(NEW YORK) — Labor unions reached their highest level of approval in the U.S. since 1965, according to a new Gallup poll.
Seventy-one percent of poll respondents said they approve of such organizations, up from 68% last year. Prior to the pandemic, 64% of poll respondents said they approved of unions.
Support for unions peaked in the 1950s, when three in four Americans said they approved of unions, Gallup data showed.
The increase in support for labor unions arrives amid a surge of labor activity nationwide. Petitions for union elections increased 57% over the first six months of fiscal year 2022, which ended on March 31, compared with the same six-month period a year prior, the National Labor Relations Board said in April.
Union victories at high-profile companies like Starbucks and Amazon in recent months have drawn heightened public attention to labor campaigns.
Since an initial union drive at a Starbucks store in Buffalo, New York, in December, 232 additional company locations have voted to unionize, the NLRB said on Monday. Over that period, 47 stores have voted against a union, the agency said.
Meanwhile, in April, a worker-led labor organization won the first-ever U.S. union at a 6,000-employee Amazon warehouse on Staten Island, New York.
Even as approval for unions has increased in recent years, the union membership rate has dropped to a historic low.
Last year, the union membership rate fell to 10.3%, which amounted to 14 million members, according to data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The rate had dropped from 10.8% in 2020, the BLS found.
By comparison, the union membership rate stood at 20.1% in 1983, the first year for which comparable data was collected, the BLS said. That membership rate amounted to 17.7 million workers who belonged to a union.
The Gallup poll released on Tuesday reinforced the finding that the vast majority of Americans have foregone union membership. Eighty-four percent of respondents said they do not belong to unions, the poll showed.
There appears to be an opportunity for union growth, however. Roughly one in 10 nonunion workers said they’re “extremely interested” in joining a union, according to a separate Gallup poll conducted in June.
Fifty-eight percent of respondents, however, said they’re not interested at all in joining a union.
Some economists have attributed a surge in union activity in recent months to a tight labor market in which employers are eager to hire, thereby affording leverage to workers.
The U.S. economy added a robust 528,000 jobs last month, while the unemployment rate fell to 3.5%, matching its lowest level in 50 years.
(NEW YORK) — At least two people have died amid severe storms in the Midwest.
In Michigan, a 14-year-old girl was electrocuted and killed on Monday when an electrical line fell during a thunderstorm, according to the Monroe Public Safety Department. She was walking with a friend in her backyard and reached for what she thought was a stick, but it was the charged electrical line, authorities said.
And in Toledo, Ohio, a woman was killed when a tree fell on her, fire officials said, according to ABC affiliate WTVG-TV.
More than 250,000 customers were without power across Michigan, Illinois and Indiana as the storms rolled through Monday.
That cold front is now moving to the East Coast on Tuesday, bringing strong storms from Virginia to Maine. Damaging winds will be the biggest threat.
(NEW YORK) — Uber is rolling out new safety features that will allow users to talk to a live safety agent and text 911 operators in the case of emergency.
Rebeca Payne, the lead project manager on Uber’s safety team, told ABC News about how, according to the popular ride-sharing platform, some of the features can help riders feel more comfortable and can give more access to emergency services. One feature, which Uber says will be rolled out to more than half of the country, including New York City and California, will allow users to text 911 operators for immediate emergency response.
Payne said about 55% of the U.S. will be able to use it.
“Text-to-911 is something that we started testing in 2019 in the counties that allowed for texting to their 911 call centers,” Payne said. “And so with this announcement, we are now expanding that to all of the counties that have this technology available now.”
When riders use the text-to-911 feature in the app, it will generate a prewritten message including information about the trip, such as the vehicle information and location. Payne said it’s a good way for users to “discreetly” get emergency help.
Another new feature, called “live help,” will let riders, drivers and couriers speak to a safety agent through a partnership with the security company ADT. Riders can send a message through the Uber app and receive a call or text with a trained safety agent, according to Uber. Users can then stay on the phone with that agent until they feel comfortable or until their ride ends.
“They can use that for any situation that isn’t yet escalating to the need of getting police or other emergency services like fire department or ambulance, but they may feel unsafe or uncomfortable and need someone to talk them through a situation,” Payne said.
