President Biden on Wednesday asked U.S. intelligence agencies to “redouble their efforts” to determine the origins of the coronavirus, saying in a statement that he was calling for a broad government report that incorporated findings from American labs and other federal agencies on whether the virus was accidentally leaked from a lab or transmitted by an animal to humans.
He asked intelligence officials to report back to him in 90 days on the results of their work and to keep Congress “fully apprised.”
Mr. Biden’s statement came as top health officials renewed their appeals this week for a more rigorous investigation into the origins of the virus, as the World Health Organization faced mounting criticism for an earlier report dismissing the possibility that it had accidentally escaped from a Chinese laboratory.
In his statement, Mr. Biden said that he had asked his national security adviser in March to task intelligence officials with a report on their latest analysis of the virus’s origins, which he said he received earlier this month before asking for “additional follow-up.” He said the intelligence community had “coalesced around two likely scenarios” but not definitively answered the question.
“Here is their current position: ‘while two elements in the IC leans toward the former scenario and one leans more toward the latter — each with low or moderate confidence — the majority of elements do not believe there is sufficient information to assess one to be more likely than the other,’” Mr. Biden said.
The calls from Mr. Biden and top American health officials were the latest in a series of White House demands in recent months that any such inquiry be free from Chinese interference. But they drew additional attention as some scientists have expressed a new openness to the idea of a lab accident and the W.H.O. grappled with how to respond.
Xavier Becerra, the U.S. health and human services secretary, said at an annual meeting of the W.H.O. on Tuesday that preparing for the next pandemic required a fuller study of the origins of this one.
“Phase two of the Covid origins study must be launched with terms of reference that are transparent, science-based and give international experts the independence to fully assess the source of the virus and the early days of the outbreak,” Mr. Becerra said.
Andy Slavitt, one of President Biden’s top coronavirus advisers, was more pointed in his criticisms of the W.H.O. and China. A joint W.H.O.-China inquiry whose findings were released in March dismissed as “extremely unlikely” the possibility that the virus had emerged accidentally from a laboratory.
“We need to get to the bottom of this and we need a completely transparent process from China,” Mr. Slavitt told reporters on Tuesday. “We need the W.H.O. to assist in that matter. We don’t feel like we have that now.”
Suggestions that the coronavirus may have been accidentally carried out of a laboratory in late 2019 in the Chinese city of Wuhan were largely drowned out last year by scientists’ accounts of its likely path from an animal host to humans in a natural setting.
Many scientists believe that a so-called spillover event remains the most plausible explanation for the pandemic. But the joint inquiry by the W.H.O. and China did not settle the matter: The Chinese government repeatedly tried to bend the investigation to its advantage, and Chinese scientists supplied all the research data used in the final report.
Dr. Francis Collins, the National Institutes of Health director, criticized the report while testifying to Senate lawmakers Wednesday on the agency’s budget.
“It is most likely that this is a virus that arose naturally. But we cannot exclude the possibility of some kind of a lab accident. That’s why we’ve advocated very strongly that W.H.O. needs to go back and try again after the first phase of their investigation really satisfied nobody,” Dr. Collins said. “And this time we need a really expert driven, no-holds-barred collection of information, which is how we’re mostly really going to find out what happened.”
Echoing his past comments, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s top expert on infectious diseases, agreed the virus was “most likely” naturally occurring. “But no one knows that 100 percent for sure,” he said at the same hearing. “And since there’s a lot of concern, a lot of speculation, and since no one absolutely knows that, I believe we do need the kind of investigation where there’s open transparency.”
In early March, a small group of scientists calling themselves the Paris group released an open letter calling for an inquiry separate from the team of independent experts sent to China as part of the W.H.O. investigation.
This month, a group of 18 scientists said in a letter published in the journal Science that there was not enough evidence to decide whether a natural origin or an accidental laboratory leak caused the Covid-19 pandemic.
After the findings of the joint inquiry by China and the W.H.O. were released in March, the director of the W.H.O., Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, conceded that the lab leak theory required further study, saying he did not believe that “this assessment was extensive enough.”
And countries including Australia, Germany and Japan have continued at this week’s W.H.O. meeting to call for firmer steps toward a more comprehensive investigation.
The official Covid-19 figures in India grossly understate the true scale of the pandemic in the country. Last week, India recorded the largest daily death toll for any country during the pandemic — a figure that is most likely still an undercount.
Even getting a clear picture of the total number of infections in India is hard because of poor record-keeping and a lack of widespread testing. Estimating the true number of deaths requires a second layer of extrapolation, depending on the share of those infected who end up dying.
