The latest President Donald Trump's case of covid-19 launched a five-day scramble among federal officials to find treatment. Post reporters Damian Paletta and Yasmeen Abutaleb describe, in an excerpt from their new book, the pressure the White House applied on FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn to authorize monoclonal antibody therapy for the president. Because he was 74 years old and met the medical definition of obesity, the then-president was at high risk for severe disease. In fact, Trump was much sicker than his closest aides knew. Even in nations where vaccine campaigns have been most successful, they have met pockets of resistance and hesitancy. In the United States, rates in the South and Midwest lag behind the national average. In the European Union, about 1 in 4 residents say they will not get vaccinated. Hesitancy is a hurdle in Russia and India, too. Together, these obstacles raise the ominous question, as posed by reporter Adam Taylor: What if the first part of the global vaccine campaign was actually the easiest? Fatigue, respiratory issues and other lingering symptoms of coronavirus infection, known as long covid, may have afflicted more than 2 million people in England, according to a study by Imperial College London and other U.K. researchers. Women, as well as people from low-income communities, are more likely to be susceptible. Long covid may be more widespread than thought, the research suggests. The United States has administered about 300 million mRNA doses. Following those vaccinations there have been 1,226 reports of myocarditis, a rare heart condition in which the muscle is inflamed, according to data recently presented to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advisers. The symptoms are mostly mild and predominantly affect teenagers and young men. Though there is a "likely association" between the mRNA vaccines and myocarditis, federal officials say, the benefits of vaccination far outweigh these and any other risks. In fact, as one vaccine expert pointed out, covid-19 itself causes this heart condition far more frequently than vaccines do. A computational biologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Jesse Bloom, noticed several coronavirus sequences had been stored but then deleted from an archive at the National Institutes of Health. Bloom found those sequences in Google's cloud storage and analyzed them. The sequences do not add any support to the various hypotheses about the virus's origins. But, as one epidemiologist said, the analysis offers additional "evidence of what many of us speculated — that the virus was circulating before the market outbreak" in China. Other important news Spread of the delta variant in Sydney means the region is facing "perhaps the scariest period" of the pandemic, according to New South Wales premier Gladys Berejiklian. The American Red Cross has warned the resumption of organ transplants, scheduled surgeries and other procedures is leading to critical shortages of blood. Japan is considering a four-day workweek, an idea that has been floated by multiple countries as their economies recover from the pandemic. Almost 900 Secret Service members, many assigned to protect Trump and Vice President Mike Pence, tested positive for the coronavirus, the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington said. | 
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