She said that user response to the feature, which was piloted in nine U.S. cities at the end of last year, has been “overwhelmingly positive.”
The features have been added to the app’s safety toolkit, which was introduced in 2018.
In Uber’s most recent safety report, the company reported that 99.9% of the average of nearly three million rides per day had no reports of safety incidents, including car accidents, physical assaults or sexual assaults.
But the report also found that in 2019 and 2020, the company reported 3,824 sexual assault incidents. Uber reported similar rates of such incidents in previous years.
For access to the new safety features, users need to update their Uber apps. Payne said she recommends users also explore the safety toolkit in the app.
(WASHINGTON) — As some federal student loan borrowers across the country prepare to see their loans wiped out following President Joe Biden’s debt cancellation plan, some borrowers may be wondering if the effort holds up legally.
The legality of Biden’s plan largely depends on who you ask. However, the Biden administration has vehemently defended canceling student loan debt for 20 million people and that the move is legally justified.
For the remaining 55%, Biden’s plan will offer more relaxed terms for loan repayment, according to the Biden administration. Those terms include cutting the amount that borrowers have to pay each month in half — from 10% to 5% of discretionary income — as well as covering borrowers’ unpaid monthly interest, among other efforts.
“The Department of Justice, Office of Legal Counsel and the general counsel’s office of the Department of Education have looked at the text of the statute and belief that the action that the Secretary took, the administration took here is legally justified,” National Economic Council Deputy Director Bharat Ramamurti said during a press briefing Friday.
“The president was clear from the beginning that he did not want to move forward on this unless it was clear that it was legally available to him,” Ramamurti said. “… One of the first things that he did when he came to office was ask for that legal opinion.”
The Department of Education, alongside the Department of Justice, released a legal opinion last Tuesday in defense of the groundbreaking administrative move, citing the HEROES Act.
The act provides the Secretary of Education broad authority to grant relief from student loan requirements during specific periods — such as the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic — for particular purposes, like addressing financial harms of wars or national emergencies.
“The Secretary of Education has used this authority, under both this and every prior administration since the Act’s passage, to provide relief to borrowers in connection with a war, other military operation, or national emergency, including the ongoing moratorium on student loan payments and interest,” the opinion reads.
The White House has repeatedly faced questions concerning the future of Biden’s plan in court, during a Friday press conference where officials said they expect legal challenges.
A June decision against the Environmental Protection Agency from the Supreme Court cited the “major questions doctrine,” which requires Congress to clearly and explicitly grant agencies the authority to employ extraordinary actions. He says this strategy may be used to jeopardize Biden’s plan.
“Recent rulings from the Supreme Court suggest that at least some of the justices on the current court could view sweeping executive action like this as running afoul of congressional intent,” Adam S. Minsky, a student loan attorney, told ABC News. “But this is not necessarily the same type of case that was recently decided.”
“It’s going to be up to the courts to decide whether those are valid claims or not, but we believe that we’re on very strong legal grounds,” Ramamurti said.
Jed Shugerman, a professor at Fordham Law, said he doesn’t see the order “surviving a legal challenge.”
“My bottom line is that if the Biden administration wants to prevail in an inevitable legal challenge, it needs to switch to the more appropriate statute as the legal basis for this policy (under the Higher Education Act of 1965) or significantly narrow its policy for specific COVID relief claims (and even then, it would be vulnerable),” Shugerman told ABC News.
Minksy said this is uncharted territory, adding that both Biden and former President Donald Trump have used the HEROES Act to pause federal loan payments, interest, and collection since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Biden’s plan will erase at least $10,000 in federal student loan debt for Americans who made less than $125,000 per year in the 2020 or 2021 tax year, or less than $250,000 as a household.
For Americans under that same income bracket who took out Pell grants to pay for college, it would erase up to $20,000.
It is unclear when borrowers will see a change in their account balance. The White House says the applications for student debt relief will be launched by early October, with relief beginning to reach borrowers by early to mid-November.
(WASHINGTON) — In Colorado, supporters of Donald Trump seeking evidence of 2020 election fraud have flooded some county offices with so many records requests that officials say they have been unable to perform their primary duties.