In consultation with more than a dozen experts, The New York Times has analyzed case and death counts over time in India, along with the results of large-scale antibody tests, to arrive at several possible estimates for the true scale of devastation in the country.
Even in the least dire of these, estimated infections and deaths far exceed official figures. More pessimistic ones show a toll on the order of millions of deaths — the most catastrophic loss anywhere in the world.
India’s official coronavirus statistics report about 27 million cases and over 300,000 deaths as of Tuesday. The country’s response to the pandemic has been further complicated this week by a cyclone that is battering India’s eastern coast, with winds of more than 95 miles per hour.
Even in countries with robust surveillance during the pandemic, the number of infections is probably much higher than the number of confirmed cases, because many people have contracted the virus but have not been tested for it. On Friday, a report by the World Health Organization estimated that the global death toll of Covid-19 may be two or three times higher than reported.
The undercount of cases and deaths in India is most likely even more pronounced, for technical, cultural and logistical reasons. Because hospitals are overwhelmed, many Covid deaths occur at home, especially in rural areas, and are omitted from the official count, said Kayoko Shioda, an epidemiologist at Emory University. Laboratories that could confirm the cause of death are equally swamped, she said.
Additionally, other researchers have found, there are few Covid tests available. Families are often unwilling to say that their loved ones have died of Covid. And the system for keeping vital records in India is shaky at best. Even before Covid-19, about four out of five deaths in India were not medically investigated.
Dominic Cummings, the former top aide to Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain, on Wednesday painted a picture of chaos, incompetence and confusion at the heart of the government in a ferociously critical account of its early handling of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Testifying before lawmakers, Mr. Cummings — who had a spectacular falling-out with Mr. Johnson last year — said that Britain’s political leadership had failed by delaying its first lockdown. He also said that the health secretary, Matt Hancock, should have been fired for lying and that Mr. Johnson had initially regarded Covid-19 as a “scare story.”
With its promise of juicy details about an alliance gone bad, the testimony had been expected to be political theater of a rare vintage.
“Dominic Cummings has long been known as a man who brings a bazooka to a knife fight,” said Matthew Goodwin, a professor of politics at the University of Kent, said before the former adviser spoke. “I suspect he shall not walk quietly into the night.”
Mr. Cummings, whom Mr. Johnson fired in November, acknowledged his own errors in failing to advise the prime minister to lock down the country earlier than he did, in March of last year.
“Yes, it was a huge failing of mine,” Mr. Cummings told a joint meeting of Parliament’s Science and Technology Committee and Health and Social Care Committees. “I bitterly regret that I did not hit the emergency panic button earlier than I did.”
In addition to attacking Mr. Hancock, Mr. Cummings criticized Mr. Johnson; the prime minster’s fiancée, Carrie Symonds; and Mark Sedwill, who was the country’s most powerful civil servant before stepping down last year.
Mr. Johnson initially likened Covid-19 to swine flu and joked that he would be injected with the virus on television to reassure the people of Britain. Mr. Cummings said on Wednesday that the prime minister was initially more worried about the virus’s effect on the economy than the impact on public health.
Speaking in Parliament, Mr. Johnson said on Wednesday that the pandemic had created a situation that had been “appallingly difficult” to deal with but insisted that he had made decisions in the country’s best interests.
Mr. Cummings compared the situation in Downing Street to a scene in the science-fiction movie “Independence Day” in which the United States president is told that aliens have landed, a scenario for which there was no plan.
The former adviser told the hearing that Mr. Sedwill, then the cabinet secretary, had suggested that Britons should be encouraged to spread the coronavirus to provide immunity, comparing it to chickenpox.
Asked on Wednesday about whether the government’s policy had been to achieve “herd immunity” in the population, Mr. Cummings said that while it was not an objective, it had been seen as “an inevitability.”
He also described the secrecy surrounding the government’s main scientific advisory committee as a “catastrophic mistake,” saying that it meant there was insufficient scrutiny of the group’s deliberations.
Lawyers representing the European Union said on Wednesday that they would seek penalties from AstraZeneca that could run into the billions of euros if the pharmaceutical company fails to deliver tens of millions of doses of Covid-19 vaccine that it is contractually required to supply.
In the first hearing in a lawsuit that the E.U. has brought against AstraZeneca, lawyers representing the bloc told the judges in a Brussels courtroom that they would seek €10 (about $12) a dose for each day that delivery is delayed, along with €10 million a day for each of four alleged breaches of contract.
