Amid efforts to “double down” on distribution equity, half of the COVID-19 vaccines administered last week in Chicago went to Black and Latinx residents, city officials said.
During the first week of vaccinations in mid-December, when eligibility was limited to health care workers and long-term care facility staff and residents, that number was 18%, Mayor Lori Lightfoot said, calling the data “deeply disturbing.”
“As soon as we saw these numbers, we doubled down even harder on our efforts to drive these life-saving vaccines into communities that need them most and ensure vaccination rates among residents of all races and ethnicities match the demographics of our city,” the mayor said during a press briefing Friday.
Black and Latinx residents make up about 30% and 29%, respectively, of Chicago residents, though during the first week of vaccine administration, they received 8.1% and 9.8% of first doses, respectively. In the week ending Feb. 13, they received 23.6% and 26.2% of first doses, respectively.
Meanwhile, 59.4% of first doses administered in the initial week went to white residents, who make up about half of the city’s population, and 15.1% to Asian residents, who represent about 7% of residents. In the most recent week, the number of first doses administered to those populations dropped to 41.4% and 5.6%, respectively.
Vaccine equity has been a concern nationwide, as communities of color have been hit hardest by the COVID-19 pandemic. Black Americans are 2.3 times more likely to die from COVID-19 compared to white Americans when age is taken into account, one analysis found.
In Chicago, Black and Latinx residents account for nearly 72% of COVID-19 fatalities, based on city data, despite representing 59% of the city’s population.
Lightfoot said that even before the city began administering vaccines, health officials knew “vaccine hesitancy, particularly among people of color, would be a significant challenge.”
“And it has been,” she said, citing the initial data.
To reach vulnerable populations, the city worked with several community partners, including unions and faith leaders, to provide education and access to the vaccine. In 15 neighborhoods hardest hit by the pandemic, the city has also gone “door to door” and into high-traffic areas like laundromats and grocery stores to help with scheduling appointments, Lightfoot said.
“We still have a long way to go,” the mayor, who received her second dose of the vaccine Friday, said regarding the 50% vaccination rate. “I’m confident that that number will only continue to grow. It tells me that all of the outreach and education is finally breaking through.”
On Jan. 25, vaccine eligibility was expanded to frontline essential workers and Chicagoans ages 65 and older.
The city is expected to expand eligibility to all other essential workers and Chicagoans between the ages of 16 and 64 with underlying medical conditions on March 29, pending supply.
ABC News’ Brian Hartman contributed to this report.
ABC NewsBy MAX GOLEMBO and EMILY SHAPIRO, ABC News
(NEW YORK) — An icy blast is stretching from Dallas to New York City Friday morning — but warmth is finally on the horizon for the South.
Friday’s storm focuses on the East Coast, with flooding rain in the Carolinas, an icy mix in the mid-Atlantic and snow from New Jersey to Massachusetts.
Philadelphia, New York and Boston could see 1 to 3 more inches of snow.
The snow and ice will begin to move out Friday night.
Meanwhile, a hard freeze warning is in effect in Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana and Mississippi, where temperatures are in the teens and 20’s Friday morning.
The freeze will finally lift Friday afternoon and the South is expected to see temperatures rise to the 50’s and 60’s this weekend.
After a week of historic and disastrous snow and ice in the South, over 180,000 customers are still without power in Texas and over 111,000 are in the dark in Mississippi Friday morning.
Two C-17 military transport aircraft will be heading to Galveston and Corpus Christi, Texas, to deliver supplies, a senior defense official told ABC News Thursday evening. The official said the aircraft will mainly be used to deliver water.
Most of Jackson, Mississippi, is currently without water and city officials say there’s no timeline on when it will be restored.
“We do not have a definitive timeline as to when the water will be restored in the tanks,” Jackson Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba said during a news conference Thursday.
The city will begin water distribution at several sites Friday.
(GREENVILLE COUNTY, S.C.) — Since late fall, 60,000 students and teachers across Greenville County, South Carolina, have been filing into the classroom for school the old-fashioned way: in-person, five days a week.
They’ve done it, Greenville superintendent Burke Royster said, by enforcing mask wearing, hand washing and social distancing — mostly by about 3 feet with plexiglass barriers when 6 feet isn’t possible — using high-quality ventilation and launching their own contact-tracing program.
Royster said he believes his schools have lower transmission than its surrounding community — a finding that is supported by research.
“I think it simply reinforces that this is a workable, viable solution,” Royster said of his school’s mitigation methods.
Greenville County is one of many examples across the U.S. of schools that have charted their own path forward since fall in the absence of a clear federal standard on what it means to reopen a classroom safely.
That all changed Friday when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for the first time issued specific steps schools could take depending upon their level of viral transmission in the community.