In Nevada, some election workers have been followed to their cars and harassed with threats.
And in Philadelphia, concerns about the potential for violence around Election Day have prompted officials to install bulletproof glass at their ballot-processing center.
With 10 weeks to go until the 2022 midterms, dozens of state and local officials across the country tell ABC News that preparations for the election are being hampered by onerous public information requests, ongoing threats against election workers and dangerous misinformation campaigns being waged by activists still intent on contesting the 2020 presidential election.
The efforts, many of which are being coordinated at both the national and local level, range from confronting election officials at local government meetings to training volunteers to challenge the vote-counting process on Election Day, according to election officials.
Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon told ABC News he’s concerned that the efforts are a reflection of the prevailing attitude among 2020 election deniers that “the folks running elections in this county or this city are up to no good.”
‘A weaponized tool’
Election officials said that records requests, which are designed under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to make the vote-tallying process transparent to the public, have increasingly been used by election deniers to disrupt the system.
At the “Moment of Truth Summit,” a two-day meeting of election deniers hosted by MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell last week in Springfield, Missouri, activists instructed attendees on how to request election-related records, and pointed them to templates to make it easier to submit the forms.
“Save your county! Get your cast vote records now!” was one of the calls to action, urging supporters to request ballot logs containing information on each ballot cast. One speaker boasted about his efforts, saying, “I have one of the best groups of followers in the world … and I basically set them out to start making public records requests everywhere for this information. And lo and behold, over time and working together, they managed to get hundreds and hundreds of these records.”
In Wisconsin, Dane County Clerk Scott McDonell told ABC News that just days after the summit, a Wisconsin activist filed one of those very requests — a lengthy inquiry that not only sought specific and detailed information, but offered guidance on how local officials should retrieve the data. McDonell said he’s received as many as 50 of these kinds of requests over a two-day period.
Elizabeth Howard, senior counsel in the Elections and Government Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan think tank that tracks election rules, said it smacks of a coordinated effort.
“Election officials are clearly getting, like, a copy-and paste-job of a FOIA request from some centralized entity,” she said. “They can see in the FOIA request because it’ll be bracket, insert county here, close bracket — and the requestor doesn’t insert the name of the county.”
Election officials said many of the onerous requests seek ballot records, information on voting machines, and even the personal information of election workers — which election offices will not provide.
“They have become a weaponized tool against us to keep us from being able to do our job,” said Trudy Hancock, president of the Texas Association of Elections Administrators.
Marc Early, the supervisor of elections in the state of Florida, said that all the requests are making it harder to prepare the state for the upcoming midterms.
“We are under obligation to respond to these records requests in a very proactive way — but the volume and the nature of these requests are such that it’s difficult to just keep track of it all,” Early said. “And it’s become a big problem, because we have elections to conduct but we also have our obligations … to take these requests seriously. And we are, but it’s a difficult environment to live under.”
In Michigan, election officials have found themselves facing accusations from a one-time state officeholder. The clerk for Michigan’s Canton Township told ABC News that former state Sen. Patrick Colbeck has inundated the township with so many records requests that the clerk invited Colbeck to his office to let him see the township’s election management system in action, in the hope that Colbeck’s concerns about voter fraud would be assuaged.
“We have spent hours with him,” clerk Michael Siegrist said of Colbeck.
But the visit didn’t satisfy Colbeck, who Siegrist said is now asking the Michigan township to release the election management system’s programming files — something officials say they can’t do.
Such files are “not subject to public disclosure under the FOIA laws in Michigan, because they are both proprietary and a blueprint for election programming, and if they were distributed could result in individuals having a resource to hack future elections,” said Siegrist.
Colbeck, however, told ABC News the information he is seeking is not programming data, but timestamp information associated with cast vote records already provided by the township.
“This timestamp data would be very useful in an analysis of cast vote data,” he said, adding that “the election results database and associated log files created by the Dominion Election Management System software are not examples of source code any more than a MS Word document created by the MS Word application is source code.”
Colbeck called the disagreement “but one example of concerted statewide obstruction regarding FOIA requests.”
The township said it was still working through its backlog of records requests — eight of which have come from Colbeck alone.
