1.5 million teachers at high risk for virus
As pressure mounts for teachers to return to their classrooms this fall, concerns about health risks from the coronavirus are pushing many toward alternatives, including career changes, as others mobilize to delay school reopenings in hardhit areas.
Teachers unions have begun pushing back on what they see as unnecessarily aggressive timetables for reopening. The largest unions say the timing should be guided by whether districts have the ability — and funding — to implement protocols and precautions to protect students and teachers, even if that means balking at calls from President Trump to resume inperson instruction.
On Monday, a teachers union filed a lawsuit to block the reopening of schools in Florida, where state officials have ordered school districts to reopen campuses as an option unless local health officials deem that to be unsafe. Educators in several cities have called for the school year to start with remote instruction. Some have joined demonstrations in Arizona, where three teachers sharing a classroom during summer school tested positive for the virus and one died.
A recent analysis from the nonprofit Kaiser Family Foundation estimated nearly onequarter of the nation’s teachers — nearly 1.5 million — are considered higherrisk for serious illness from the coronavirus because of other health conditions or age.
And a new APNORC poll finds only 1 in 10 Americans think schools should return to normal operations this fall. VACCINES
U.S. pays Pfizer $1.95 billion
The Trump administration on Wednesday announced a nearly $2 billion contract with the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer and the smaller German BioNTech biotechnology company for up to 600 million doses of a coronavirus vaccine. If the vaccine proves to be safe and effective in clinical trials, the companies say they could manufacture the first 100 million doses by December. Under the arrangement, the federal government would obtain the first 100 million doses for $1.95 billion, or about $20 a dose, with the rights to acquire up to 500 million more. Americans would receive the vaccine for free. WASHINGTON, D.C.
Judge says no to migrants
A federal judge in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday declined to release roughly 300 migrant parents and children held in U.S. family detention centers despite what he called immigration authorities’ “shortcomings” in controlling the virus. Lawyers for the families had asked U.S. District Judge James Boasberg to release the families because they fear being infected by the virus. More than 3,700 cases of the virus have been confirmed in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities.