Georgia Public Health Commissioner Dr. Kathleen Toomey (right) gave updates on COVID-19 vaccine distribution and the worsening winter outbreak alongside Gov. Brian Kemp (left) at Emory University’s Woodruff Health Sciences Center in Atlanta on Dec. 22, 2020. (Photo by Beau Evans)
Seniors and staff in Georgia’s nursing homes are set to start receiving COVID-19 vaccines next week as positive cases continue increasing across the state amid the winter holidays, Gov. Brian Kemp and other officials said Tuesday.
Elderly-care facility residents who have been among the hardest hit since the pandemic sparked in March should start receiving doses next Monday of a vaccine developed by the pharmaceutical company Moderna, the second vaccine to roll out so far in Georgia.
The vaccine boost comes as Georgia continues to see a spike in positive COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations during the winter holiday season. Georgia reported its highest-ever daily case number of 6,242 positive cases on Tuesday, said state Public Health Commissioner Dr. Kathleen Toomey.
The worsening winter outbreak has prompted officials to open 60 intensive-care beds at the Georgia World Congress Center starting next week in preparation for peaking capacity at local hospitals, Kemp said. He urged Georgians to take caution this week as families and friends gather for the Christmas.
“This long battle, as long as it’s been, we know it is coming to an end with this vaccine before us,” Kemp said at a news conference Tuesday. “But that being said, we cannot let up.
“We have to continue to focus on celebrating safely to get us through the holidays as normally and as quickly as possible so that we can continue the methodical reopening of our economy and weathering this COVID-19 storm until we can get everyone in our state vaccinated.”
State officials expect to receive 174,000 doses of the Moderna vaccine in the initial distribution phase, adding to the roughly 125,000 doses Georgia has received so far of the vaccine developed by pharmaceutical company Pfizer.
Workers at local hospitals and health departments in Georgia have been first in line to be vaccinated following federal approval of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines this month. Officials are pushing to vaccinate all the state’s health-care workers sometime in January.
About 20,000 doses of the Moderna vaccine should be in next Monday’s shipment to elderly-care facility residents and staff. The Moderna vaccine can be stored at less-cold temperatures than the Pfizer vaccine.
“We are seeing a miracle of modern science happen right before our eyes,” Kemp said Tuesday. “And it is well needed, I’ll tell you.”
Roughly 95% of the state’s elderly-care facilities have signed up since October to receive the COVID-19 vaccine and have providers arrive on-site to administer doses to residents and staff, Toomey said.
Hundreds of health-care facilities, clinics, primary-care physicians and pharmacists have signaled to state officials their willingness to receive the vaccine and administer doses in the coming months.
With vaccines rolling out now for hospitals and elderly-care facilities, Toomey said she anticipates workers in critical jobs like Georgia’s school teachers should start receiving the vaccine in February.
The vaccine likely will not be widely available to the general public until summer 2021, officials have said. An online dashboard has been created to track progress on the vaccine’s distribution.
“With now the Moderna vaccine, we can literally cover the state in vaccination,” Toomey said.
Like Pfizer’s vaccine, the Moderna vaccine was developed using new technology that mimics the virus’ DNA to create immunity, not by injecting small amounts of virus as has traditionally been done with vaccines. That method helped developers produce the vaccine within months instead of years.
Clinical trials showed both vaccines have mild side effects like temporary arm pain and under-the-weather feelings. Emory University in Atlanta oversaw trials of the Moderna vaccine with thousands of local participants, including a large number from minority communities.
Ahead of the wider rollout, officials and health experts are urging Georgians to trust in the vaccine’s safety and to get vaccinated as soon as they can to better halt COVID-19’s spread.
“Vaccines don’t save lives, vaccinations do,” said Emory Healthcare CEO Dr. Jonathan Lewin. “As soon as you have the opportunity to receive the vaccine, please be sure to do that.”
More than 500,000 people in Georgia have tested positive for COVID-19 so far. As of Tuesday, the virus had killed 9,503 Georgians.
ATLANTA – The evidence police typically obtain through no-knock search warrants aren’t worth the inherent risks of knocking unannounced on a citizen’s door in the middle of the night, a criminal defense lawyer said Tuesday.
