Dwindling demand forces new approaches to boost immunization numbers.

LEILA NAVIDI • Star Tribune

Christine Runyon administered the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine to Jamie Larson last month at United Labor Center in Minneapolis.

They hunted him down like he’s a terrorist.

Police cars swarmed him as he drove home from his church. They ordered him out of his car and made him kneel down on a busy highway.

Heavily-armed SWAT police arrested him. But he’s not a terrorist. He’s Artur Pawlowski, a Christian pastor. And he’s now in jail.

Watch this shocking police attack for yourself.

And hear a pre-recorded message from Pastor Artur too.

For more details on the arrest, click here.

Three Massachusetts college students were suspended after school administrators saw a photo of the trio at an off-campus party, outside and unmasked, according to reports.

“There was a photo sent to the administration of these girls outside off-campus on a Saturday. This is why they lost a whole semester of their schooling,” one parent told CBS’s Boston affiliate, WBZ-TV.

It’s unclear when the photo was taken and whether the young women had been vaccinated at the time they attended the party.

The freshman were cut off from virtual learning after being suspended and barred from taking their finals, meaning they will have to redo the semester, their parents griped.

Gwyneth Paltrow hit the bottle “every night” during the pandemic, in addition to gaining 14 pounds.

The actress, who is well known for her wellness and lifestyle brand Goop, concocted a lot of quinoa whiskey cocktails to help her get through the lockdown, according to The Mirror.

“I was drinking seven nights a week and making pasta and eating bread. I went totally off the rails,” Paltrow, 48, said, according to the article.

As more reports surface of breakthrough COVID cases, in and outside the U.S., the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) today said it will change how breakthrough cases are reported, effective May 14.

According to a statement on the CDC’s website, the agency said to help “maximize the quality of the data collected on cases of greatest clinical and public health importance” it will stop reporting weekly COVID breakthrough infections unless they result in hospitalization or death.

The news followed another change, announced late last month, in how PCR tests should be administered to the fully vaccinated.

Both changes will result in lower overall numbers of reports of breakthrough cases in the U.S.

A breakthrough case is recorded if a person tests positive for SARS-Cov-2 two weeks after receiving the single-dose Johnson & Johnson (J&J) shot or completing the two-dose Moderna or Pfizer vaccination.

Why the changes matter

In April, the CDC issued new guidance to laboratories recommending reducing the RT-PCR CT value to 28 cycles — but only for those fully vaccinated individuals being tested for COVID.

In an RT-PCR test — the gold standard for detecting SARS-CoV-2 — RNA is extracted from the swab collected from the patient. It is then converted into DNA, which is then amplified.

CT, or cycle threshold, is a value that emerges during RT-PCR tests. A CT value refers to the number of cycles needed to amplify viral RNA to reach a detectable level.

According to the Indian Council of Medical Research, a patient is considered positive for COVID if the CT value is below 35. In other words, if the virus is detectable after 35 cycles or earlier, then the patient is considered positive.

Dr. Anthony Fauci recommends a CT value of 35. Globally, the accepted cut-off for CT value for COVID ranges between 35 and 40, depending on instructions from manufacturers of testing equipment.

“If the benchmark were to be lowered to 24 it would mean that CT values in the range 25-34 would not be considered positive,” according to the Indian Council of Medical Research, as reported by The Indian Express. “A benchmark of 35, therefore, means that more patients would be considered positive than we would get if the benchmark were 24.”

In other words, lowering CT threshold parameter may lead to missing infectious persons.

CDC won’t report new breakthrough numbers this week

Because the change in how the CDC will report breakthrough cases is still being implemented and won’t take effect until May 14, the CDC did not report new numbers this week . . .

New Jersey’s Rutgers University will enroll as many as 200 children between the ages of 6 months and 11 years to take part in a COVID-19 vaccine trial for Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech.

The college announced Thursday it has been selected as a clinical trial site for Pfizer-BioNTech’s global research study “to evaluate the efficacy” of the companies’ two-dose COVID-19 vaccine in children.

The Pediatric Clinical Research Center at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in New Brunswick is one of several clinical trial sites for the pediatric study and the only trial site in the Garden State.

Rutgers said it will enroll up to 100 children ages 5 to 12, 50 children ages 2 to 5 and 50 kids ages 6 months to 2 years in the trial.

In total, 4,644 children are slated to take part in the program worldwide, according to the university.

Trial participants will be randomly selected to receive two doses of Pfizer’s coronavirus vaccine or a placebo.

