News Room

COVID-19 has impacted every intercollegiate sport this season. For example, over 20 percent of all men’s Division I basketball games have been cancelled or postponed, not including the Ivy League, whose teams shut down their seasons entirely. The NCAA recently announced that March Madness will be held entirely in the state of Indiana. The NCAA has also made several policy changes, including granting one extra year of eligibility to spring-, fall- and winter-sport student-athletes and permitting student-athletes to transfer to another school without sitting out one year. Although such changes appear sympathetic to the needs of student-athletes, they carry with them unintended consequences.

Dr. Anna Nagurney, director of the Virtual Center for Supernetworks at UMass Amherst, said the logistical failures of Massachusetts’ coronavirus vaccine registration website are unacceptable in a state that is “known for its prowess in information technology.”

On Thursday, state Sen. Eric Lesser filed legislation that would direct the Massachusetts Department of Public Health to immediately create a one-stop online sign-up for vaccinations accessible from desktop computer as well as mobile devices; as well as a phone hotline immediately be established in multiple languages. “The Phase 2 vaccine rollout is creating mass confusion and anxiety for our eligible senior population," Lesser said. "The system is cumbersome, contradictory, and asks residents over 75 to navigate a haze of web links, locations, and instructions, each with different criteria and scheduling systems." Dr. Anna Nagurney, an expert in logistics and professor at University of Massachusetts Amherst, said the rollout should have been smoother in a state known for its prowess in information technology.

President Joe Biden announced his administration was in talks with Moderna to buy an additional 200 million doses, for a total of 600 million, therefore ensuring the United States would have at least two shots for nearly every citizen. Under the previous administration, the government bought 200 million vaccines from Pfizer and 200 vaccines from Moderna. Moderna confirmed it was in talks to do so on Wednesday morning in a press release. Biden also said the federal government would increase the number of vaccines in shipments being sent to states, after weeks of state officials worrying they did not have enough doses to meet their goals. The shipments would increase from 8.6 million to 10 million every week, and states would be informed of their shipments three weeks in advance, ABC News reported.

President Joe Biden’s coronavirus response team is preparing to send vaccines directly to retail pharmacies for the first time as soon as early February, a move that would create new access points for Americans to get immunized against COVID-19. The exact timing is still uncertain and highly dependent on the nation’s overall vaccine supply. But two sources familiar with the matter told McClatchy that the president’s new task force is pushing ahead with the plan, eager to expand vaccination availability to more people in more places as the virus continues to spread and new variants emerge.

“This is an integral part of the National Vaccination strategy that the president released a couple of weeks ago and we are working as quickly as we can, and as the supply allows, to execute on it,” one White House official said on condition of anonymity.