“No-knock warrants are almost exclusively used for drug cases. They’re never used for kidnapping, burglary, murder or theft,” Catherine Bernard, a partner with Atlanta’s Bernard & Johnson LLC, told members of a state Senate study committee. “[But] no-knock warrants are incredibly dangerous for everyone involved on both sides of the transaction.”
The Senate Study Committee on Law Enforcement Reform was formed this year as a follow-up to a hate crimes bill the General Assembly passed at the end of this year’s legislative session in June. Both the Senate panel and the House Judiciary Non-Civil Committee held hearings during the summer and fall to consider potential reforms to policing and the state’s criminal justice system.
Besides no-knock warrants, the committees also have been taking testimony on Georgia’s citizens arrest law and the legal doctrine of “qualified immunity” that protects police officers from civil suits under certain circumstances.
While Georgia law does not give police the authority to execute no-knock search warrants, judges can and do sign orders allowing them if law enforcement authorities can show knocking on a criminal suspect’s door might be dangerous or might inhibit an investigation by, for example, giving suspects time to flush drugs down a toilet.
Pete Skandalakis, executive director of the Prosecuting Attorneys’ Council of Georgia, said no-knock warrants are rare in Georgia.
“I’ve been a prosecutor for 32 years. I have not seen many of them,” he said.
Bernard said no-knock warrants are routine, but most don’t get attention because they don’t yield the tragic results that make them high-profile cases.
Exceptions in Georgia include the death of David Hooks, a 59-year-old grandfather in East Dublin shot in 2015 during a drug raid based on false information from an informer, and Kathryn Johnston, an elderly Atlanta woman shot to death in 2006 during a raid by undercover police officers at what turned out to be the wrong address.
“Innocent lives are destroyed by no-knock search warrants,” Bernard said.
Bernard said justifying no-knock warrants as necessary to keep suspects from getting rid of illegal drugs doesn’t hold up because anyone possessing a large quantity of drugs wouldn’t be able to dump them so quickly.
“If it’s something that can be flushed down the toilet, it’s not worth risking somebody’s life over,” she said.
While Bernard urged senators not to tamper with the current state law that prohibits no-knock warrants, others who testified called for the repeal of Georgia’s citizens arrest law, which has come under scrutiny because of the Ahmaud Arbery case.
Three white men were arrested last spring in the February shooting death of Arbery, an unarmed Black man from Brunswick who was jogging in the men’s neighborhood. At first, the local prosecutor declined to bring charges, citing the citizens arrest law.
“The racist history of our law is on display,” said Mazie Lynn Causey, general counsel for the Georgia Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. “It allows private individuals to take on the role of enforcer, prosecutor and judge.”
Other witnesses at Tuesday’s hearing complained that allowing police officers who commit misconduct in carrying out their duties qualified immunity from civil suits makes the burden of proof to win such cases virtually impossible.
Chris Stewart, an Atlanta personal injury and civil rights attorney, said he’s working on legislative proposals to either eliminate or modify Georgia’s qualified immunity law.
But Skandalakis said qualified immunity serves a useful purpose in law enforcement in that it encourages police officers to do their jobs without being afraid of being sued.
“Qualified immunity is not absolute immunity,” he added. “A police officer who does not follow policies and procedures or does not act in a reasonable manner can lose qualified immunity.”
Both the House and Senate committees are expected to make recommendations for the full General Assembly to consider when lawmakers return next month for the 2021 session.
Legislation aimed at drawing more visitors to former President Jimmy Carter’s hometown of Plains is on its way to President Donald Trump for his signature.
The U.S. Senate unanimously passed a bill on Monday that already had cleared the House of Representatives re-designating the Jimmy Carter National Historic Site as the “Jimmy Carter National Historical Park.”
The measure was introduced into Congress by Sen. David Perdue, R-Ga., and Rep. Sanford Bishop, D-Albany, and cosponsored by the entire Georgia congressional delegation.
“No matter where life has taken me, from the Governor’s Mansion to the White House, Plains has always been my home,” Carter said Monday. “Rosalynn joins me in thanking Senator Perdue, Congressman Bishop and the Georgia delegation for helping preserve my family’s legacy.”
