U.S.A.
Page 10 n THE ASIAN REPORTER
August 1, 2022
U.S. reaches deal with Moderna for omicron COVID-19 vaccine
By Zeke Miller
The Associated Press
ASHINGTON — The Biden
administration says it has
reached an agreement with
Moderna to buy 66 million doses of the
company’s next generation of COVID-19
vaccine
that
targets
the
highly
transmissible omicron variant, enough
supply this winter for all who want the
upgraded booster.
The order of the bivalent shot follows the
announcement in June that the federal
government had secured 105 million doses
of a similar vaccine from rival drugmaker
Pfizer. Both orders are scheduled for
delivery in the fall and winter, assuming
regulators sign off on their effectiveness.
The Pentagon said the Moderna contract
was worth $1.74 billion.
AP Photo/Jenny Kane, File
AP Photo/Charles Krupa, File
W
The omicron strain has been dominant
in the U.S. since December, with the BA.5
subvariant now causing a massive wave of
infections across the country, even
infecting President Joe Biden.
“We must stay vigilant in our fight
against COVID-19 and continue to expand
Americans’ access to the best vaccines and
treatments,” Health and Human Services
Secretary Xavier Becerra said in a
statement. “As we look to the fall and
winter, we’re doing just that — ensuring
Americans have the tools they need to stay
safe and help keep our nation moving
forward.”
The U.S. orders with Pfizer and
Hawai‘i national park gets land where ancient villages stood
Continued from page 8
experts and residents to better understand
the various cultural sites.
The addition brings the total park size to
554 square miles, almost as large as the
entire island of Oahu.
While the park has recently acquired a
few small parcels of land in the same area,
the donation is the park’s largest addition
since 2003, when about 156 square miles of
land was incorporated.
Hawai‘i Volcanoes National Park super-
intendent Rhonda Loh in a statement
called the Pohue Bay area “an incredibly
precious and culturally significant
landscape that needs to be protected.”
She added: “The park is working to de-
My Turn: Summer heat
brings burning feet
Continued from page 6
suffocating in the furnace-like dorm while
Jeremy and I were whiling away the night
in the luxury of our air-conditioned
fortress. We were the Kings of the Palace!
Until …
It started slowly. I felt a tingling
sensation in my foot. Soon, both feet felt
like I was walking on pins and needles.
Then, all of a sudden, my feet felt like they
were on fire. I started maniacally flopping
back and forth under the sheets.
At one point, I frantically turned to
Jeremy and yelled, “Jeremy! What is going
on with my feet!?!” I soon discovered that
he was going through the same thing.
Apparently, the cleaning crew had
sprinkled some disinfectant on the shower
stall, and that’s where the burning feeling
was coming from.
I’m just thankful that the bathroom had
a shower and not a tub.
I don’t even want to think about what
else could have been burning.
Humor writer Wayne Chan lives in the San Diego area;
cartoonist Wayne Chan is based in the Bay Area.
Kueng, Thao sentenced for
violating Floyd’s rights
Continued from page 9
prison on October 4, though Magnuson
noted that could change because of their
state trial. Magnuson said he would
recommend that they be allowed to serve
their time at minimum-security federal
facilities in Duluth or in Yankton, South
Dakota, to be near family. The final
decision is up to the Bureau of Prisons.
Chauvin, who is white, was the most
senior officer at the scene and was
sentenced to a 22 1/2-year state sentence
that he’s serving concurrently with his
federal sentence. He’s been held in solitary
confinement in the state’s maximum
security prison at Oak Park Heights for his
own safety since his murder conviction and
will eventually be transferred to federal
prison.
Associated Press/Report for America
reporter Trisha Ahmed contributed.
velop an interim operating plan for Pohue
that explores opportunities for public use
compatible with resource protection.”
Trust for Public Land acquired the
privately owned land July 12 and gave it to
Hawai‘i Volcanoes National Park the same
day.
The parcel stretching from the
southwest coast of Hawai‘i Island up to the
national park was purchased for $9.4
million with funding from the Land and
Water Conservation Fund and a donation
from the Wyss Foundation. The land had
previously been the target of several resort
proposals, Trust for Public Land said.
“We are grateful the National Park
Service will steward the area, ensuring the
history, culture, and natural beauty of this
place
are
protected
for
future
generations,” Trust for Public Land
associate vice president Lea Hong, who
leads the Hawai‘i division for the
organization, said in a statement.
Hong emphasized the role locals have
played in preserving the land, fighting off
pressure from developers and others to
keep the area natural.
“It’s really a testament to decades of
community concern and love for that area,”
Hong said. “It’s a testament to the
community’s dedication to conserving the
coastline that this project will happen.”
PLANNING FOR WINTER. A vial of the
Moderna COVID-19 vaccine, left, is displayed on a
counter at a pharmacy in Portland, Oregon, on De-
cember 27, 2021. The Biden administration says it
has reached an agreement with Moderna to buy 66
million doses of the company’s next generation of
COVID-19 vaccine that targets the highly transmissible
omicron variant, enough supply this winter for all who
want the upgraded booster. Pictured in the right photo
is a vial of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine.
Moderna include options to purchase 300
million doses each, but reaching that total
will require more funding from congress,
the Biden administration said.
About 261 million Americans have
received at least one COVID-19 shot, but
only 108 million have received a booster.
“Squid Game” receives
Emmy nomination
NEW YORK — Emmy Award nomina-
tions were released in July, and “Squid
Game,” the brutal Netflix survival drama
about desperate adults competing in
deadly children’s games for a chance to
escape debt, won in its bid to become the
first non-English-language drama series
ever nominated for top drama.