The bloc is demanding 90 million doses from the company by the end of June, and another 180 million by the end of September. The proposed penalties, if accepted by the judge, would begin on July 1 and could quickly balloon into billions of euros.
The proposed penalty is much higher than the purchase price of the vaccine. The European Union has paid a little over €2 a dose, which AstraZeneca sold at cost when it was first introduced.
A European Commission spokesman on health issues, Stefan De Keersmaecker, said that the lawsuit’s prime goal was to get AstraZeneca to deliver the doses, not to extract money from the company. If the doses are delivered, he said, the demand for penalties would be dropped.
Rafael Jafferali, a lawyer representing the bloc, said AstraZeneca “diverted” millions of doses from plants that were supposed to produce vaccines for the bloc and shipped the doses to other countries instead, including Britain — actions that Mr. Jafferali called a “flagrant breach of contract.”
He accused the company, which is based in Britain and Sweden, of misleading the European Commission for months with “calm and reassuring” messages that it would be able to fulfill its delivery promises.
Fanny Laune, another lawyer representing the European Commission, said that because of delays in AstraZeneca’s deliveries, “millions” of people in Europe would be deprived of vaccine protection, contract Covid-19 and possibly die.
“We need to vaccinate a lot, and we need to vaccinate quickly, to bring the mortality down,” Ms. Laune said.
AstraZeneca’s lawyers hit back at the Commission, calling the accusations “shocking.”
“Our fundamental principle is equitable global access to vaccines,” said Hakim Boularbah of Loyen & Loeff, a firm representing AstraZeneca. “The urgency is to vaccinate the whole global population.”
Developing and mass-producing a new vaccine in so short a time had never been done before, so the supply plan in the contract was “an estimate,” and was not binding, AstraZeneca’s lawyers argued. They said the company had no obligation to use all its production facilities to supply the European Union in preference over other countries.
AstraZeneca, they said, was “fully transparent” with the European Commission in late 2020, keeping the commission informed of expected delays because of production problems. The lawyers said the commission was now trying to “unilaterally rewrite” its contract with AstraZeneca by imposing new delivery deadlines.
The litigation between the pharmaceutical company and one of its biggest customers has damaged the reputations of both sides.
AstraZeneca has drawn much of the blame for the European Union’s slow vaccination start, with shortages of doses delaying the rollout in many member countries. The company has said production problems were to blame.
The bloc’s vaccination efforts have gained pace in recent weeks, and now appear to be on track to get at least one dose to 70 percent of its adult population by the end of June.
The Brussels court is expected to issue an emergency ruling on part of the lawsuit within a month. Under Belgian law, a separate lawsuit over damages would be tried in September.
As Memorial Day weekend approaches, the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention offered a hopeful message mixed with caution on Tuesday for Americans planning to celebrate the traditional beginning of summer with friends and family.
“If you are vaccinated, you are protected, and you can enjoy your Memorial Day,” the C.D.C. director, Dr. Rochelle P. Walensky, said during a White House news conference. “If you are not vaccinated, our guidance has not changed for you, you remain at risk of infection. You still need to mask and take other precautions.”
The holiday weekend comes amid a national decline in coronavirus cases, hospitalizations and deaths. All across the country, mask mandates are easing, restrictions are lifting and many states have gone back to business as usual.
After countless traditional Memorial Day events and other first rites of summer were canceled last year because of the pandemic, vaccinated Americans may be looking forward to crowded beaches and packed backyard barbecues, getting back to what Dr. Walensky described as “something closer to normal.”
As of Tuesday, 50 percent of those 18 or older in the U.S. were reported as fully vaccinated, according to data from the C.D.C. More than 61 percent of adults have received at least one shot, though the pace has been slowing. President Biden set a goal on May 4 of at least partly vaccinating 70 percent of adults by July 4 as the administration has shifted its strategy in order to reach those who may still not have gotten shots.
But Dr. Walensky also urged those who remain unvaccinated to add a new activity to their Memorial Day rituals. “I want to encourage you to take this holiday weekend to give yourself and your family the gift of protection by getting vaccinated,” she said. “We are on a good downward path, but we are not quite out of the woods yet.”
Dr. Walensky’s remarks come after the C.D.C. said this month that it was no longer necessary for fully vaccinated people to mask or maintain social distance in many settings. The change was a major step for the federal government toward coaxing Americans closer to a post-pandemic world, even as the spread of the virus persists the globe.
And as U.S. states and retailers gradually began adopting the guidance, being able to distinguish who was vaccinated or who was not essentially turned into an honor system that relies on unvaccinated people keeping their masks on in public.
