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      US adds 559,000 jobs in May as fears of hiring slowdown fade

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      The US added 559,000 jobs in May as the coronavirus pandemic receded, shaking off fears of a substantial slowdown in hiring after April’s disappointing monthly report.The Bureau of Labor Statistics said on Friday that the unemployment rate had fallen to 5.8% from 6.1% in April, still significantly higher than the 3.8% unemployment rate recorded in February 2020 before Covid 19 hit the US but less than half its 14.8% peak in April last year.The news comes one month after the labor department shocked economists by announcing the US had added just 266,000 new jobs in April – far below the 1m gain that had been expected. May’s gains were less than economists had predicted and with the level of employment still 7.6m jobs below its pre-pandemic peak, the Capital Economics group calculates it would take more than 12 months at the current pace to fully eradicate the shortfall.April’s report led to sparring between the Biden administration and Republicans who claimed higher levels of unemployment benefits were keeping people from returning to work and this month’s lukewarm report is unlikely to end that row.But there are signs of a strong rebound across the US economy. Worker filings for unemployment benefits have dropped by 35% since late April and fell to a pandemic low of 385,000 last week, the labor department said on Thursday.Private sector employment increased by 978,000 jobs in May, according to ADP, the US’s largest payroll supplier. The figure was the strongest gain since the early days of the recovery. “Companies of all sizes experienced an uptick in job growth, reflecting the improving nature of the pandemic and economy,” said Nela Richardson, chief economist at ADP.More than half of adult Americans are now fully vaccinated and business is booming in many sectors as state and local governments ease restrictions. But employers across the country are reporting worker shortages as the recovery strengthens. The US Chamber of Commerce said this week that labor shortages now represent “the most critical and widespread challenge” to US businesses. Nearly half of small-business owners had unfilled job openings in May, according to a survey from the National Federation of Independent Business.Alongside evidence of strong growth, some economists are warning about the return of inflation. Prices on a broad range of goods from lumber to chicken have soared as demand has outstripped supply. In April a key inflation indicator – the personal consumption expenditures (PCE) price index – rose to 3.1% compared to last year, its highest level in 13 years. More

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      'A summer of freedom': Joe Biden sets new vaccine target – video

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      Joe Biden has announced a national “month of action” to try to get at least 70% of Americans vaccinated against coronavirus before the Fourth of July holiday.
      The president said the vaccines would allow the public to enjoy “a summer of freedom” where they could safely gather with loved ones without fear of the virus

      Biden promises ‘summer of freedom’ as he urges more Americans to get vaccinated – live More

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      US gun sales spiked during pandemic and continue to rise

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      Gun sales, which spiked sharply during the early months of the coronavirus pandemic, have continued to increase in the United States, with first-time buyers making up more than one-fifth of Americans who purchased guns.The development will frustrate and disappoint gun control advocates who point out the huge number of firearms already circulating in American society as well as a seemingly never-ending cycle of mass shootings.A study by the General Social Survey, a public opinion poll conducted by a research center at the University of Chicago, 39% of American households own guns, up from 32% in 2016.Separately, research data compiled by the FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS), background checks that topped 1m a week in March 2020 – the highest since the government began tracking them in 1998 – and continued, with one week in April this year recording a record 1.2m checks. Background checks are seen as a reliable metric to track gun sales.A third data study, compiled by Northeastern University and the Harvard Injury Control Research Center and seen by the New York Times, shows that 6.5% of US adults, or 17 million people, have purchased guns in the past year, up from 5.3% in 2019.Of those, almost one fifth who bought guns last year were first-time gun owners of whom half were women, a fifth were Black and a fifth were Hispanic, challenging the stereotype of white male gun owners building personal arsenals. In 2021, gun owners overall were 63% male, 73% were white, 10% were Black and 12% Hispanic.Separately, The Trace, a non-partisan group that tracks guns sales, estimates 2.3m guns were purchased in January alone. Sales, which had remained largely flat for the duration of the Trump presidency, jumped 64% in 2020, the group said.Still, the increases are relatively small compared to the 400m guns estimated to already be in circulation, including at least 4m AR-15s, commonly described as assault rifles.“Americans are in an arms race with themselves,” South Los Angeles city council representative Marqueece Harris-Dawson told the New York Times. “There was just as much a run on guns as on toilet paper in the beginning of the pandemic.”Increased gun sales comes as Texas this month became the 20th state to pass legislation that no longer requires a permit to carry a concealed handgun. At the same time, a rash of mass-shootings, often involving AR-15 weapons have dominated headlines.According to the Gun Violence Archive, 67 mass shootings have taken place in May of this year. The most recent occurred on Sunday when a gunman opened fire in Miami, killing two people and injuring 20 others. Authorities in Texas said on Monday they had arrested a man accused of plotting to carry out a mass shooting at a Walmart, and a search of the suspect’s home turned up firearms, ammunition and materials officials described as “radical ideology paraphernalia”.Still, researchers are wary of connecting increased gun ownership with gun violence. The FBI reported a 25% rise in homicides last year that has continued into this with an 18% increase over the first three months of 2021 across 37 cities, including rises of 36% in Los Angeles and 23% in New York.But criminologist Richard Rosenfeld at the University of Missouri told the New York Times that the focus on gun numbers is misplaced. “The critical issue is not simply the increase in the supply of guns but in the nature of the weaponry that’s being used in violent crime, and that has really changed,” he said. More

