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DePaul, Columbia to require students returning for fall semester to be vaccinated
DePaul University and Columbia College will require students to be vaccinated against COVID-19 before returning to campus this fall, the schools announced this week.
Both schools plan to offer vaccines on campus this month.
“Safety, mutual care and social responsibility” are behind the decision, according A. Gabriel Esteban, president of DePaul, the nation’s largest Catholic university.
“While the pandemic has kept many of us apart in the last year, I am greatly anticipating your return to campus in the fall,” Esteban wrote in a letter to students. “Keeping our community safe requires a collective effort.”
Both schools will grant religious or medical-based exemptions to the rule.
Read Mitch Dudek’s full story here.
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10:04 a.m. FDA inspection found problems at factory making J&J vaccine
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COVID-19 shot to return in fall (LIVE UPDATES) 2")
The Baltimore factory hired to help make Johnson & Johnson’s COVID-19 vaccine was dirty, didn’t follow proper manufacturing procedures and had poorly trained staff, resulting in contamination of material going into a batch of shots, U.S. regulators said Wednesday.
The Food and Drug Administration released a statement and a 13-page report detailing findings from its just-completed inspection of the idled Emergent BioSciences factory.
Agency inspectors said a batch of bulk drug substance for J&J’s single-shot vaccine was contaminated with material used to make COVID-19 vaccines for another Emergent client, AstraZeneca. The batch, reportedly enough to make about 15 million J&J vaccine doses, had to be thrown out.
Other problems cited in the inspection report included peeling paint, black and brown residue on factory floors and walls, inadequate cleaning and employees not following procedures to prevent contamination between vaccine batches and ingredients.
Nothing made at the factory for J&J has been distributed, the FDA noted. The nearly 8 million doses of J&J vaccine given in the U.S. came from Europe.
Both Emergent and Johnson & Johnson said Wednesday that they are working to fix the problems as quickly as possible.
Read the full story from the Associated Press here.
New cases and vaccination rates
- Wednesday, the Illinois Department of Public Health reported 2,765 new cases of the coronavirus diagnosed among 81,133 tests to keep the average statewide positivity rate at 3.8%. After doubling over the course of a month, that key metric has now fallen or held steady for nine straight days.
- Illinois hospitals reported a slight decrease in COVID-19 patients, down to 2,191 as of Tuesday night.
- But the virus also killed 28 more residents, including a Kankakee County man in his 30s.
- More than 1.3 million Illinoisans have contracted COVID-19 over the last year, and 21,722 have died.
- More than 8.3 million doses of the COVID-19 vaccine have been administered overall over the past four months, with 3.5 million residents now fully vaccinated — almost 28% of the population.
