U.S. Judge Blocks Vaccine Mandate for Federal Workers

A federal judge in Texas issued a preliminary injunction on Friday blocking the White House from requiring federal workers to be vaccinated against the coronavirus, though the ruling came months after the White House said that 95 percent of federal workers were already in compliance.

The Justice Department said it would appeal the ruling.

Mr. Biden announced in September that more than 3.5 million federal workers were required to get vaccinated by Nov. 22. He said that there would be no option to get regularly tested, aside from some religious or medical exemptions.

After the deadline passed, the White House said more than 95 percent of federal workers were in compliance with the mandate. On Friday, the administration said that 98 percent of federal workers are vaccinated or have sought medical or religious exemptions.

“We are confident in our legal authority,” Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, said Friday, after the ruling.

The judge in Texas, Jeffrey Brown, ruled that opponents of the mandate for federal employees were likely to succeed at trial and blocked the government from enforcing the requirement. Judge Brown was appointed to the District Court for the Southern District of Texas by President Donald J. Trump in 2019.

Judge Brown, who is based in Galveston, said his ruling — in a lawsuit filed by the group Feds for Medical Freedom — was not about whether people should get vaccinated against coronavirus. He wrote that “the court believes they should.”

“It is instead about whether the president can, with the stroke of a pen and without the input of Congress, require millions of federal employees to undergo a medical procedure as a condition of their employment,” he wrote in his 20-page ruling. That, he said, was “a bridge too far.”

He said less invasive measures could protect public health, like masking, social distancing and remote work.

Last week, the Supreme Court blocked the Biden administration from enforcing a vaccine-or-testing mandate for large employers, dealing a blow to a key element of the White House’s plan to address the pandemic as cases resulting from the Omicron variant are on the rise. In that case, conservative justices deemed the policy an improper imposition on the lives and health of many Americans.

But the court allowed a more modest mandate requiring health care workers at facilities receiving federal money to be vaccinated.

The administration’s third major vaccine requirement, which was aimed at employees of federal contractors, was blocked by a federal judge in December.

Booster shots of the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines aren’t just preventing infections with the contagious Omicron variant — they’re also keeping infected Americans from ending up in the hospital, according to data published on Friday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The extra doses are 90 percent effective against hospitalization with the variant, the agency reported. Booster shots also reduced the likelihood of a visit to an emergency department or urgent care clinic. The extra doses were most effective against infection and death among Americans aged 50 and older, the data showed.

Over all, the new data show that the vaccines were more protective against the Delta variant than against Omicron, which lab studies have found is partially able to sidestep the body’s immune response.

It is generally accepted that booster shots keep people from becoming infected, at least for a while. Data from Israel and other countries have also suggested that boosters can help prevent severe illness and hospitalization, especially in older adults.

“Data from other countries have also shown significant benefit of getting the booster, but this is really showing it in the U.S.,” Akiko Iwasaki, an immunologist at Yale University, said of the figures released on Friday. “These numbers should be very convincing.”

On Thursday night, the C.D.C. published additional data showing that in December, unvaccinated Americans 50 years and older were about 45 times more likely to be hospitalized than those who were vaccinated and got a third shot.

Yet less than 40 percent of fully vaccinated Americans who are eligible for a booster shot have received one.

Friday’s results are based on three new studies led by the C.D.C. In one study, researchers analyzed hospitalizations and visits to emergency departments and urgent care clinics in 10 states from Aug. 26, 2021 to Jan. 5, 2022.

Vaccine effectiveness against hospitalization with the Omicron variant fell to just 57 percent in people who had received their second dose more than six months earlier, the authors found. A third shot restored that protection to 90 percent.

It’s unclear whether protection from the boosters might also wane as it did after two shots, noted Natalie Dean, a biostatistician at Emory University.

“We just have to recognize that all these estimates of Omicron third-dose protection are going to be people who are pretty recently boosted,” she said. “We do wonder the durability of boosters themselves.”

When debating booster shot recommendations for all American adults, scientific advisers to the Food and Drug Administration and the C.D.C. repeatedly bemoaned the lack of booster shot data that was specific to the United States.