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      Covid summer: Fauci warns US has ‘a ways to go’ despite lowest rates in a year

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      Dr Anthony Fauci, the top infectious diseases expert in the US, has warned it is too early to declare victory against Covid-19 as cases fall in the country to the lowest rates since last June.“We don’t want to declare victory prematurely because we still have a ways to go,” Fauci told the Guardian in an interview. “But the more and more people that can get vaccinated, as a community, the community will be safer and safer.”The Memorial Holiday weekend marks the unofficial start of summer in the US, and for the at least 50% of the adult population that is fully vaccinated, it could usher in a season of maskless barbecues and trips to the beach.Daily coronavirus cases have dropped 53% since 1 May, according to Johns Hopkins University data, but the rates are still high in the unvaccinated population and cases are growing globally. Already there have been more global cases in 2021 than in all of 2020, according to Johns Hopkins University data.“As long as there is some degree of activity throughout the world, there’s always a danger of variants emerging and diminishing somewhat the effectiveness of our vaccines,” said Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (Niaid).The US has been under pressure to provide greater aid in global vaccine efforts and has in recent weeks committed to donate 80m vaccines in addition to the $4bn donation its pledged to Covax, the global vaccine-sharing scheme. Fauci said more help could be on the way.“We are discussing right now at various levels about how we might be able to up production to get vaccine doses from the companies that are already making them for us, get more doses that will be able to be distributed to lower- and middle-income countries,” Fauci said.At the same time, the US must address the issues stopping its people from getting vaccinated. Part of this group is strongly opposed to the vaccine but there is also a portion of the unvaccinated population that hasn’t been able to get the shot because of lack of access to information or transportation or concerns about missing work because paid sick leave is not guaranteed in the US.Fauci said this too is something the US is focusing its efforts on as Joe Biden’s administration seeks to get a first dose of the vaccine to 70% of the US adult population by 4 July.This month, the White House deployed more vaccination resources to underserved areas and mobile clinics and supported an effort by ride-share companies to offer free trips for people getting vaccinated. In April, Biden called for all employers to provide paid time off for employees to get vaccinated and made a tax credit for small and medium-sized businesses to offer paid leave for employees to get the shot and to recover from any side-effects they might experience after.“Today, in our current day, the accessibility and the convenience of getting a vaccine is really rather striking,” Fauci said.But until the overwhelming majority of Americans have been vaccinated, the Covid-19 risk is still high in the US.As of Friday, 59.1% of Americans 12 and older had received their first dose of the vaccine and 47.4% were fully vaccinated, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention(CDC).“We cannot abandon public health measures when you still have a degree of viral activity in the broad community in the United States,” Fauci said. “Although we’re down to less than 30,000 infections per day that’s still a lot of infections per day.”The national death rate among the unvaccinated population is roughly the same as it was in late March, according to a Washington Post data analysis published this month. The adjusted hospitalization rate is as high as it was in late February, though cases are declining, according to the analysis.Tara Kirk Sell, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, said in the next few months, coronavirus could spread out of hand among unvaccinated people.“Unfortunately these groups of people who are anti-vax or who will end up being susceptible to the disease are going to be in pockets,” Sell said. “It’s not going to be evenly distributed through the population.”Earlier this month, the CDC released an optimistic report which said in a best case scenario, Covid-19 infections could be driven to low levels by July if the vast majority of people get vaccinated and take other precautions, such as wearing masks and social distancing.The CDC report was not a forecast, but a set of scenarios created by six independent research teams using data through 27 March. The modeling does not include what could happen if there was a new, more dangerous variant.Sell expects things will be better this summer, but warned that autumn is still an unknown.“I think we should be humble about what our certainty is about how things will unfold,” Sell said. ”There have been a lot of curveballs.”In the meantime, clinicians like Dr Michelle Chester, who administered the first Covid-19 vaccine in the US outside a clinical trial, are pushing to get vaccinations in as many people as possible.“I’m happy with the numbers but we need to do more because there is still a huge number of people that are still not vaccinated,” said Chester, director of employee health services at Northwell Health, the healthcare system which has treated more hospitalized Covid-19 patients than anywhere in the US.Northwell Health has vaccination sites operating for people 12 and older in the greater New York City area. Some are open 24 hours a day to ensure people with difficult work schedules can find time to get the vaccine.“The more that we can get people vaccinated, the less we have to worry about the virus in a sense of it affecting those individuals who maybe cannot get the vaccine for medical reasons,” Chester said. “We’re protecting them.”Chester said there is still “a long way to go”, but she expects for her family, at least, a more normal summer than last year.“My husband is vaccinated, my daughter couldn’t wait to get her vaccine,” Chester said. “I feel very comfortable that my family is protected and I want that same level of comfort everyone else because I just want to get back to normal.” More

