not mention wearing a mask or social distancing. 

He did acknowledge that things could get worse—if he’s not in charge. Trump painted an apocalyptic portrait of a nation under Democratic control: one with no jobs, no borders, no freedom—not even Christmas. “They’ve used the pandemic and the phony fake ballots, the mail-in ballots, they used that to sabotage a country.”

When the first wave of COVID-19 hit the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians in spring, Brian Mask would awaken nightly to the sound of helicopters airlifting patients from the under-resourced local health center to hospitals as far as 80 miles away. “You could see the fear in people when they came outside, asking, ‘Who is it this time?'” he said. “We couldn’t even mourn the first person, because then it was the next one, and the next one, and the next one.”

Weeks prior, in early March, Yale disease historian Frank Snowden had warned in the New Yorker that epidemics spread “along the fault lines created by poverty and inequality”—so as COVID-19 now continues to sweep the United States, it comes as no surprise that it’s found a particular niche among Indigenous communities.

The Mississippi Choctaw, the Navajo and other southwestern tribes struggled early on, but most of rural Indian Country was largely unscathed until the pandemic’s most recent surge. Now, cases have spiked for the Blackfeet and Crow tribes in Montana, where overworked tribal hospital employees are tending to relatives and neighbors. In Wisconsin, cases among Native Americans have risen nearly sevenfold in three months, while Lakota tribes’ efforts to protect their reservations in North and South Dakota finally crumbled in the face of state leaders’ inaction. The virus is even raging through remote Alaska Native villages with little to no health infrastructure. 

I’m done being sad that my tribe & family keep losing loved ones to #COVID19. All I have is anger now. We lost a wonderful young man last night. 32 years old. Amazing father, husband, & the light of his extended family. I’m devastated. Wtf is happening?!!

— Desi Rodriguez-Lonebear, PhD (@native4data) November 27, 2020

Though culturally distinct and far apart, these communities share a common condition: the chronic neglect of a political system that’s never valued their lives. Native Americans are the only people in the United States with a constitutional right to health care, yet despite this and other promises made in treaties, the federal Indian Health Service (IHS) receives just a fraction of the funding it needs to fulfill tribal health needs. The result is a dearth of preventative care, hospital beds, and physicians (especially Indigenous physicians) on reservations, leaving Native patients to travel dozens of miles to get care, or simply disengage from the system. All these problems get exponentially worse under the stress of a pandemic, as Indigenous health expert Dr. Donald Warne explained to me in August.

Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that, compared to whites, American Indians and Alaska Natives with COVID-19 are four times more likely to be hospitalized, a higher rate than any other ethnic group—and yet probably an under-estimate, given the rampant misclassification of Indigenous people in health data. Their higher rates of hospitalization and mortality reflect higher rates of diabetes, heart disease, and other conditions stemming from generations of life on reservations, where resources are usually scant and environmental injustices have tainted air and water.

“Many parts of Indian Country are lacking in fundamental infrastructure,” Rep. Deb Haaland (D-N.M.) of the Laguna Pueblo tribe told me in April. “When you don’t have running water or water that’s potable, it’s difficult to stay hydrated, wash your hands, and exercise all the precautions.”

Inadequate housing makes it tough to quarantine or social distance, while gaps in education and Internet access have limited the reach of health guidance. Navajo people I spoke to in May said it wasn’t until local leaders took to the radio, sharing messages in the Navajo language, that elders began to take the pandemic seriously, as many don’t go online, speak English, or trust outsiders. Dr. Warne said this problem exists throughout Indian Country, where more reliable, culturally attuned messaging could do a lot to stem the virus’s spread, especially with more federal funding for the national network of Tribal Epidemiology Centers.

Though the CARES Act allocated $8 billion for the country’s 574 federally recognized tribes, economic desperation is forcing reservations to re-open their doors to tourists and visitors, and thus to virus risk. Tribal casinos nationwide have been projected to lose more than $22 billion this year, or roughly half their revenue. The Potawatomi, Oneida, and Lac du Flambeau Band of Lake Superior Chippewa (all tribes in Wisconsin) chose to re-open their casinos even as the dangers became evident. The Lac du Flambeau saw cases increase fivefold in just one month, but as their COVID-19 incident commander told Wisconsin Public Radio, “we needed that revenue.”

The Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians re-opened its casino-resort in October despite a devastating new wave of cases. Since COVID-19 arrived in April, more than 13 percent of the tribe’s 11,000 members have tested positive, and at least 88 have died (more than the number of deaths in Vermont, population 624,000). The casino employs about 1,200 tribal members including Brian Mask, who’s taken it upon himself to firmly enforce the casino’s mask mandate after losing several loved ones to the virus.