There are differences between Israel and the United States — for example, in the way Israel defines severe illness — that made it challenging to interpret the relevance of Israeli data for Americans, they said.

Some members of the Biden administration supported the use of booster doses even before the scientific advisers of the agencies had a chance to review the data from Israel. Federal health officials intensified their boosters-for-all campaign after the arrival of the Omicron variant.

The C.D.C. now recommends booster shots for everyone 12 years and older, five months after getting two doses of the mRNA vaccines made by Pfizer-BioNtech and Moderna, or two months after a single dose of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine.

The usefulness of booster shots in Americans younger than 50 was a topic of vigorous debate in the fall. Several experts argued at the time that third shots were unnecessary for younger adults because two doses of the vaccine were holding up well.

Some of those experts remained unconvinced by the new data.

It was clear even months ago that older adults and those with weakened immune systems would benefit from extra doses of the vaccine, said Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and a member of the F.D.A.’s vaccine advisory committee.

But “where is the evidence that a third dose benefits a healthy young person?” he asked.

“If you’re trying to stop the spread of this virus, vaccinate the unvaccinated,” he added. “We keep trying to further protect the already protected.”

But other experts changed their minds in favor of boosters because of the highly contagious Omicron variant. Even if two doses were enough to keep young people out of hospitals, they said, a third dose could limit virus spread by preventing infections.

“They’re both data-driven, legitimate positions,” said John Moore, a virologist at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York. But at this point, the debate is over: “We are using boosters in everyone, and that’s what’s happening.”

Fewer people in the United States are being admitted to the hospital with Covid than a week ago, suggesting that the record-breaking surge in hospitalizations driven by the Omicron variant could soon decline, following recent case trends. But the country remains far from the end of the Omicron wave, and in many areas it could be weeks before the strain on hospitals subsides.

The number of people hospitalized with the virus nationwide and those sick enough to require intensive care remain at or near record levels. In much of the West, Midwest and more rural areas of the country, where Omicron surges hit later, cases and hospitalizations are still growing significantly.

Indeed, most of the decrease in new hospital admissions so far is driven by places that experienced Omicron outbreaks earliest.

Omicron reached many metropolitan areas in the eastern half of the country before it became dominant nationwide, and hospitalizations jumped quickly in the Northeast and the South before the new year. Now, hospitalizations are beginning to level off in the Northeast in particular.

But the strain on many local hospitals is far from over.

Covid hospitalizations remain higher in every state than they were two weeks ago, and 12 states had more people hospitalized this week than they did at last winter’s peak.

The Biden administration said on Friday that it would suspend 44 flights from the United States to China operated by Chinese airlines in retaliation for China’s imposing similar restrictions on American companies in recent weeks.

The Chinese government has canceled the flights, operated by American Airlines, Delta Air Lines and United Airlines, after passengers on their planes tested positive for the virus after arriving in China. The passengers had tested negative before getting on their planes.

In the order on Friday, the U.S. Transportation Department described the suspensions by China, which run through early March, as punitive and unfair.

China’s aviation authority canceled the flights using a “circuit breaker” provision intended to allow the country to limit the spread of the virus. According to the U.S. order, China’s policies allow airlines that deliver passengers who later test positive for the virus to choose either a two-week suspension of the offending flight or a four-week limit on the number of passengers on that flight. The U.S. companies were never given that choice, and were denied the four-week notice promised under Chinese policy, the Transportation Department said.

“The Chinese government individually clears each and every potential traveler for travel to China prior to their departure from the United States, after verifying predeparture test results and other required documentation,” Carol A. Petsonk, a top aviation official in the department, wrote in the order. “U.S. carriers, who are following all relevant Chinese regulations with respect to predeparture and in-flight protocols, should not be penalized if passengers, postarrival, later test positive for Covid-19.”

The order suspends 44 flights from the United States to China scheduled from Jan. 30 to March 29. The affected flights are operated by Air China, China Eastern Airlines, China Southern Airlines and Xiamen Airlines. Most were scheduled to depart from Los Angeles, with the others departing from New York. France and Germany have taken similar actions in response to China’s use of the circuit breaker policy.

Early in the pandemic, Chinese officials barred U.S. airlines from operating passenger flights into their country, prompting the Trump administration to retaliate. The dispute eventually subsided, and limited flights between the countries resumed more than a year ago.