‘Let your voices be heard’
Officials in Washoe County, Nevada, have also been flooded with records and information requests that they describe as “numerous” and “onerous.” But their election workers have also been the targets of threats and harassment.
Election workers have been followed to their cars and threatened with rhetoric like “Traitors are dealt with,” county spokesperson Bethany Drysdale told ABC News.
By mid-June, shortly after the Nevada primaries, Drysdale says the harassment had become so severe that the Washoe County voter registrar resigned their position, prompting the Washoe County Commission to propose a support plan to help county employees that “are unfairly publicly attacked, harassed, or disparaged by members of the public or by political organizations.”
That effort was assailed by members of the Republican Women of Reno, who in an online post asked, “Is it 1984 in Washoe County?” The organization, which has been leading local election challenge efforts and training poll watchers, urged others to “show up and let your voices be heard” at county commission meetings.
In Pennsylvania, Philadelphia officials are so concerned that they have installed bulletproof glass at their ballot-processing center ahead of the midterm elections.
In Otero County, New Mexico, David Clements, a former college professor who gained national prominence for pushing baseless claims of voter fraud, has been attending town hall meetings and confronting officials about the 2020 election.
“We want to let you know that this issue isn’t going to go away,” Clements said at a county commissioner meeting last week. “In fact, I’ll be here every two weeks, no matter how futile you think this exercise is.”
Clements, who was suspended last year from New Mexico State University, has traveled across the country to advocate for audits of the 2020 election. A week after speaking at Lindell’s “Moment of Truth Summit,” he was back in New Mexico, where he was escorted out of a Doña Ana County commission meeting after pressing the commissioners to investigate election-related claims.
“This has been brought up multiple times and there’s just no fact to it,” a commissioner told Clements.
At the Doña Ana meeting, Clements also publicly asked for the resignation of county clerk Amanda Lopez Askin.
“It was almost a joke to me,” Askin told ABC News. “I’m serving my community, and then you have 50,000 people that voted for me. All he does is feed my determination.”
Askin has had to report several death threats to the FBI, and she said the vitriol she’s receiving from election denial groups is becoming the new normal.
“It’s disheartening, and the thing that they don’t realize is, I’m a fellow New Mexican,” she said. “I was born and raised here, and I’m more against voter fraud than anyone.”
“It’s unfortunate he’s harassing public forums and public officials with baseless lies,” Alex Curtas, director of communications for the New Mexico secretary of state, said of Clements.
Contacted by ABC News for comment, Clements replied with a list of poll results from the conservative polling company Rasmussen Reports showing the percentage of likely voters who believe cheating affected the results of the 2020 election, and other related statistics.
‘A different level of intensity’
Back in Washoe County, Nevada, officials say election deniers have also spread dangerous misinformation — such as when one activist posted a clip from the election office’s livestream and questioned what an election worker was doing with their computer.
“When they posted the video, they said, ‘What is he doing? Look at him, he looks shifty. Look at him, he must be up to something,'” said Drysdale, the county spokesperson. “And that kind of caught fire.”
The employee was actually just shutting down a computer at the end of the day, Drysdale said.
“Misinformation yields threats against election officials that make it a lot more difficult to do our job, whether those threats be violent in form or whether they be harassment,” said Michigan Secretary of State Joselyn Benson.
In Maine, a local election denier transformed a former movie theater into a “Constitutional Hall” to hold so-called “election integrity” events and poll watcher trainings. The events have resulted in an increase in “requests for information about things that don’t exist,” according to the Maine secretary of state.
“To the election deniers who are hosting phony training, filling our citizenry with misinformation and disinformation, I would say our elections are free, fair, and secure,” Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows told ABC News.
Officials in other states, including Missouri, Indiana, Colorado and Kansas, told ABC News they were concerned about election deniers being trained as poll workers.
“This is a different level of intensity that I was not expecting,” said a Johnson County, Kansas, election commissioner.
A report released two weeks ago by the U.S. House Oversight and Reform Committee said election officials are facing unprecedented challenges.
“These new pressures on election officials make their core job of running elections far more difficult by draining already scarce resources and undermining public confidence in election processes,” the report said.
(WASHINGTON) — With the primaries nearly all finished, it will soon be time for the general election debates — except there may not be all that many debates to tune into.