Eventually, the Indian Health Service dispatched a four-person team to shore up local services, and the National Guard began offering testing in the tribe’s eight rural communities. But Mask says the most important support has come from tribal members themselves.

For six months, Mask and his neighbors have led mutual aid efforts collecting and distributing food, hygiene products, and other necessities. When local leaders were slow to offer health guidance, they urged people to mask up and stay home—all as the virus claimed the lives of Mask’s next-door neighbor, three uncles, and most recently, a cousin he grew up with. “It’s unreal,” he says. “It feels like I’m living in one of those B horror movies.” 

Glimmers of relief are appearing. The Indian Health Service recently announced plans to vaccinate nearly half the country’s 5.2 million Native Americans in 2021, starting with elders, essential workers, and those with high-risk conditions. President-elect Joe Biden’s transition team just appointed Navajo Nation health director Dr. Jill Jim to its COVID-19 advisory board, and Rep. Deb Haaland is reportedly in the running to become the first Indigenous Secretary of the Interior, a move that tribal leaders say would help center their needs in federal affairs. 

In the meantime, Mask is preparing for a tough winter by staying away from crowds at the casino and urging local youth to stop gathering. Once his cousin is buried this week, he plans to launch a toy drive for children that lost parents and grandparents to COVID. “I’m the ‘mask’ that’s gonna save my community,” he quipped. “I ain’t gonna quit.” 

COVID-19 surpassed heart disease as the leading cause of death in the United States this week, according to a report released Friday by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington.

An average of 1,660 people died of COVID in the US each day in the past week, according to IHME. As Dr. Sanjay Gupta explained on CNN, this exceeded the average number of Americans (10,000 to 11,000) who die each week of cardiac issues. In all, more than 11,600 died from COVID in the past seven days.

Covid-19 is the leading cause of death in the United States this week, according to the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation and the University of Washington. @drsanjaygupta explains.https://t.co/kNP6GaB9PM pic.twitter.com/HgjWcsYEcT

— New Day (@NewDay) December 4, 2020

Fifteen percent of people in the US have been infected, the report notes. Last week, daily reported cases averaged 165,200, up from 145,900 the week before.

On Wednesday, the United States reported a record 2,804 deaths from the coronavirus, the single-worst daily death toll from the pandemic yet. The number, which is expected to rapidly climb as winter deepens, surpasses the country’s previous peak of 2,607 deaths recorded on April 15 during the first wave of the pandemic, according to John Hopkins’ COVID tracker.

It’s a devastating milestone. As CNN noted, the US is losing more people each day than other countries, including Japan, have lost throughout the entire pandemic. The single-day death toll easily exceeds the number of people killed in the Pearl Harbor assault and is poised to soon surpass the nation’s death toll from the attacks of September 11, 2001. 

Hospitalizations and infection rates across the US are also continuing to break records. “The time for debating whether or not masks work or not is over; we clearly have scientific evidence,” Robert Redfield, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said on Wednesday, warning that the winter season will see the “most difficult time in the public history of this nation.”

.@CDCDirector: "December and January and February are going to be rough times. I actually believe they’re going to be the most difficult time in the public health history of this nation, largely because of the stress that it’s going to put on our health care system.” pic.twitter.com/L7fWT4CiCk

— CSPAN (@cspan) December 2, 2020

But even as the country approaches this unimaginably difficult winter, promising news on the vaccine front continues apace. This week, the United Kingdom became the first country to authorize a COVID-19 vaccine, and the US is likely to follow in the days ahead. Former presidents Barack Obama, George W. Bush, and Bill Clinton have said that they are all willing to take the vaccine on television in order to boost public confidence in its safety.

Meanwhile, the country’s lame-duck president yesterday posted a bizarre, 40-minute long video packed with dangerous, entirely false claims of election fraud that barely made mention of the pandemic or its death toll. Other Trump administration officials are busy making plans to pack 900 guests into the White House for indoor Christmas parties.

As many as 40 million doses of two COVID-19 vaccines are expected to be available for distribution by the end of December—enough to vaccinate 20 million people. But in a country of more than 330 million, who should be the first in line to get them?

Yesterday afternoon, a panel of expert advisors to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention voted 13 to 1 to recommend that health care workers and residents of long-term care facilities get top priority for vaccination. That group would include about 20 million medical providers, EMTs, home health aides, pharmacists, and nursing home staff, as well as the roughly 3 million people who live in skilled nursing and assisted living facilities.

The idea behind vaccinating health care workers first is to protect the people who keep the health care system running, many of whom are at risk of exposure to the coronavirus while on the job. Residents of long-term care facilities, meanwhile, are considered the most at-risk populations, accounting for about 40 percent of all US coronavirus deaths despite making up less than 1 percent of the population.