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      Trump allies herald Biden investigation of Covid origins in China

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      Allies of Donald Trump took the unusual step of speaking out on Sunday in support of Joe Biden, regarding efforts to pinpoint the source of Covid-19 and find out if China knows more about the origins of the pandemic than it is letting on.Biden said on Thursday he was expanding an investigation into the outbreak, following a departure from previous thinking by at least one US intelligence agency now leaning towards the theory that the virus escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan.Michael McCaul, a Republican congressman from Texas, and Matthew Pottinger, Trump’s former deputy national security adviser who persuaded him to start using the controversial term “Wuhan virus”, both welcomed the development.“It’s absolutely essential to find out what the origin of this thing is, it’s essential for us to head off the next pandemic, it’s essential for us to better understand the variants of the current pandemic that are emerging,” Pottinger told NBC’s Meet the Press.“Both of these hypotheses that President Biden spoke of are valid, it could have emerged from a laboratory, it could have emerged from nature. Neither is supported by concrete evidence but there’s a growing amount of circumstantial evidence supporting the idea that this may have leaked from a laboratory.”The Wuhan lab theory was dismissed by many scientists and the official position of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Trump’s advisers was that the weight of evidence supported natural origins. The World Health Organization said in February it was “extremely unlikely” Covid-19 began in a laboratory.But the theory has gained traction. On Thursday, the US Office of the Director of National Intelligence said: “The US intelligence community does not know exactly where, when or how the Covid-19 virus was transmitted initially but has coalesced around two likely scenarios: either it emerged naturally from human contact with infected animals or it was a laboratory accident.“While two elements of the IC lean toward the former scenario and one leans more toward the latter – each with low or moderate confidence – the majority of elements within the IC do not believe there is sufficient information to assess one to be more likely than the other.“The IC continues to examine all available evidence, consider different perspectives, and aggressively collect and analyze new information to identify the virus’s origins.”On Sunday, a WHO-affiliated health expert speaking to the BBC said the lab theory was “not off the table” and called on the US to share any intelligence.Pottinger said he believed researchers in China had more to say. “If this thing came out of a lab, there are people in China who probably know that,” he said. “China has incredible and ethical scientists, many of whom in the early stages of the pandemic suspected that this was a lab leak. [A researcher at] the Wuhan Institute of Virology said her first thought was, ‘Was this a leak from my lab?’“These people have been systematically silenced by their government. Now that the world knows how important this is, that might also provide moral courage to many of these ethical scientists for whom I think this is weighing on their consciences. I think that we’re going to see more information come out as a result of this inquiry.”The Wall Street Journal reported last week that three members of staff at a laboratory in Wuhan became sick with Covid-like symptoms before the first Covid patient was recorded in December 2019.McCaul, a former chair of the House homeland security committee, told CNN’s State of the Union he believed Biden’s 90-day intelligence review would likely be inconclusive because Chinese authorities “have destroyed everything in the lab”. But he said he welcomed the new investigation.“It more likely than not emerged out of the lab, most likely accidentally,” said McCaul, who has long argued that China and the WHO are culpable. More

