Johnson & Johnson touts Covid booster shot as US grapples with rise in hospitalizations – live

The select committee investigating the January 6 insurrection has issued its first sweeping records request, seeking a wide range of documents regarding the Trump administration’s preparation for and response to the Capitol attack.

“The Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol is examining the facts, circumstances, and causes of the January 6th attack,” select committee chairman Bennie Thompson wrote in a letter to the National Archives and Records Administration.

“Our Constitution provides for a peaceful transfer of power, and this investigation seeks to evaluate threats to that process, identify lessons learned and recommend laws, policies, procedures, rules, or regulations necessary to protect our republic in the future.”

Eight government agencies, including the department of defense and the department of justice, received letters from the select committee requesting documents from the final days of Donald Trump’s presidency.

Among other records, the committee is asking for communications between Trump White House officials as the Capitol attack unfolded on January 6.

An urgent update, readers! Blinken is now not due to speak until 2.30pm ET/6.30pm GMT.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki is due to brief the media at 2pm ET. “Due to” because these briefing often slip back and sometimes by a lot.

The first delay, when we had expected secretary of state Antony Blinken to make public remarks at 12.15pm follows a delay or more than five hours yesterday in what were scheduled to be public remarks by Joe Biden.

The US president had been due to speak at 12pm ET, finally spoke at 5.15pm and didn’t say much, or take questions.

It’s definitely not unusual for these kinds of scheduled addresses to get moved back, and Biden is not a good time-keeper at such events, in general, but 5+ hours for a nothing-burger address that lasted a few minutes and contained little new did rather cast Biden in a less than favorable light amid ongoing fears that many awaiting evacuation will be left behind at the mercy of the Taliban.

Here’s where the day stands so far:

• Johnson & Johnson shared data showing a booster shot of its coronavirus vaccine produced a “rapid and robust increase in spike-binding antibodies”. The promising news comes as intensive care units across the US fill up due to the continued spread of the Delta variant. In states like Florida, Texas and Mississippi, more than 90% of ICU beds are now being used, and more than half of ICU patients have coronavirus.
• The US has helped evacuate more than 80,000 people out of Kabul, according to the latest update from the White House. During today’s Pentagon briefing, Major General Hank Taylor said an evacuation flight left Kabul every 39 minutes yesterday.
• A classified US intelligence study on the origins of coronavirus was inconclusive, according to reports. Joe Biden ordered the assessment earlier this year, but researchers were reportedly unable to reach a definitive conclusion on whether the virus jumped to humans via animals or escaped from a Chinese lab.

The blog will have more coming up, so stay tuned.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi praised the House’s “historic” passage of the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act yesterday.

The legislation is named for the late Democratic congressman John Lewis, who was violently assaulted while marching for voting rights during the Civil Rights Movement.

“This is fundamental to our democracy that we respect the sanctity of the vote,” Pelosi said at her weekly press conference. “That was what John Lewis’ life and risk of death was about.”

The 219-212 vote fell along party lines, and the Democratic speaker criticized her Republican colleagues for opposing the legislation, noting that past voting rights bills have passed with bipartisan support.

“Unfortunately yesterday, you did not see that bipartisanship, and it was really sad,” Pelosi said.

The unanimous Republican opposition underscores the major hurdles ahead for the bill in the evenly divided Senate. Democrats will need to convince 10 Republicans to support the bill in order to overcome the expected Senate filibuster, which seems unlikely if not impossible.

House speaker Nancy Pelosi sharply criticized two members who flew to Afghanistan yesterday to “conduct oversight” of the US military’s evacuation mission in Kabul.

Asked about congressmen Seth Moulton and Peter Meijer’s trip at her weekly press conference, Pelosi said she did not learn about it until hours before it became publicly known.

“This is deadly serious,” Pelosi said. “We don’t want anybody to think this was a good idea and they should try to follow suit.”

She added, “It was not in my view a good idea.”

Moulton, a Democrat, and Meijer, a Republican, released a joint statement yesterday confirming they had made the trip, arguing such “oversight” was vital to the integrity of the mission.

“We conducted this visit in secret, speaking about it only after our departure, to minimize the risk and disruption to the people on the ground, and because we were there to gather information, not to grandstand,” the statement said.