Delta and United did not immediately respond to requests for comment. American deferred to Airlines for America, a trade group, which said in a statement that it was “supportive of the actions taken by the Department of Transportation to ensure the fair treatment of U.S. airlines in the Chinese market.” The Civil Aviation Administration of China, the country’s aviation authority, could not immediately be reached for comment.

For more than two years, as the coronavirus washed across most nations in wave after wave of infection, the virus failed to reach some of the most remote islands dotting the Pacific Ocean. Even as cases emerged in places as remote as Antarctica, these islands — through geographic isolation and stringent policies — remained mostly untouched by the pathogen.

No longer.

As the highly transmissible Omicron variant spreads with a speed and infectiousness unmatched in the pandemic, it has found a foothold in a number of island nations.

Some are recording their first cases spreading in the local population since the pandemic began. Others that have maintained single-digit caseloads for much of the pandemic are watching with alarm as local outbreaks spread.

One of the most drastic examples is Kiribati, a collection of atolls and reef islands scattered across an area of the Pacific Ocean about twice the size of Alaska.

The country of roughly 119,000 people has kept its borders shut for much of the pandemic. Until recently, it had recorded only two Covid cases from a returning ship in May. The crew was quarantined and no outbreak was recorded.

But when the first international flight to enter Kiribati in 10 months arrived last week from Fiji, 36 passengers tested positive for the virus. The infection later spread to a security worker at a quarantine center and two other people, according to the national broadcaster, Radio Kiribati.

Now Tarawa, the capital, will go into lockdown on Monday. Most residents will be able to leave their homes only to buy food. All workplaces will be shut except for those providing essential and emergency services.

In Tonga, where aid workers are rushing to deliver lifesaving supplies after a volcanic eruption set off a tsunami that devastated the island nation, recovery efforts have been complicated by its coronavirus-free status.

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The nation has reported only one coronavirus case throughout the pandemic, and the local authorities have expressed concerns about letting in foreign aid workers who might be carrying the virus.

The Solomon Islands also reported its first community transmissions this week. The source was a boat that arrived illegally on the island of Ontong Java from Papua New Guinea carrying an infected passenger, the authorities said.

“Fellow Solomon Islanders, what we have feared has happened,” Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare said on Tuesday. “We now have community transmission of Covid-19 in Ontong Java.”

“Expect the numbers of infected people to grow rapidly in the coming days and weeks,” he added. “Expect some people could get seriously sick. And also expect some people could even lose their lives.”

A day later, community transmission was detected in the capital, Honiara, forcing the authorities there to impose a snap lockdown. As of Friday, there were 169 positive cases in the country but only 56 beds available for Covid patients.

Palau has also recently reported a coronavirus outbreak after nearly two virus-free years. As of Friday, there were 183 active cases and more than 600 people in quarantine. The country has suspended schools for two weeks and imposed a ban on community gatherings.

And Samoa is considering canceling repatriation flights after a plane from Australia landed in the country carrying 10 passengers who tested positive. They are all isolating, and there is no indication yet that the virus has spread into the community.

Still, the cases represent the highest number of coronavirus cases that the island nation has seen since the start of the pandemic. Previously, Samoa had reported just two cases in quarantine.

The national network of Social Security customer service offices, which were closed nearly two years ago at the start of the pandemic, is on track to reopen on March 30.

The Social Security Administration and unions representing the agency’s work force agreed this week to reopen more than 1,200 offices, contingent on changes in pandemic conditions and further negotiations. Bargaining is set to conclude by March 1, which would allow 30 days to plan for the office re-entry.

“This agreement will allow all the parties to wait and see what happens with the latest wave of the pandemic,” said Rich Couture, chief negotiator for the American Federation of Government Employees, one of three unions representing the agency work force involved in the talks. “Hopefully it subsides, but if it doesn’t, we can take further action to postpone the reopening if necessary.”

Social Security field offices handle benefit claims for retirement and Medicare. But they also assist with applications for Social Security Disability Insurance and Supplemental Security Income, the benefit program for low-income, disabled or older people. Since the pandemic began, nearly all public service has been available only online, and by phone and mail, and the agency work force has operated virtually. Office visits are available only by appointment and only for a limited number of critical issues.