In the bleak and disturbing series from
South Korea, hundreds of men and women
on the brink of financial ruin compete in a
deadly battle for roughly $38 million in
cash. Every game is a traditional Korean
children’s game such as Red Light, Green
Light, but the consequence of losing is
death. The winner is the person who
outlasts all opponents.
It remains Netflix’s most popular series.
“Squid Game” became the first series to
Continued on page 20
Abortion foes downplay complex post-Roe v. Wade realities
By Amanda Seitz and Josh Kelety
The Associated Press
ASHINGTON — When a
10-year-old Ohio girl travelled to
Indiana in June to end a
pregnancy forced onto her by a rapist,
several conservative politicians and TV
pundits called the report a hoax.
After horrific details confirmed the case
was real, some tried a new tack: claiming,
without evidence, that the child could have
still legally obtained an abortion in Ohio
under a near-total abortion ban that
exempts only mothers whose lives or major
bodily functions are at risk once fetal
cardiac activity is detected.
Catherine Glenn Foster, president of the
anti-abortion Americans United for Life,
added another defense for young rape
victims: She told the House Judiciary
Committee that a 10-year-old’s pregnancy
“would probably impact her life and so,
therefore, it would fall under any
exception and would not be an abortion.”
In televised statements and interviews,
anti-abortion advocates have used
misleading rhetoric about abortion access
to downplay fallout and complications
from restrictive abortion laws as doctors,
struggling to interpret laws that have
largely been untested in courts, turn away
pregnant patients for care.
Those efforts have had an immediate
impact, casting a narrative about a
post-Roe v. Wade world that overlooks how
abortion laws enacted in recent weeks
have complicated the way doctors treat
rape victims, miscarriages, and ectopic
pregnancies.
More than half a dozen doctors
interviewed by The Associated Press said
they feel compromised and uncertain
operating in an abortion landscape
fundamentally changed by a U.S. Supreme
Court ruling that rejected nearly 50 years
of precedent that abortion was a protected
constitutional right.
“It’s a horrible position for healthcare
providers to be in, to be unsure about
what’s legal and what’s not legal, and to be
questioning the care that they know that
W
they should provide,” said Dr. Jennifer
Kerns, an associate professor in the
department of obstetrics, gynecology, and
reproductive sciences at the University of
California, San Francisco.
Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost, who
initially questioned reporting of the
10-year-old girl’s rape case, said in a Fox
News Channel interview that she did not
have to leave Ohio for abortion treatment,
citing the state’s exemptions. Late last
month, Ohio Right to Life President Mike
Gonidakis repeated the claim during a
public forum: “She could have had that
abortion here.” The law’s Republican
sponsor said the same in a newspaper
column.
But it’s not as clear cut as they’ve
suggested.
The state’s nonpartisan Legislative
Service Commission confirmed in an
analysis that the age of a mother, alone,
would not allow a girl to legally access the
procedure in the state. Doctors in Ohio are
required to document a medical condition
and rationale if they administer an
abortion to provide life-saving treatment.
Yost’s office did not return a request for
additional comment. Gonidakis laid out
“different scenarios” to The AP under
which the girl might have been able to
access the abortion in Ohio, such as if a
doctor agreed her life was at risk because
of her age, while noting that he had not
reviewed her medical records.
Across social media, some conservatives
have also minimized concerns about access
to treatment for ectopic pregnancies,
calling it “still legal in every state.” An
ectopic pregnancy is defined as one in
which a fertilized egg grows outside the
uterus, where it has no chance of survival.
Abortion opponent Erin Morrow Hawley
last month told the House Reform and
Oversight
Committee
that
ectopic
pregnancies had become the subject of
“misinformation.”
“There have been social media posts
suggesting that women won’t get treated
for an ectopic pregnancy because doctors
might be afraid of performing the
procedure, but that’s absolutely false,”
said Hawley, an attorney at the religious
nonprofit Alliance Defending Freedom.
“Treatment for an ectopic pregnancy is
not, in fact, an abortion.”
State abortion laws, however, have
fuelled confusion.
Doctors generally agree that the
procedure to an end an ectopic pregnancy,
which typically includes medication or
surgery to remove the pregnancy, is not
the same as an abortion.
But women reportedly have been
declined care in states that have severely
restricted abortion access, like Ohio,
where an abortion is banned once fetal
cardiac activity is detected. Fetal
heartbeats can still be present in ectopic
pregnancies. In one case, a central Texas
hospital told a physician not to treat an
ectopic pregnancy until it ruptured, per a
letter from the Texas Medical Association.
In an e-mail to The AP, Hawley said that
doctors who have turned away ectopic
pregnancy patients because of abortion
bans are misinterpreting the laws.
Still, before Roe v. Wade was even
overturned by the Supreme Court in June,
some religious hospitals had policies
against treating women for ectopic
pregnancies.
And many states have not specified in
their newly enacted abortion bans that an
ectopic pregnancy can be treated as an
exception. That’s left doctors in some
states leery of ending the pregnancy, said
Dr. Kate White, an associate professor of
obstetrics and gynecology at Boston
University School of Medicine. Law-
makers in West Virginia, for example, are
considering an abortion ban that would
carve out an exception for ectopic
pregnancies.
“Clinicians may be afraid to treat it if the
abortion law in their state does not
explicitly carve out ectopic pregnancy. You
can see their worry, ‘Hey, growing
pregnancy, can’t interrupt it ever,’” White
said. “They are afraid that the law is too
broad.”
Kelety reported from Phoenix. Associated Press writer
Julie Carr Smyth in Columbus, Ohio, contributed.