Still, since Friday’s release, health experts, teachers unions and political pundits have continued to debate whether the guidance is too strict or not strict enough, particularly when it comes to its suggestion of 6 feet of social distancing in “red” zones.
Districts like Greenville that have already reopened are unlikely to retrofit their plans precisely to fit the new CDC guidance, nor does the CDC have the power to enforce its recommendations. Still, other schools that haven’t reopened yet remain at a standstill, finding the guidance too stringent to meet completely.
“I know that not everybody was happy with how the school guidance read,” Rochelle Walensky, the new CDC director picked by President Joe Biden, said in a JAMA interview on Wednesday.
“I sleep at night because I know that it was science-based and it was that children and teachers who go to school based on what we recommended could and should be safe,” she added.
But in the days since it was announced, it’s become clear that the CDC’s input didn’t settle the debate.
Dr. Joe Allen, director of the Healthy Buildings Program at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, took issue with the CDC connecting school reopening with coronavirus transmission, which he doesn’t believe accurately predicts how safe schools will be.
The key factors to keeping schools safe are good masking, ventilation and hand hygiene — regardless of case count in the area, Allen said.
“If we do these basics, we know we can keep kids and adults safe in schools,” he said. “What happened is that CDC layered this other level on top — these community spread metrics — and they are so strict or conservative that it’s unlikely any of these metrics will be met for the remainder of the year.”
Allen and his colleagues have also pushed back on the CDC’s guidelines to keep students 6 feet apart, which parents and schools have also argued would be impossible to do if everyone returned in-person, given the number of students and the size of the classrooms.
“We want to encourage as much distancing as possible, but we have to recognize the extreme and devastating costs and consequences of having millions of kids out of school, and that the 6-foot rule is what’s keeping a lot of them out of school,” Allen said.
The CDC insists in its guidelines that infections in schools “reflects transmission in the surrounding community.” The CDC also has maintained since the beginning of the pandemic that 6-feet of distance is what’s been proven to work. And, its guidance also suggests other ways to “layer” mitigation, such as surveillance testing of staff and students.
“I wouldn’t even say we did the best we could,” Walensky said of the plan, which pulled research from schools in the U.S. and Europe that have been open since the fall. “We did the best that science could inform.”
Walensky also said she has hope that the recent decline in cases nationwide will allow schools to be “a little bit more liberal in terms of what we’re able to do to bring the kids back to school safely.”
When the guidance was released last week, 90% of school districts were in the red zone, an area the CDC deemed unsafe for in-person learning in middle or high schools unless all other mitigation efforts were strictly maintained. That number has now fallen to 75%, Walensky said.
Other health officials and advocacy groups have praised the guidance, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, which called it “right on target.”
“These public health protocols should continue to be the model schools follow as they increasingly transition to in-person learning,” Lee Savio Beers, president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, said in a statement after the guidance was released.
Former CDC Director Rich Besser said the CDC guidelines show a path forward.
“The science shows that if schools have what they need and are able to decompress classrooms, ensure people are wearing masks, do some screening, improve ventilation — you can have kids in classroom learning, very safely, even before you have vaccination of staff and teachers,” Besser told ABC’s “Good Morning America” after the guidelines were released. “That gives me hope.”
“You have to get the numbers down in communities and those are moving in the right direction as well,” he added.
In Greenville, the superintendent of schools has seen another benefit to bringing kids back to the classroom: widespread mask-wearing because the teacher said so.
“Every day, if you count the students that are in person and our employees, that’s over 60,000 people that for somewhere between seven and nine hours a day are doing what the CDC, South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control and medical experts say they should,” Royster said.
His district has continued to see cases rise dramatically over school breaks when students are free to spend that time in the community without stringent mitigation measures, Royster said, but fall within a week of students returning.
To Allen, there’s clear science to back up Royster’s anecdote.
“What we’ve seen in the data is that when kids are in school with good control measures in place, this can actually be an environment that’s where risk is controlled for both kids, as well as the teachers and other adults in the school,” Allen said.
Given the unsettled debate, even after the CDC released its long-awaited guidelines, reporters and public health experts have consistently asked the Biden administration for clarity. Conservatives have used the debate to criticize Biden for issuing restrictive guidance despite his initial pledge to open schools within his first 100 days.
But the Biden administration has struggled to navigate the debate, attempting to walk a fine line between telling reluctant teachers to return to school while also trying to jumpstart the nation’s education system.
In December — prior to Biden’s inauguration — he announced that “if Congress provides the funding we need,” he would work to see that a majority of schools would open in his first 100 days of office. After taking office, his press secretary said that could mean being in-person just one day a week, but Biden clarified at a CNN Town Hall on Tuesday night that his goal is now to get K-8 students back to school five days a week.