Vaccination requirements have become a cultural flash point as the shots become more accessible.
Republican governors in Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Montana and Texas have denounced vaccine passports, or digital proof of vaccination, and have issued executive orders restricting their use. On Tuesday, Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia signed an executive order that prohibits state agencies from using a vaccine passport program or requiring proof that people have been vaccinated against Covid-19.
It is a question that people around the world are asking, the one for which millions have an opinion but no one has an answer: Will the Tokyo Olympics happen this summer?
The organizers of the Tokyo Olympics said last week that they had entered what they called “operational delivery mode” for the Summer Games, another clear signal that they will plow ahead toward the opening ceremony, scheduled for July 23, regardless of the state of the pandemic.
Yet widely documented polling in Japan shows that most of the country’s population wants the Olympics to be either postponed again or canceled outright. The United States Department of State this week issued a Level 4 travel advisory for Japan — “Do not travel.” And members of the global health community, prominent business leaders and at least one key Olympic partner continue to voice concerns about the dangers posed by proceeding with the Games.
One of the latest warnings came Tuesday in an article published by the New England Journal of Medicine, in which public health specialists criticized the International Olympic Committee’s so-called playbooks. The packets, created in consultation with the World Health Organization, detail measures designed to keep athletes, other Olympic visitors and the broader Japanese population safe from the virus.
As Puerto Rico recovers from a spring coronavirus surge and cases decline, the U.S. territory is steadily relaxing pandemic restrictions, including lifting a nightly curfew that was in effect since March 2020.
The island is taking a big step toward returning to normal not long after experiencing its worst outbreak. Toward the end of April, Puerto Rico was reporting over 1,000 cases a day, up from about 200 new daily cases in mid-March.
Since then, its case numbers have drastically decreased, as they have around the United States with the steady advance of vaccinations, which Dr. Carlos Mellado López, the head of Puerto Rico’s Department of Health, credited for the turnaround. Puerto Rico is averaging 146 new coronavirus cases daily over the past seven days, an almost 60 percent decrease over the past two weeks, according to a New York Times database. Just over 30 percent of the island’s population has been fully vaccinated and 45 percent has been given at least one vaccination, numbers that lag behind the U.S. averages of 39 and 49 percent, respectively.
The easing of restrictions took effect over the past two days, starting with the end of the 10 p.m. to 5 a.m. curfew on Monday. Another change affects fully vaccinated travelers on domestic flights, who no longer need to present a negative coronavirus test before entry and instead must present proof of vaccination, such as a vaccine card.
Puerto Rico will offer the Johnson & Johnson vaccine to any visitors who arrive at the Luis Muñoz Marín International Airport in San Juan, starting Friday, according to The Associated Press. Other changes include increased capacities for businesses from 30 percent to 50 percent, a reopening of the island’s stadiums at 30 percent capacity and a lifting of mask requirements for fully vaccinated people at parks and beaches.
On the mainland, state governments have been rapidly loosening restrictions. Louisiana’s governor said on Tuesday that the state would remove capacity restrictions for businesses and a mandate requiring students to wear masks at schools, starting next school year. New Jersey’s governor said on Monday that fully vaccinated people would no longer have to wear masks indoors. In Hawaii, Gov. David Ige said on Tuesday that all people, vaccinated and unvaccinated, would no longer have to wear masks outdoors.
In Puerto Rico, experts say many factors led to the island’s spring surge, including the arrival of coronavirus variants, a return to in-person work and dining, tourists flocking to the island for spring break season and gatherings to celebrate Holy Week. As cases soared, worries simmered over hospital bed capacity and the dearth of medical professionals needed to address a swell in sickness.
William Shakespeare, the man with a famous name who inspired headline writers across Britain last year when he became the second person in the country to receive a coronavirus vaccine, has died after suffering a stroke, his family said in a statement. He was 81.
Since Mr. Shakespeare was vaccinated on Dec. 8 at University Hospital, Coventry, in central England, 57 percent of Britain’s population has received at least one dose of a coronavirus vaccine, one of the highest vaccination rates in the world.
On Tuesday, people older than 30 in Britain became eligible to receive a vaccine.
In a statement released through the hospital where Mr. Shakespeare was vaccinated, his wife of 53 years, Joy, said he had been grateful for becoming one of the first people to be vaccinated against the coronavirus.
“It was something he was hugely proud of,” she said. “He loved seeing the media coverage and the positive difference he was able to make to the lives of so many.”
“He often talked to people about it and would always encourage everyone to get their vaccine whenever he could,” she said.
