Vaccines

A proposal in the Washington Legislature would make it a crime to use or sell a fake COVID-19 vaccination card. The sponsor says he wants to deter people from even considering the ruse, but he also wants to send a signal to prosecutors to prioritize these cases as a matter of protecting public health.

On Thursday, the U.S. Supreme Court blocked implementation of the Biden administration’s vaccine rule for big businesses. By that evening, officials with Oregon’s Occupational Safety and Health Division had called off state rulemaking as well.

With more than 500,000 employees, the post office says complying with the rule would be difficult and could interfere with timely mail deliveries.

Parents of children too young to be vaccinated are facing difficult choices as COVID cases fueled by the omicron variant rise to record levels and every encounter seems risky.

Oregon OSHA is working on the state’s version of a federal vaccine mandate for larger businesses. But legal challenges remain.

The private Portland university joins other schools that have made the shift to requiring boosters in the past few weeks including the University of Oregon, Oregon State University and Southern Oregon University.

In one of his first acts as Washington secretary of state, Democrat Steve Hobbs has told his roughly 300 staff to get vaccinated against COVID-19 by Feb. 25, or face losing their jobs.

The move to shorten the Pfizer booster interval comes as the U.S. shatters daily case records. The recommended interval for those who received Moderna or Johnson & Johnson vaccines has not changed.

The program called COVAX was set up to make sure that all countries have access to COVID vaccines. Two key public health figures talk about what went wrong — and how to fix it.

To deal with the looming omicron surge, Oregon is taking several steps, including the addition of three new high-volume vaccination and booster sites to the six currently operating.