Across nine key battleground states, five debates for major offices have so far been confirmed for the fall, according to an ABC News count.
A bulk of the resistance is coming from Republican candidates who, they say, wish to debate on their own terms. While that’s not a stunning split from cycles past — for example, Trump’s team in 2020 tried to make demands of what the final presidential debate covered — it’s more than possible that in at least a handful of races pivotal to who holds the balance of power in Washington, such efforts will lead to no formal TV debates at all this fall.
Few swing states have confirmed events on the calendar. In Texas, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott and Democratic challenger Beto O’Rourke will debate at the end of September in the Rio Grande Valley.
In Florida, potential face-offs are anticipated, but not certain. The Sunshine State hosted two gubernatorial debates in 2018 and while there’s been no official word if the candidates have agreed to debate this year, host group “Before You Vote” has begun marketing events in the contests for both governor and senator.
From there, the logistics become more contentious.
Here’s the breakdown in major battlegrounds:
Arizona
Arizona Republicans Kari Lake and Blake Masters — gubernatorial and Senate hopefuls, respectively — have deployed a campaign strategy to paint their opponents, Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs and Sen. Mark Kelly, as having something to hide in lieu of debate RSVPs, while the Democrats’ teams say they’re negotiating terms with the Citizens Clean Elections Commission, the leading group in the state for the last 20 years. The commission has asked for RSVPs by the end of the week.
So far, only in the Arizona secretary of state race have both candidates, Republican Mark Finchem and Democrat Adrian Fontes, committed to debating.
Lake formally committed to debating Hobbs on Wed., Oct. 12, after taunting her in a viral Twitter video while Hobbs’ team told ABC they “would like to participate” but “are asking them for some format tweaks.” Masters has used a similar strategy to Lake, challenging Kelly over Twitter to four debates — but so far only committing himself to one, on Thursday, Oct. 6, which Kelly’s team says they’re also planning to attend “pending some final discussions with the hosts.”
The debate for Arizona attorney general is being rescheduled from Aug. 29 to Sept. 28. In response to questions from ABC News, Hamadeh’s team said they were working with the clean elections commission to secure a date that worked for both parties, which the commission confirmed. Democrat Kris Mayes committed to the original date weeks ago.
Pennsylvania
Another state rife with squabbles is Pennsylvania. This month, Dr. Mehmet Oz, the Senate Republican nominee, released a list of five debates he has agreed to attend and called upon his opponent, Democratic Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, to disclose whether or not he will participate. Fetterman’s team has been mostly silent: The candidate, who has been recovering from a stroke he suffered in May, did not answer questions after a recent event in Pittsburgh but a spokesman, Joe Calvello, told reporters, “We are up for debating Oz.”
During the Democratic primary, Fetterman called debates “an important part of history” and that “voters deserve no fewer than three network televised debates.”
In late July, a local Pittsburgh station KDKA-TV invited the candidates to a debate it plans to host on Sep. 6 but has heard back from only the Oz campaign, an editor at the station told ABC News. By comparison, the candidates for Senate in the Keystone State debated twice in 2018.
Meanwhile, Doug Mastriano, the Republican state senator running for Pennsylvania governor, last week proposed rules that would ban news outlets from holding exclusive broadcast rights over debates with his opponent, Democratic Attorney General Josh Shapiro, and would let each candidate choose a moderator. A Shapiro spokesman called the proposal “a stunt” and an excuse to avoid questions by the far-right Mastriano, who has shunned nearly all traditional media while he pivots his campaign message away from the hardline stances he took during the primary — instead, for example, focusing on inflation and economic worries.
No debates have been announced publicly.
Ohio
Ohio Republican Senate nominee JD Vance did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the status of his plans for general election debates. His Democratic challenger Rep. Tim Ryan’s campaign has agreed to three televised conversations.
“It’s well past time for JD Vance to venture out from his San Francisco mansion, pay Ohio a visit, and actually speak directly to the people he says he wants to represent. And once JD agrees to these three debates, Tim Ryan will debate JD any other time and place,” Ryan’s campaign director, Dave Chase, told ABC News.