The goal raises questions, however, about how a majority of students can return to school in the next two months if 75% of the country currently falls under the “high-transmission” category. Under the CDC guidelines, much of the county would remain in virtual or hybrid learning until case numbers declined.
On vaccines for teachers, the White House has also confirmed that they do not believe teachers need to be vaccinated before returning to school, though they recommend teachers be prioritized for vaccine eligibility.
Ultimately, however, the White House and the CDC said it’s still up to local school boards.
“What we’re trying to do is evaluate the risk of COVID in the school, a potential outbreak … versus the counterfactual, which is all the education loss, all of the food security loss, all of the mental health,” Walensky said.
“I think a year from now, we’ll start understanding all of those losses and we’ll really need to think about what the risk we were willing to take at the time.”
ABC News’ Sophie Tatum contributed to this report.
ABC NewsBy MAX GOLEMBO and EMILY SHAPIRO, ABC News
(NEW YORK) — The storm that left parts of the South buried under 15 inches of snow and a shield of ice is now moving into the Northeast.
Little Rock, Arkansas, saw a record 11.8 inches of snow on Wednesday while 6 inches of snow fell in Oklahoma, Tennessee, Alabama and Mississippi.
Galveston, Texas, Mayor Craig Brown told ABC News’ Good Morning America Thursday that the city is still facing burst pipes and power outages.
“Ninety percent of our entire population was cut off of the power for about two days,” Brown said.
He said people are also dealing with lack of food and water.
“The human suffering though that is occurring from this is very, very concerning,” he said.
“This is worse than a hurricane,” he added. “In a hurricane you can go to the mainland and get away from this. In this particular situation, no matter where you go in Texas you still have a concern that is similar to what we have here.”
On Thursday, the heavy snow is moving through the Northeast, from Washington, D.C., to Philadelphia to New York City.
About 100 flights have already been canceled at New York City’s LaGuardia airport.
The snow will reach Boston later in the day and will last in the Northeast cities through Friday morning.
D.C. could see 2 to 4 inches of snow, Philadelphia could get 6 to 8, New York is forecast for 5 to 9 inches and Boston is expected to see 6 to 8 inches.
An icy mix of freezing rain and sleet is expected from Virginia to North Carolina on Thursday and Friday.
From Florida to North Carolina, there’s a possibility of flash flooding and tornadoes.
Bill Pugliano/Getty ImagesBY: ELLA TORRES, ABC NEWS
(NEW YORK) — Rush Limbaugh, a colossal figure whose unflinching brashness helped shape American conservative politics and media while his history of derogatory comments about marginalized communities turned him into one of the country’s most polarizing names, has died. He was 70.
He announced in early February 2020 that he was fighting advanced lung cancer. His diagnosis was met with well wishes from many prominent Republican figures and appeared to prompt then-President Donald Trump to present him with the Presidential Medal of Freedom at the 2020 State of the Union address on Feb. 4, a day after he revealed his diagnosis on air.
The honor stirred conversation among Democrats and members of and advocates for marginalized communities because of Limbaugh’s long history of making disparaging comments about minority groups, the LGBTQ community, suicide, AIDS patients and women.
The divisive reaction was emblematic of Limbaugh’s legacy.
Gov. Mike Huckabee, R-Ark., called it a “powerful moment” on Twitter, with conservative TV personality Meghan McCain saying that those on the right most likely applauded it.
“He’s completely changed the paradigm of radio,” McCain said on “The View,” when asked by co-host Whoopi Goldberg what Limbaugh had done to deserve the honor.
Those on the other side of the political divide argued otherwise.
Joe Biden, then months away from being elected president, condemned Trump in a statement for presenting the award to Limbaugh, whom he called “a conservative media personality who has done as much as Trump himself to divide our nation.”
Trump, during an interview on Fox News on Wednesday, called Limbaugh a “fighter,” adding: “I mean he, in theory, could have been gone four months ago, really. He was fighting until the very end. He was a fighter.”
Beginning a career in radio in 1971, Limbaugh became known for his conservative opinions and views on immigration, women’s rights and race. He launched “The Rush Limbaugh Show” in 1988 and steadily remained among the most influential radio show hosts, as determined by Talkers magazine.
Limbaugh’s presence in talk radio effectively changed the course of the industry, and he’s often been credited with saving AM radio. When he first launched his show, he offered a new kind of talk show that many hadn’t heard before, according to Brian Rosenwald, a scholar at the University of Pennsylvania whose research focus includes media studies and Limbaugh himself.
The status quo prior to Limbaugh mainly consisted of hosts conducting interviews or hearing from callers, rarely letting their own opinions and values seep into the conversation, according to Rosenwald. Yet Limbaugh proudly shared his opinions and garnered a loyal fanbase.