Six months after the second dose, participants will be “unblinded” and “the vaccine will be offered to those who received the placebo,” the school said.

Can a university, business, or school require staff and customers to receive a COVID-19 vaccination? Should they? The answer to both of these questions is not clear.

Let’s start with higher education. Normally, universities can require certain vaccinations. Under Colorado state law, students attending Colorado colleges and universities must be vaccinated against measles, mumps, and rubella unless they take a personal, medical or religious exemption. Vaccination against meningitis is also required for new students in student housing unless they sign a waiver.

Colorado State University, the University of Colorado, the University of Northern Colorado and Metropolitan State University just announced that they will require students, faculty, and staff to receive COVID-19 vaccinations before attending this fall joining the University of Denver, Fort Lewis College, and Colorado College, which made similar announcements earlier in the year. Individuals will have the option to request an exemption.

That seems simple enough. Not so fast. Since all three available COVID-19 vaccines are authorized by the Food and Drug Administration under “emergency use authorization” (EUA) people must be notified “of the option to accept or refuse administration of the product.” If people have the right under federal law to refuse a provisionally authorized vaccine, can an institution of higher education require it?

What about primary and secondary schools? The state currently requires entering students to have been vaccinated against several communicable diseases. As with higher education, medical, personal, and religious exemptions are available. Currently the Pfizer COVID vaccine is approved for people 16 years and older and will soon be available for children as young as 12. It’s only a matter of time before lawmakers consider K-12 mandates. But again, the vaccines’ EUA status complicates the legality of such a potential obligation.

What about other employers? According to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, employers can mandate COVID vaccinations with medical and religious exemptions but “the employer must show that an unvaccinated employee would pose a direct threat due to a significant risk of substantial harm to the health or safety of the individual or others that cannot be eliminated or reduced by reasonable accommodation.” Once again, how does the EUA status of the vaccines impact the requirement? It would seem that until full FDA approval, any such requirement would have to be a strongly worded recommendation. . .

Mayor Lori Lightfoot also expressed confidence in the way the pandemic is headed — particularly with vaccines expected to be approved for some children soon.

Students should be required to attend full-time, in-person school in the fall as long as they don’t have medical conditions that make them vulnerable to COVID-19, outgoing Chicago schools chief Janice Jackson said this week.

Speaking at a virtual parent town hall alongside Mayor Lori Lightfoot, Jackson was asked what she expects next school year to look like and whether parents will have the option to keep their kids remote.

“Given where we are with vaccinations and guidance from the CDC, and our desire just to see our kids back in school knowing that this last year has taken a toll on some of our students academically, we want a return to full daily instruction in our schools,” Jackson said at the event Thursday. “We want to move away from the hybrid. And so that’s what we’re focused on and that’s what we’re marching towards.

The teachers union in the middle of a scandal for influencing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s official school reopening guidance gave nearly $20 million to Democrats in the 2020 election cycle, filings show.

Federal election filings reveal that the American Federation of Teachers and its local affiliates spent $19,903,532 on political donations during the 2020 cycle, with nearly all of the funds going to Democrats and liberal groups.

Last year’s AFT donations include $5,251,400 for the Democrats Senate Majority PAC and $4,600,000 for the Democratic House Majority PAC, according to data compiled by The Center for Responsive Politics’ Open Secrets database.

Besides PACs that supported Congressional Democrats, the AFT network also gave to groups like “For Our Future,” a liberal organization that received more than $1.5 million and heralded Biden’s inauguration on Twitter.

“There is so much to celebrate today,” the group wrote on inauguration day. “While we know there is ‘much to repair, much to restore, much to heal, much to build, and much to gain.’ And we’re ready, #PresidentBiden & #KamalaHarrisVP!”

AFT affiliates gave to Democratic federal Congressional candidates over Republicans more than 99% of the time in the 2020 cycle, filings show.

The AFT has come under fire recently for its role in shaping CDC guidance around schools reopening. The New York Post reported last weekend on emails between top White House, CDC, and AFT officials that show the AFT crafting language and overall working closely with the CDC. The communication intensified ahead of the CDC’s planned Feb. 12 announcement to recommend whether schools should reopen.

In that February announcement, the CDC ultimately sided with the teachers union and delayed issuing guidance that schools should resume fully in-person classes.

After the emails emerged, Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee sent a letter Wednesday to CDC Director Rochelle Walensky alleging that political influence from the teachers unions and White House influenced the federal agency’s official guidance. The Republicans argue the agency put “politics over science and Biden-Harris campaign donors over children.“ . . .