Georgia
Another push-and-pull is in Georgia, where Herschel Walker, the Republican Senate candidate, has agreed to take part in a debate on Oct. 14. That agreement comes after pressure from his opponent, Sen. Rev. Raphael Warnock, who accused him of dodging debates in a campaign ad released last month.
However, the debate Walker is proposing to have is not one of the ones that Warnock had already agreed to: Warnock previously accepted invitations to debate in Savannah, Macon and Atlanta in October while Walker hasn’t committed to any of those invitations — another layer of discord.
Nevada
Both Nevada’s gubernatorial and Senate debates have been set — but the participation from candidates remains unclear. Democratic Gov. Steve Sisolak and his Republican challenger, Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo, are set to face-off on Oct. 2.
As for the Senate race, a spokesperson for Republican nominee Adam Laxalt tweeted that while he “looks forward” to debating Democratic incumbent Catherine Cortez Masto, Laxalt’s team has “not agreed to any debate invitations at this time and still reviewing all debate options.”
North Carolina
Democratic Senate candidate Cheri Beasley accepted the North Carolina Association of Broadcasters’ invitation to a debate in October — but there’s been no confirmation yet from her opponent.
Republican Senate candidate Ted Budd told ABC News he is open to debating but would not make decisions until after Labor Day. Budd did not debate any of his primary opponents and has made no indication that he would accept a general election debate invitation.
Michigan
Further disputes persist in the gubernatorial race in Michigan, where Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and Republican nominee Tudor Dixon are locked in an argument over which dates are best, with Whitmer’s team confirming to ABC News that she has accepted two debates: on Oct. 13 in Grand Rapids and on Oct. 25 in Detroit.
Dixon’s team pushed back on the dates, however, writing on Twitter that “debates must start BEFORE voting begins, not after as Whitmer is demanding.” Dixon further argued that her opponent “wants to hide, but the people deserve answers.”
In response to Dixon’s comments, Whitmer’s campaign told ABC News that “for more than a decade, Michigan has held one to two statewide televised gubernatorial debates in October. Governor Whitmer looks forward to continuing that tradition with debates on October 13th and October 25th so Michiganders have an opportunity to see the clear contrast between the candidates as they make their decisions in this crucial election.”
Wisconsin
Neither Democratic Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes nor Republican incumbent Ron Johnson responded to requests for comments about their debate plans. Johnson previously debated his opponents in the 2016 and 2010 races.
The big picture
Last April, the national arm of the Republican Party walked away from the Commission on Presidential Debates, cutting ties with the general election debate process and dismantling a bipartisan process 30 years in the making.
The Republican National Committee voted unanimously at the time to leave the group, which they claimed was biased.
“We are going to find newer, better debate platforms to ensure that future nominees are not forced to go through the biased CPD in order to make their case to the American people,” RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel said in a statement at the time.
“The CPD’s plans for 2024 will be based on fairness, neutrality and a firm commitment to help the American public learn about the candidates and the issues,” the CPD responded at the time.
(NEW YORK) — After securing enough doses in the national stockpile to vaccinate the most at-risk Americans against monkeypox, the federal government says it has begun training its sights on the next steps of the outbreak.
“We’re watching this very, very closely and will be prepared to move out against any outbreak that might happen in additional populations,” Assistant Secretary for Response and Preparedness Dawn O’Connell told ABC News.
That includes watching college campuses as students head back to school and keeping an eye on cases that spill outside of the current at-risk community of mostly gay and bisexual men.
“If we begin to see an outbreak in a college campus, we will make vaccines available on that college campus — absolutely,” said O’Connell, who leads monkeypox response within the Department of Health and Human Services.
At the same time, with cases in the U.S. passing 17,000, there are “very active internal conversations” about expanding the targeted population for vaccines, O’Connell said.
Those conversations are only possible because of the milestone the administration hit on Friday when it announced that — while facing criticism from advocates over the response so far — there were finally enough vaccines in the strategic national stockpile to fully inoculate all of the nearly 1.7 million Americans that the Center for Disease Control and Prevention has deemed at-risk.
But it’s been a rocky four months to get to that point. The Biden administration had only a few thousand vaccines on hand when the first monkeypox case was detected in the U.S. The rest of the stockpile — 1.1 million vials — was abroad in Denmark, where supply was bottlenecked with Bavarian Nordic, the only manufacturer of the JYNNEOS vaccine in the world.