Processing of Social Security retirement benefits and Medicare claims has not been impaired during the office shutdown, agency records show. But there were sharp drops in 2020 in benefit awards for Supplemental Security Income and disability insurance.

Social Security had earlier announced a tentative plan for employees to return to the offices on Jan. 3. But that date was postponed because of disagreements between the agency and unions over specifics of the plan.

The new agreement calls for all employees and visitors to wear masks while at Social Security facilities, regardless of their vaccination status. Under the agency’s original plan, visitors who stated that they were vaccinated would have been permitted to forgo masks. The agreement also calls for negotiations between the agency and various segments of the work force over the specifics of each group’s reopening plan.

“Our main concern is to keep employees and the visiting public safe and healthy,” Mr. Couture said.

The details on office reopenings, including hours of operation, are still being negotiated, but are expected to be announced in March. The agency also plans to continue to allow telework to varying degrees for different jobs.

During the transition, the agency advises people to use its website wherever possible or to call its national toll-free number, 800-772-1213, as a starting point to receive assistance.

— Mark Miller

The path of the pandemic is uncertain, but investors may have already made up their minds about the prospects for companies that had prospered months earlier. Netflix and Peloton plunged late in the day on Friday on signs that “stay at home” stocks, which were already under pressure, could take a turn for the worse as people begin to venture out again.

Netflix reported its fourth-quarter earnings after the market closed, and warned that subscriber growth was about to slow. This sent the streaming giant’s stock down 20 percent, erasing more than $40 billion in market cap. The report suggests that the company is more vulnerable to competition than its investors are comfortable with.

Rivals are eating into Netflix’s business. The company, which now has 222 million subscribers, forecast that it would gain only 2.5 million customers in the current quarter, far from analysts’ average estimate of just over six million. Competition from the likes of Disney+, Amazon Prime Video, HBO Max and others “has only intensified over the last 24 months,” Netflix said.

Other streamers have some advantages. Those services are attached to big studios, so they already own a ton of content. (Amazon is about to own a studio, if regulators approve its deal to buy MGM.) That gives them license to market their streaming efforts outside the United States, where all the growth is. Netflix can’t do the same as easily. In order to compensate, Netflix last week announced a price increase for U.S. subscribers.

Investors may reconsider the heady valuation of Netflix’s stock. Until the expected decline in growth announced on Thursday, investors were essentially paying double for each dollar of expected profit at Netflix, versus tech giants like Meta and Alphabet. But are Netflix’s growth prospects really that good? The answer, at least for now, is no.

Peloton is similarly struggling, as the at-home exercise equipment maker grapples with waning demand for its bikes and treadmills. Its shares closed 24 percent lower Thursday — and are down some 80 percent over the past six months.

The company said it was weighing layoffs. “We now need to evaluate our organization structure and size of our team,” John Foley, Peloton’s chief executive, wrote in an open letter to customers and employees.

Peloton expects to have lost as much as $270 million last quarter, it said ahead of its scheduled earnings report next month.

The company denied that it would temporarily halt all production because of a glut in inventory, pushing back on a CNBC report that had sent its shares plunging. That said, Mr. Foley wrote that “we are resetting our production levels for sustainable growth.

The World Health Organization, which has been resistant to endorse the wide use of booster shots and slow in recommending vaccinations for children, moved on Friday to revise its advice on both fronts, bringing its guidance closer to that of most wealthy nations, including the United States.

An advisory panel for the agency recommended expanding the use of a reduced dosage of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine to children aged 5 to 11. It also recommended that frontline health care workers, older adults and those in other high-risk groups who have been inoculated be offered a booster dose four to six months after their initial doses.

The committee had already authorized boosters for those whose immune systems are diminished.

As many nations — fearing waning immunity and new waves of infection — began rolling out booster campaigns, the W.H.O. has warned that those efforts could undermine ones to get much-needed vaccine supplies to poorer countries.

Roughly 60 percent of the world’s population has received at least one dose of a Covid vaccine, but only 9.4 percent of people in low-income countries have received at least one dose, according to Our World in Data.

