Washington and New Mexico announced they were dropping their indoor mask mandates Thursday, leaving Hawaii as the only state that has yet to set a date for lifting its mandate.
Washington's statewide indoor mask mandate will lift in most places on March 21, including at schools and child care facilities. New Mexico will drop its mandate immediately, which also includes schools.
(CNN) The Biden administration is opening additional federally run free Covid-19 testing sites this week in six states across the country -- Maine, Maryland, Nevada, Delaware, Texas and Washington -- as the Omicron variant of the coronavirus continues to surge in the US.
The goal is to make the vaccine – called Corbevax – available in other low- and middle-income nations across the globe to help prevent future variants of concern from forming.
“As long as we leave the southern hemisphere unvaccinated new variants of concern for us will emerge," said Dr. Peter Hotez, co-director of the Texas Children's Hospital Center for Vaccine Development and dean at Baylor's National School of Tropical Medicine. “The only way to stop it is to vaccinate the world and we think our [vaccine] is going to be a major contributor to that."
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