While individual states will have the final say on who gets the vaccines first, they are expected to follow the recommendations of the panel, known as the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. Making these decisions has become even more urgent as the numbers of new cases and hospitalizations have soared to record levels in the past month. “Since we’re averaging one COVID death per minute in the United States right now, in the time it takes us to have this ACIP meeting, 180 people will have died from COVID-19,” said Beth Bell, chair of the panel’s COVID-19 vaccine work group, at the start of Tuesday’s meeting. “So we are acting none too soon.”

Arkansas Secretary of Health José Romero, the committee’s chair, said the recommendation reflects the principles of “maximum benefit, minimum harm” and mitigates inequalities in vaccine distribution. Kathleen Dooling, a CDC medical officer, explained that the choices “promote justice” because health care personnel put themselves at risk to care for patients during the pandemic, and because all long-term care facilities are expected to get access to vaccines at about the same time, regardless of their patients’ socioeconomic status.

The committee is made up of medical and public health experts who issue recommendations on all kinds of vaccinations, from flu shots to childhood inoculations. Since the spring, it has been studying and discussing the scientific, ethical, and practical questions of who should get priority for COVID-19 vaccines once they are available. The committee is considering recommending that following health care workers and long-term care residents, vaccinations should be made available to essential workers such as teachers, agricultural workers, and police, followed by adults over 65 and people with high-risk medical conditions.

Meanwhile, the arrival of functional vaccines appears imminent. Pfizer and Moderna have both asked the FDA to issue emergency use authorizations for their vaccines, which are reported to be about 95 percent effective against the coronavirus. However, there are significant logistical challenges associated with each vaccine. Both require two doses spaced several weeks apart, and it may be difficult to track patients in nursing homes, where there can be frequent turnover among residents. Additionally, because some adults in the vaccine trials reported side effects including fever, headaches, and muscle pain after receiving their second dose, ACIP members discussed the need to stagger vaccinations for health care workers to avoid, for instance, an entire hospital unit calling in sick.

Despite these challenges, “most jurisdictions” in the county believe they will be able to vaccinate all health care workers within three weeks, Nancy Messonnier, the director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, said at the meeting Tuesday. And nearly all skilled nursing facilities nationwide have enrolled in a program to receive vaccinations from CVS and Walgreens pharmacies.  

“To all the people out there that are anxiously waiting for this vaccine,” Messonnier said, “we hope that this vote gets us all one step closer to to the day when we can all feel safe again, and when this pandemic is over.”

Leading infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci warned on Sunday that the worst was yet to come with the coronavirus pandemic, with the United States potentially facing a “surge superimposed upon the surge that we’re already in” after the Thanksgiving holidays.

Fauci’s bleak prediction comes at the end of a month in which more than 4.1 million Americans were infected with COVID-19 and more than 25,000 died. As of Sunday, more than 13.3 million Americans have been infected by the coronavirus and more than 265,000 have died, in a pandemic that has disproportionately afflicted Black, Latino, and Native American communities. 

“I don’t want to frighten people, except to say it is not too late to do something about this,” Fauci said on NBC’s Meet the Press, urging that anyone who traveled over the holidays continue to wear masks and practice physically distancing from others to help curtail the surge. Fauci also noted that a first wave of vaccinations could reach priority individuals before the end of December. Referring to what is now “a very difficult time,” Fauci added, “We’re going to have to do the kinds of restrictions of things we would have liked to have done, particularly in this holiday season, because we’re entering into what’s really a precarious situation.”

TODAY: Dr. Anthony Fauci tells @chucktodd that "it is not too late" to stop the spread of Covid.

Dr. Fauci: "We might see a surge super-imposed on that surge that we're already in." pic.twitter.com/MAj2g9r1MA

— Meet the Press (@MeetThePress) November 29, 2020

Meanwhile, President Donald Trump did his first post-election television interview on Sunday and said next to nothing about the raging pandemic. Instead, he continued to focus on denying the reality of his election loss and pushing blatant lies to Fox News host Maria Bartiromo, who said nothing at all to challenge or correct him. Bartiromo sat by as Trump argued without any evidence that a “rigged election” had been stolen from him and suggested that the Justice Department and FBI were “missing in action” and somehow involved in a contrived plot to steal the election from him. Trump’s baseless, conspiratorial monologue came on a weekend when his election loss was yet again confirmed on multiple fronts, with the Pennsylvania Supreme Court tossing out the latest lawsuit in that state and recounts in Wisconsin adding to Biden’s victory there.

Trump did make one comment about the pandemic on Sunday, taking personal credit for creating coronavirus vaccines. 

“I came up with vaccines,” Trump says

— Manu Raju (@mkraju) November 29, 2020