In August, before the Omicron variant had been identified, the W.H.O. called for a global moratorium on boosters to increase the distribution of vaccine supplies to countries in the greatest need. But Omicron has once again scrambled efforts to get ahead of the virus, and there is a growing body of evidence that suggests that older people can benefit from booster shots.

The C.D.C. released data on Thursday that suggested that the risk of hospitalization for unvaccinated Americans ages 50 to 64 with Covid was far higher than it was for those in the age group who were vaccinated and received a booster shot.

Dr. Katherine O’Brien, director of the W.H.O.’s department of immunization, vaccines and biologicals, said that the agency’s new guidance was in line with its central goal — to protect people who are at the highest risk of severe disease and of death.

But the agency is still not going as far as many wealthy nations, which are now offering boosters to all adults. In the U.S., the C.D.C. recently went farther, endorsing booster shots of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine for children ages 12 and older.

Dr. Soumya Swaminathan, the W.H.O.’s chief scientist, said Tuesday that “there’s no evidence right now” that healthy children and teenagers need an extra dose, adding that the aim of the booster program is to protect “those at highest risk of severe disease and dying.”

An unvaccinated 55-year-old Minnesota man was moved to a Texas hospital so that he could remain on a ventilator after a court battle that raised questions about who has the right to make life-or-death decisions when patients cannot speak for themselves.

The Minnesota man, Scott Quiner, became sick with Covid-19 in October. An operations manager at a transportation company, he was unvaccinated. His illness became so severe that, according to court records, he was placed on a ventilator after being admitted in November to Mercy Hospital in Coon Rapids, just north of Minneapolis. He remained on the ventilator for weeks.

Then, on Jan. 11, hospital officials told Mr. Quiner’s wife, Anne, that they would be removing him from the ventilator in two days, over her objections.

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In court papers, Mercy Hospital did not provide specific reasons for why it moved to take Mr. Quiner off the ventilator. Allina Health, which oversees the hospital, declined to comment on Mr. Quiner’s case, citing patient privacy. Ms. Quiner did not respond to messages seeking comment.

On Jan. 12, Ms. Quiner pleaded for a lawyer’s help on the “Stew Peters Show,” a podcast whose host has falsely called coronavirus vaccines “poisonous shots” and given a platform to pandemic conspiracy theories.

She said that aside from her husband’s lungs, his organs were functioning and “there was nothing wrong with his brain.” Only a couple of days earlier, she said, her husband had opened his eyes “and was more alert.”

“I’m thinking, ‘Why are you killing him?’” said Ms. Quiner, whose husband had made her his health care agent in 2017. Under Minnesota law, that means she has the authority to make medical decisions on his behalf if he is unable to himself.

What followed was a legal case that underscored the tensions between people who refuse the coronavirus vaccine and hospitals that have been filled with patients sick with the virus, a majority of them unvaccinated.

For nearly two years, some businesses owners in Hong Kong felt confident that they had weathered the worst of the pandemic. That changed this month when Omicron started spreading, and officials returned to the trusted “zero-Covid” playbook that Hong Kong shares with mainland China.

Restaurants were forced to shut down by 6 p.m. Small animals were culled. Flights from eight countries were suspended. Imports came to a standstill.

Hong Kong is chasing the same dogged virus strategy as China, hoping this will strengthen ties to Beijing and allow it to declare victory over Covid-19. But in the process, a Chinese territory once known as “Asia’s World City” has cut itself off from the outside world, crushing an economy reliant on international trade at a time when the global supply chain is already deeply strained.

The economic fallout has been staggering. In the days after the city announced its latest virus measures, several small businesses, including a rotisserie chicken chain, a popular wine bar, a craft beer shop and a gastro pub, said they would close.

“I’ve tried to hold out as long as possible, but we are losing money,” said Perry Lam, the owner of a local brewery called H.K. Lovecraft.

Economists at Wall Street banks have lowered their estimates of the city’s economic growth for the year. Fitch, the ratings agency, warned that the ban on foreign travel would severely threaten Hong Kong’s economic future.

Hong Kong has reported around 300 cases of Omicron, most detected from overseas visitors during their quarantine. In recent days, however, local infections have jumped and emerged from unexpected origins, putting health officials on edge. In all, it has recorded 13,096 virus cases and 213 deaths since the start of the pandemic.