The U.S. began to ease those supply constraints with a new dose-stretching policy authorized earlier this month by the Food and Drug Administration, which has allowed clinics to start extracting up to five doses from each vial by using a shallower injection method that the FDA says is just as safe and effective.
The U.S. is also underway on starting up the very first domestic facility to begin manufacturing monkeypox vaccine doses outside of Denmark, using raw materials from Bavarian Nordic but completing the “fill and finish” process in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Grand Rapids Aseptic Manufacturing (GRAM), which O’Connell visited on Monday, will be up and running in about three months — one-third of the typical time it takes to build out a process to make vaccine, the company said.
GRAM is expected to have doses ready to ship out sometime in December, contingent on final approval from the FDA.
By March, the Michigan-based manufacturer hopes to have shipped out about 2.5 million vials, which could be used as up to 12.5 million shots under the new dose-stretching strategy.
It’s all part of an effort to move public health preparedness onto U.S. soil, O’Connell told ABC, rather than rely on other countries for resources that become scarce when they’re needed most.
“Every time I sit down with a member of Congress, I talk about the needs that I have. The strategic national stockpile is at the top,” O’Connell said.
“Making sure that the stockpile is well-funded is one of the cornerstones of my tenure in [my] position,” O’Connell said.
The stockpile, she said, has “been chronically underfunded, and it is responsible for maintaining preparedness against multiple threats.”
And while O’Connell defended the country’s early monkeypox response, saying the federal government ordered 36,000 vaccines when there were only two known cases in the U.S., she also acknowledged that there were some “lessons learned.”
“That’s not to say we haven’t made mistakes,” she said.
“I’m always worried about preparedness — making sure that I have enough for wherever this disease may go,” she said.
Still, the millions of doses being manufactured in Michigan this winter will be coming after thousands, if not tens of thousands, of Americans have already been infected.
To that, O’Connell said it’s about the medium- and long-term preparedness.
“That’s one of the reasons why I’m here is to make sure we’ve got this capacity now and in the future coming online and ready to go against whatever population is affected next,” O’Connell said, referring to the Grand Rapids facility.
(NEW YORK) — Seventy-five people have died and 59 have been injured in Pakistan over the last 24 hours due to severe weather, further devastating a country that’s experiencing historic rain and flooding, according to the country’s National Disaster Management Authority.
About one-third of Pakistan is under water, the country’s federal minister for climate change, Sherry Rehman, wrote on Twitter Monday, saying in an interview that Pakistan is experiencing a “climate catastrophe.”
Rehman said that Padidan, in Pakistan’s Sindh Province, received an “unheard of” nearly 70 inches of rain in one day.
In the last day, 59 people were injured and more than 58,000 homes destroyed due to monsoon rains and flooding, the National Disaster Management Authority said. Since June 14, 1,136 people have died, 1,634 people have been injured and more than one million homes have been destroyed because of flash floods, the agency said.
The monsoon rains occurred a month early this year, causing rivers and dams to overflow and impacting all four of Pakistan’s provinces.
In a statement, the climate minister called the flooding a “climate-induced humanitarian disaster of epic proportions.”
“Frankly, no one has seen this kind of downpour & flooding before, and no one country can cope alone with the multiple, cascading effects of extreme weather, climate events,” Rehman wrote.
The rains have impacted 33 million people in Pakistan and have forced thousands of people to evacuate.
Pakistan’s government deployed soldiers to help with search-and-rescue operations, with army helicopters airlifting people to safety.
(NEW YORK) — Astronaut Nicole Aunapu Mann is set to become the first Native American woman in space when NASA launches its new crew to the International Space Station this fall.
Mann will serve as commander on the SpaceX Crew-5 mission and will be joined by three others, astronaut and pilot Josh Cassada, astronaut Koichi Wakata from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, and Russian cosmonaut Anna Kikina.
“I feel, I think in one word, just absolutely excited,” Mann, an enrolled member of the Wailacki of the Round Valley Indian Tribes, told ABC News. “The training that we’ve been through the launch with this crew, it’s going to be an incredible mission.”