Mr. Shakespeare died on Thursday at the hospital where he had been vaccinated, and where he had been hospitalized last year after suffering a stroke.
Mr. Shakespeare received his first dose shortly after Margaret Keenan, then 90, became the first person in Britain to be vaccinated and the first in the world to receive a clinically authorized, fully tested coronavirus vaccine.
Their vaccinations brought a sense of optimism to Britain: “If I can have it at 90 then you can have it, too!” Ms. Keenan said at the time.
At least 127,000 people have died of the coronavirus in Britain, according to a New York Times database, the world’s fifth-highest known death toll.
The other William Shakespeare, the playwright and poet who died in 1616, also has a connection to the coronavirus pandemic: The section of Westminster Abbey in London that includes Poet’s Corner, which has a monument to him, was used as a vaccination center this spring. (He is not buried there, as an earlier version of this item said.)
The family of the modern Mr. Shakespeare said he would be remembered for much more than sharing a name with one of England’s most famous historical figures. He was an amateur photographer and jazz aficionado, a parish councilor and an official at local schools for more than two decades.
A local councilor and friend of Mr. Shakespeare’s, Jayne Innes, said on Twitter, “Bill will be remembered for many things, including a taste for mischief.”
“Bill loved meeting people and helping them in any way possible,” Ms. Shakespeare said. “Most of all he was a wonderful husband, father and grandfather.”
Singapore has provisionally approved a breathalyzer test that its makers say can detect Covid-19 within 60 seconds, and which the government hopes will speed the rate at which diagnoses can be made.
The breathalyzer was developed by Breathatonix, a company with ties to the National University of Singapore. It will be used to screen arriving travelers at a border checkpoint in the Southeast Asian nation, the company said in a statement on Monday.
Breathalyzer tests are commonly used to test the blood alcohol content in drivers suspected of driving while drunk, and are increasingly being developed to detect diseases. The Breathatonix test analyzes the volatile organic compounds in a person’s breath. People who test positive will be required to take a polymerase chain reaction, or P.C.R., test as confirmation.
Breathatonix said it had conducted clinical trials between June 2020 and April 2021 at in Singapore at the National Centre for Infectious Diseases and Changi Airport and in Dubai at the Dubai Health Authority and the Mohammed Bin Rashid University of Medicine and Health Sciences. The company said in a statement in October that the technology had achieved 90 percent accuracy in a trial.
After the European Union’s announcement on May 19 that vaccinated travelers coming from the United States can soon visit the bloc’s member nations, the Louvre and Sicily’s beaches once again feel within reach. Here are some things to keep in mind.
Because the United States remains closed off to international leisure travelers, aviation industry experts say there won’t be enough planes flying to cause a huge surge in Europe-bound flights from the United States.
Flight schedules are almost certain to change as summer rolls on. But John Grant, a senior aviation analyst at OAG, a travel data and insight provider, suggests that prospective passengers “look first at travel to those cities with a high frequency of service, perhaps at least twice daily, since those destinations with just one daily flight or less than daily services are likely to be the more vulnerable services for short notice cancellations.”
When booking a hotel, one thing to watch for is the credits-versus-refunds flash point: Although vaccines and the eagerness to travel may make the idea of a credit less odious than it seemed last spring, always ask about policy specifics.
And realize that any trip to Europe this summer will come down to managing expectations.
“Save the ‘must check all the boxes’ trip to Europe for a bit later, once all new protocol kinks have smoothed out,” said Louisa Gehring, the owner of Gehring Travel.
When police officers from India’s elite antiterrorism unit descended on the New Delhi offices of Twitter on Monday night, the visit sent a clear message: India’s powerful governing party is becoming increasingly upset with the social media giant because of the perception that it has sided with critics of the government.
With anger growing across the country over India’s stumbling response to the pandemic, people are turning to Twitter to broadcast their complaints, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party have struggled to control the narrative of how the crisis is being handled.
As a result, top Indian political leaders have applied increasing pressure on Twitter, as well as on Facebook and other social media platforms. This month, the government ordered social media platforms including Twitter to take down dozens of posts critical of the government’s handling of the pandemic.
The action on Monday was mostly symbolic: Twitter’s offices were closed because of India’s devastating coronavirus outbreak. The police acknowledged that they were there not to make arrests, but merely to deliver a notice disputing a warning label that Twitter had placed on some tweets by senior members of the ruling party.
“Regardless of the clumsy manner in which it was conducted, this raid is an escalation in the stifling of domestic criticism in India,” said Gilles Verniers, a professor of political science at Ashoka University near New Delhi.
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