These low numbers have been too much for Beijing’s zero-tolerance line, a seeming prerequisite for Hong Kong to reopen its border with China — a top priority for local officials who are under pressure to make the former British colony more like the mainland.

• New Zealand on Friday confirmed a case of Omicron in the town of Palmerston North, the first known Omicron case outside of workers at the country’s airports and hotel quarantine facilities. The person had previously spent two weeks in a quarantine facility in Christchurch. To counter the potential spread of the variant, New Zealand will increase the isolation time for all people who test positive for the virus to 14 days from 10, a spokesperson for the Ministry of Health said on Friday. Close contacts must now isolate for 10 days instead of a week.

• Malaysia on Friday resumed the sale of flight and bus tickets to vaccinated travelers going to and from Singapore through a vaccinated travel lane that connects the neighboring Southeast Asian countries. The suspension began on Dec. 22 over concerns about Omicron. Travelers in the program will not have to quarantine but must be tested for the coronavirus six times after arrival.

• Hong Kong teachers and school staff members will be required to receive at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine to enter school premises starting Feb. 24, the authorities said on Thursday. Unvaccinated staff will also be barred from teaching online or off-campus when in-person classes are not suspended, and all staff directly employed by schools will need to receive second doses by April 21. Around two-thirds of people in the city of 7.5 million are fully vaccinated, a relatively low rate compared with that of many developed countries.

• India’s capital, New Delhi, is considering easing restrictions and Mumbai will open schools next week, as officials say the worst of the Omicron-fueled wave in major urban centers appears to be subsiding. India reported nearly 350,000 new Covid cases on Friday, but officials say they are heartened that the test positivity rate has started coming down in major cities and that hospitalization rates have remained drastically lower than the deadly second wave fueled by Delta in the spring. More than 65 percent of India’s adult population is fully vaccinated, while more than 90 percent has received at least one dose of a vaccine.

China has largely kept the coronavirus at bay since 2020, but officials there are going to ever more extreme lengths to quell outbreaks that have proliferated around the country in recent weeks.

A growing number of people are finding their lives suddenly upended as a result.

At least 20 million people in three cities were under full lockdown as recently as last week, and many more cities across the country have been subjected to partial lockdowns and mass testing. During the past month, at least 30 major Chinese cities have reported locally transmitted Covid cases.

The case numbers themselves are minuscule by global standards, and no Covid deaths have been reported in China’s current wave. On Friday, the health authorities reported a total of 23 new locally transmitted cases in five cities.

But many cases have involved the highly transmissible Omicron variant, and with each passing day, the government’s dogged pursuit of “zero Covid” is looking harder to achieve. Many wonder how long it can be maintained without causing widespread, lasting disruptions to China’s economy and society.

“At this point, it’s really almost like a last-ditch, or certainly very stubborn and persistent, effort to stave off the virus,” said Dali Yang, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago. “They are really stuck.”

The urgency to extinguish nascent outbreaks is now heightened because the Winter Olympics are set to open in Beijing in two weeks. As of Friday, 24 locally transmitted cases had been discovered in the city’s latest coronavirus wave.

An apologetic and teary-eyed Adele announced on Thursday that her forthcoming Las Vegas residency would be delayed, citing production problems and the toll of Covid-19.

The show, titled “Weekends With Adele,” was scheduled to open on Friday at the Colosseum at Caesars Palace, with two concerts weekly running through April 16.

“I’m so sorry but my show ain’t ready,” the singer, her voice trembling, said in a video posted to her social media channels. “We’ve tried absolutely everything that we can to put it together in time and for it to be good enough for you, but we’ve been absolutely destroyed by delivery delays and Covid — half my crew, half my team are down with Covid, they still are.”

The shows will be rescheduled, she said, describing herself as “gutted” and “really embarrassed.”

Adele’s latest album, “30,” was released in November and topped the Billboard chart for six straight weeks.

The recent surge in coronavirus cases has led to a number of concert cancellations, including Dead & Company’s playing in the Sand festival in Mexico, though festivals like Coachella and other high-profile tours are proceeding.