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      ‘Tyranny’: Idaho governor repeals lieutenant’s mask mandate ban

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      The Republican governor of Idaho has repealed an executive order prohibiting mask mandates that was issued by his lieutenant governor while he was out of the state.Brad Little called Janice McGeachin’s action “an irresponsible, self-serving political stunt” and an example of the government “tyranny” she claimed to oppose.McGeachin, a Republican like Little, is a prominent pro-Trump figure in a state roiled by opposition to public health measures meant to contain the coronavirus. In March, she was present when protesters burned masks at the state capitol in Boise.Little has never issued a statewide mask mandate but he has worn a mask and encouraged others to do so. As across the US, case numbers are dropping as more Idahoans are vaccinated.McGeachin announced her own run for governor last week.Seizing her chance when Little was in Tennessee for a meeting of Republican governors on Thursday, she said her order banning mask mandates in schools and public buildings would “protect the rights and liberties of individuals and businesses”. In conflict with almost all public and scientific advice, the text of the order said masks were “ineffective mitigation measures”.In a statement on Friday, Little said he opposed mask mandates because government should not tell people what to do.“But as your governor, when it came to masks I also didn’t undermine separately elected officials who, under Idaho law, are given authorities to take measures they believe will protect the health and safety of the people they serve.“… The action that took place while I was traveling this week is not gubernatorial. The action that took place was an irresponsible, self-serving political stunt.”On Friday, McGeachin was using the nullified order in fundraising efforts.Little continued: “Taking the earliest opportunity to act solitarily on a highly politicised, polarising issue without conferring with local jurisdictions, legislators and the sitting governor is, simply put, an abuse of power.“This kind of over-the-top executive action amounts to tyranny – something we all oppose. How ironic that the action comes from a person who has groused about tyranny, executive overreach, and balance of power for months.”Adding that under McGeachin’s order there would have been no safety requirements for social workers visiting homes of at-risk individuals, at the state testing lab, or at prisons that could have been hit with coronavirus outbreaks, Little said the order conflicted with existing laws.“This is why you do your homework, lieutenant governor,” he said.Asked by a state Democrat to deliver an opinion, the office of the Idaho attorney general said McGeachin had the authority to issue the order, but it appeared to be counter to the Idaho constitution.Little and McGeachin have clashed constantly. Late last year, as Covid cases surged across the US, McGeachin appeared, holding a gun and a Bible, in a video released by the Idaho Freedom Foundation, a rightwing thinktank which opposed restrictions related to a pandemic it said “may or may not be happening”.“We recognize that all of us are by nature, free and equal, and have certain inalienable rights,” she said. “Among which are enjoying and defending life and liberty, acquiring, possessing and protecting property and pursuing happiness and securing safety.”According to Johns Hopkins University, Idaho has recorded more than 192,000 cases of Covid-19 and 2,090 deaths. The national caseload is 33.1m, the death toll close to 590,000. More