“He’s doing something that people had never heard,” Rosenwald told ABC News. “He starts to feel a responsibility as he starts getting all these callers saying, ‘Thank God, Rush, you’re finally on air. We finally have a voice.'”
“The Rush Limbaugh Show” continued for over three decades, although Limbaugh took a break from his show in 2003 after admitting an addiction to painkillers and a stint in rehab. Limbaugh was then arrested in 2006 after a three-year investigation that resulted in a warrant charging him with fraud to conceal information to obtain prescriptions, according to reports at the time.
Limbaugh’s attorney said he had reached a deal with prosecutors to have the charges eventually dismissed if he continued treatment for drug addiction. Though it was never proved, some speculated that Limbaugh’s addiction may have led to an autoimmune inner ear disease that caused him profound deafness between October 2001 and January 2002. He regained hearing through the use of cochlear implants.
Limbaugh was outspoken about the punishment he thought those struggling with addiction should face before he announced his own addiction.
“It’s destructive, it’s demoralizing and the people who are caught doing this stuff ought to be sent away. They ought to be punished,” Limbaugh said during a show.
Even after his own announcement, he wanted little sympathy, telling listeners, “I refuse to let anyone think I am doing something great here, when there are people you never hear about who face long odds and never resort to such escapes.”
As much as people on the right see Limbaugh as a hero who gave conservatives a voice, Rosenwald said, those on the left will remember him as “a hate-mongering bigot who said a lot of awful things” and “reinforced prejudices.”
Among the comments that generated controversy, Limbaugh in 2007 described the NFL as “a game between the Bloods and the Crips without any weapons,” effectively comparing Black professional football players to gang members.
In 2012, he called Sandra Fluke, then a Georgetown University law student, a “slut” after she argued to Congress that birth control should be covered by her employer’s health care plan.
He later apologized to Fluke and said his “choice of words was not the best,” although he had made the claim in various forms multiple times.
A year later, he said on his talk show that white people should stop feeling guilty about slavery.
“If any race of people should not have guilt about slavery, it’s Caucasians. The white race has probably had fewer slaves and for a briefer period of time than any other in the history of the world,” he said, calling his statement as a “history lesson.”
Of the LGBTQ community, Limbaugh blamed gay marriage for a decline in Christianity in 2015.
“Many of these churches now perform homosexual marriage, they ordain gay pastors or ministers, and, in some cases, female and lesbian pastors and ministers, which you might think would cause some people to leave those churches,” he said on his talk show.
All considered, Rosenwald said no matter what the public thinks of Limbaugh, his impact in both politics and media can’t be overstated.
Before Trump awarded Limbaugh the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the country’s highest honor for a civilian, last year, he thanked him for “all that you have done for our nation, the millions of people a day that you speak to and you inspire, and all of the incredible work that you have done for charity.”
In 25 years, Limbaugh helped raise nearly $44 million for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, according to the health agency. He also ran a campaign for the Stephen Siller Tunnel to Towers Foundation, which supports first responders and the military, after former NFL player Colin Kaepernick criticized a Nike shoe featuring the Betsy Ross flag.
Limbaugh has held friendly and even close relationships with numerous Republican presidents and politicians, including George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush.
In 1992, Limbaugh was invited to stay overnight at the White House by the elder Bush. In 2008, George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush and Jeb Bush all called in to his show to congratulate him on his 20th anniversary.
“President George W. Bush calling to congratulate you on 20 years of important and excellent broadcasting,” Bush said over the phone to Limbaugh. “I’m here with a room full of admirers, there’s two others … people who consider you friends.”
However, when Barack Obama was president, Limbaugh launched numerous attacks against him, including saying he wasn’t a U.S. citizen, that Obama was “an angry Black guy” and that his “entire economic program is reparations.”
He also called Obama “Barack, The Magic Negro” numerous times, a term that was run in a Los Angeles Times op-ed that later was made into a song to the tune of “Puff the Magic Dragon.”
Limbaugh later defended his usage of the name, saying he did not come up with it and that it was satire, before playing an entire song that referred to Obama as such.
Limbaugh’s brash style of “infotainment” — a mix of facts and performance — in part led to the style often attributed to Fox News, according to Rosenwald.
“Fox News is a thing because of him,” Rosenwald said.
His prominence in conservative media and politics meshed well with the Trump era, with Limbaugh predicting the mainstream media would not understand the desire for Trump.
Limbaugh understood the impact Trump could have in part because, like Limbaugh himself, Trump “never put his tail between his legs,” according to Rosenwald.
“Rush refused to go away. Trump refused to go away in controversy,” Rosenwald said. “Without Rush Limbaugh and without the media type that he created, I don’t think you get a President Trump.”
WLS-TVBy MEREDITH DELISO, ABC News