“We left on a plane with empty seats, seated in crew-only seats to ensure that nobody who needed a seat would lose one because of our presence.”

The trip infuriated senior officials at the Pentagon and the state department, who told the Washington Post that the lawmakers’ presence had been a distraction from the evacuation mission itself as the military grapples with an August 31 deadline to leave Afghanistan.

The US military has now helped evacuate more than 80,000 people out of Kabul since the Taliban took control of the capital city earlier this month.

According to the latest numbers from the White House, about 19,000 people were evacuated between 3 am ET yesterday and 3 am ET today.

“This is the result of 42 US military flights (37 C-17s and 5 C-130s) which carried approximately 11,200 evacuees, and 48 coalition flights which carried 7,800 people,” a White House official told the press pool.

“Since August 14, the U.S. has evacuated and facilitated the evacuation of approximately 82,300 people on US military and coalition flights. Since the end of July, we have re-located approximately 87,900 people on US military and coalition flights.”

Some US allies have pushed Joe Biden to extend the August 31 deadline to complete the evacuation mission, but he indicated yesterday that he believed the military could complete the operation by the end of the month.

“We are currently on a pace to finish by August the 31st,” Biden said at the White House yesterday. “The sooner we can finish, the better. Each day of operations brings added risk to our troops.”

Hallie Golden reports for the Guardian on those suffering with long-term symptoms of coronavirus:

For months, Andrea Tomasek suspected she was suffering from debilitating symptoms brought on by a Covid-19 infection. She had a fever and her breathing was so labored she said it felt like her “lungs were sponges full of fluid”. She later experienced dizziness and periods where she would pass out.

But when the 37-year-old first started to feel sick in March 2020, the pandemic was still in its early days, so she couldn’t access a test in her home city of Savage, Minnesota, a suburb of Minneapolis.

Without that initial Covid-19 diagnosis, physicians repeatedly discounted the connection between her symptoms and the virus.

“It has been a huge struggle,” she said. “I’ve been gaslit. I’ve had doctors dismiss me outright and try and prescribe me anxiety medication. It’s been ridiculous.”

It wasn’t until October, when her symptoms still hadn’t let up, that she said a doctor made the connection between her illness and Covid, and referred her to the Mayo Clinic’s post-Covid care clinic.

The Guardian’s Vincent Ni and agencies report:

A classified US intelligence report delivered to the White House was inconclusive on the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic, in part due to a lack of information from China, according to US media reports.

The assessment received on Tuesday, which was ordered by President Joe Biden 90 days ago, was unable to definitively conclude whether the virus that first emerged in central China had jumped to humans via animals or escaped a highly secure research facility in Wuhan, two US officials familiar with the matter told the Washington Post.

They said parts of the report could be declassified in the coming days.

Responding to reports, China’s foreign ministry spokesperson, Wang Wenbin, on Wednesday criticised Washington for “politicising” the issue of Covid origin-tracing.

“The United States says it lacks information from China,” Wang told a press briefing, according to China News service, a state-owned newswire. “I can tell the United States that this is just an excuse to cover up the failure of its intelligence in origin tracing.”

Greetings from Washington, live blog readers.

Johnson & Johnson has just shared data showing that a booster shot of its coronavirus vaccine produced a “rapid and robust increase in spike-binding antibodies”.

Dr Mathai Mammen, the global head of the company’s research and development team, said, “We look forward to discussing with public health officials a potential strategy for our Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine, boosting eight months or longer after the primary single-dose vaccination.”

The news comes as the US grapples with a rise in coronavirus hospitalizations due to the continued spread of the Delta variant.

In states like Florida, Texas and Mississippi, more than 90% of the beds in intensive care units are now being used, and more than half of ICU patients have coronavirus, according to data from the department of health and human services.

Most coronavirus hospitalizations are occurring among unvaccinated Americans, and the Biden administration is hoping that the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of the Pfizer vaccine — combined with the new data from Johnson & Johnson — could encourage more people to get their shot.

Otherwise, those hospitalization numbers could get even worse.

The blog will have more coming up, so stay tuned.