Born in California, Mann graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy, where she was the varsity women’s soccer captain. She earned a master’s degree in mechanical engineering from Stanford and later became a colonel in the U.S. Marine Corps. She has been deployed twice aboard aircraft carriers, flying missions in support of combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, and was awarded six medals for her service.
“Teamwork is so important to human spaceflight,” she told ABC News. “And I think my background in the Marine Corps and also playing soccer on a team really helped develop that.”
The expedition will be Mann’s first space flight since she became an astronaut in 2013. She is one of eight members of NASA’s 21st astronaut class, nicknamed the “Eight Balls,” formed for space station operations and potential future assignments to the Moon and Mars.
During the upcoming mission, which is set for launch on Monday, Oct. 3, the team will conduct scientific experiments to benefit life on Earth and prepare for human exploration of outer space. Their preparation included instruction in space station systems, Russian language and robotics, as well as science and physiological and survival training.
“We’ll get a chance to do a couple of spacewalks, flying the robotic arm, and so there’s a lot that goes into that preparation to be ready for your mission,” Mann said.
Cassada, who along with Mann are the last two in their class to fly to space, described her as “incredibly capable” and one of his “closest friends.”
“Her ability to shift gears is really interesting — this ability to say, ‘OK, Josh, you’re joking. We’re done joking. We’re focusing and we are 100% operational this moment,'” he told ABC News. “And it’s really neat that it takes us all in the exact same direction just very organically.”
In his allocated 3.3 pounds of personal items, Cassada said he plans to pack 1980s movies for the team to watch every Friday, teasing Mann for never understanding his movie references and jokes, despite growing up in the ’80s.
Mann, on the other hand, said she will bring her wedding ring and a gift from her mother when she was young: a dream catcher, which in some Native American cultures symbolizes unity and provides protection.
In 2002, when John Herrington, an enrolled member of the Chickasaw Nation, became the first Native American man to fly into space, he carried the Nation’s flag and a traditional flute on his 13-day voyage.
At the end of the day, Mann said, it “really doesn’t matter if you’re a woman or a man or what country you’re from, or your gender or your race.”
“We are coming together as a human race,” she said, “And our mission on board the International Space Station of developing this technology and research to benefit all of humankind is really what brings us together.”
(NEW YORK) — Although temperatures are still above 70 degrees in a majority of the U.S., with a little under a month left of summer, Starbucks has already kicked off the unofficial start of fall with the return of Pumpkin Spice Lattes.
Starting Tuesday, the iconic “PSL” — made with Starbucks Signature Espresso, steamed milk, cinnamon, nutmeg, clove, real pumpkin, topped with whipped cream and pumpkin pie spices — will officially return to the coffee chain’s menu for its 19th year.
For customers not quite ready to turn to hot drinks just yet, the fall-flavored drink is available in iced or blended form as well.
The limited time lineup also includes the Pumpkin Cream Cold Brew, which is sweetened with vanilla syrup, topped with pumpkin cream cold foam and a dusting of pumpkin spice.
The Apple Crisp Macchiato — inspired by the layered apple, cinnamon and brown sugar flavors of apple crisp — will also return to the menu after its debut last season. This year, the drink is made with oat milk and Starbucks Blonde Espresso as its standard recipe.
Harvey Rojas Mora, Starbucks beverage developer, said in a statement that the “oatmilk adds a creaminess and brings forward the oat flavors of a traditional apple crisp topping.”
The Apple Crisp Macchiato will also be available hot, iced or blended throughout the season.
As for the pastry case, pumpkin is up for grabs in muffin form as well as a Pumpkin Scone and Pumpkin Loaf. The Seattle-based coffee shop chain has also added an Owl Cake Pop, made with vanilla cake and buttercream that’s dipped in purple chocolate coating.
To help celebrate the start of the fan-favorite season, Starbucks has created a “Pumpkin Portal to Fall,” a quiz-style game that tests customers’ knowledge of emojis, pop culture and Starbucks.
The company has created new designs for its whole bean coffee packages, inspired by the people and stories associated with the blends’ origin and flavor. The artwork and color scheme of supermarket Starbucks products have also been designed to help shoppers find the perfect coffee for brewing at home.
