The latest A federal advisory panel on Friday voted against providing a third dose of Pfizer-BioNTech's vaccine for everyone 16 and older, but they're continuing to debate whether to authorize an additional dose for older adults. The vaccine's makers had asked the Food and Drug Administration to approve boosters, six months after full vaccination, for anyone 16 and older. The FDA committee's decision, plus those made by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and that agency's advisers, will influence whether boosters are available beginning Sept. 20 as the Biden administration has hoped. The FDA advisers voted Pfizer's general plan down; discussions on other recommendations were still ongoing as of Friday afternoon. To know any other major decisions coming out of the panel today, you can sign up for The Post's Health, Science and Environment news email alerts here. Amid a lack of ventilators, clinicians and other necessities as hospitals treat an influx of covid-19 patients, some states are rationing medical care or preparing to do so. So many patients have been admitted to Idaho's hospitals the state has activated "crisis standards of care," a rationing process designed to save as many lives as possible. A tough choice at the Alaska Medical Center in Anchorage is another example, where physicians had to decide how to divide two kidney dialysis machines among four patients. "We're at a place I don't think U.S. health care has been at in over 100 years," Bruce Siegel, president and CEO of a hospital trade group, told The Post. "We simply don't have capacity in large parts of the country." New cases per 100,000 residents in California are among the lowest in the United States, after a difficult summer where the more transmissible delta variant triggered a spike in infections. All is not glittery in the Golden State, though. Hospitals ICUs, particularly in the Central Valley and rural north, have been overwhelmed. A lack of staff is hampering the response in this state, too. But mask mandates and a vigorous vaccine campaign have helped flatten the curve in California, experts told The Post. President Biden said this week the "governors of Florida and Texas are doing everything they can to undermine the lifesaving requirements that I proposed," another salvo in the president and Republican officials' bitter exchanges over vaccine mandates. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) responded by accusing the president of being "a habitual violator of the U.S. Constitution." And GOP attorneys general published an open letter Thursday saying they would "seek every available legal option" against the requirements. Hundreds of millions more doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine will be donated worldwide after the Biden administration purchases them, according to two people familiar with this deal. Details weren't final yet Friday — formal announcement of this plan is expected for next week. The United States has already bought 500 million doses for Covax, the World Health Organization-backed program to share vaccines with poorer nations. Other important news A CDC study released Friday concludes that, of the three vaccines available in the United States, Moderna's is the most effective against hospitalization — but all offer "substantial protection." The FDA emergency-use authorization for Eli Lilly's antibody treatment has been expanded beyond certain patients who test positive for infection to include people who are exposed to the virus as well. Larger-than-usual numbers of children infected with the seasonal virus RSV have been admitted to medical centers in the Washington region, hospital officials say. Covid-19 has exacerbated the problem of unclaimed bodies in the United States. In Maricopa County, Ariz., for instance, there has been a 30 percent increase in these remains. Travel to Hawaii slowed, but did not stop, after Gov. David Ige (D) asked tourists to stay away through October to avoid overburdening the state's already strained hospitals. Microbiologist Didier Raoult, who advocates for hydroxychloroquine and other dubious covid-19 therapies, is in jeopardy of losing his job as director of an infectious diseases institute in France. | 
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