The re-designation will help protect three current sites in Plains: Carter’s boyhood farm, Plains High School – the alma mater of both Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter, now a museum – and the Plains Train Depot, which served as headquarters for Carter’s presidential campaign.
Eventually, the home where the Carters now live and their gravesites will be included in the park.
After serving as Georgia’s governor in the early 1970s, Carter – a Democrat – was elected president in 1976 when he defeated Republican incumbent Gerald Ford. Carter served one term before he lost to Republican Ronald Reagan in 1980.
Many of the visitors who travel to Plains ride the SAM Shortline Excursion Train, a tourist attraction in its own right connecting downtown Cordele with Plains via Americus.
Georgia K-12 public schools have the option not to count year-end tests toward students’ final grades this year due to schooling hardships from the COVID-19 pandemic following a vote Monday by the state Board of Education.
State law requires scores on the annual Georgia Milestones tests to account for 20% of the cumulative grades for most of the state’s public-school students, from the third grade up to their senior year.
But this year, the Milestones scores can be counted essentially zero after State School Superintendent Richard Woods won approval for his proposal to water down the tests so students and teachers can have some relief as they continue working through tremendous challenges due to the virus.
“I firmly believe this is the right thing for kids,” Woods said after Monday’s vote. “We must ensure students and teachers are not penalized for circumstances beyond their control.”
School districts now have leeway to recalculate final course grades for the fall semester and count the tests as 0.01% if they want, a state Department of Education spokesperson confirmed. The same 0.01% weight can also apply for year-end tests in the upcoming spring 2021 semester.
Critically, each district also has the option to count the test scores higher than the 0.01% weight for students’ final grades in their local schools if they choose, the spokesperson confirmed.
Woods’ 0.01% proposal gained huge support from students, teachers, parents and school advocates across the state after U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos shot down his request in September to relax federal requirements on standardized tests this year with the pandemic.
DeVos insisted on using the tests to gauge school performance despite the impacts of virtual learning, which has upended how teachers instruct the state’s nearly 2 million students.
But Woods, backed by Georgia’s largest teachers’ union, pledged to gut the tests.
“Don’t worry about the tests,” Woods told local school districts in September. “We will abide by federal law, but we are also going to take the high-stakes power of the tests away.”
Despite his pledge, Woods’ plan was nearly killed in October when several state board members agreed with DeVos that the test weights should stay put, both to track how much students are learning and keep them from shrugging off their studies if the tests have no teeth.
“I’m not ready to give up on this year,” said Mike Royal, a 10-year board member who opposed scrapping the test weights entirely.
Royal joined other board members in October to hack the tests’ weight down to 10% instead of 0.01%, triggering a 30-day public comment period required before a final vote. That decision was met with intense backlash, the board to ditch the 10% alternative last month and back Woods’ original proposal.
“It has been an increasingly challenging year,” board Chairman Scott Sweeney said after Monday’s vote. “We still have a tremendous amount of work before us.”
Georgia schools are staring down another rough road to close out the 2020-21 term after shifting to online-only courses last spring and returning to uncertain classroom settings in the fall. Many districts remain strictly virtual while others have given students the option to resume in-person studies.
Meanwhile, standardized tests in Georgia are in the crosshairs after Woods outlined plans in October to continue shrinking the importance of year-end assessments and give local school districts more flexibility to evaluate student and teacher performance – ideas that Gov. Brian Kemp also supports.
That follows legislation the General Assembly passed this year that eliminated four year-end tests in Georgia high schools and one in the third grade, marking a win for the governor as he pushes to lock in support from educators ahead of his bid for reelection in 2022.
Greg Dozier, commissioner, Technical College System of Georgia
ATLANTA – The Technical College System of Georgia awarded $9 million in grants Monday to establish new College and Career academies in Appling, Evans and Union counties.
Three technical colleges will partner with local education systems to establish the academies, with each receiving $3 million.
Coastal Pines Technical College will work with Appling County Schools to establish the Appling Regional College and Career Academy. The Evans Regional College and Career Academy will be run through a partnership of Ogeechee Technical College and Evans County Schools.
North Georgia Technical College will partner with Union County Schools to establish the Union County College and Career Academy.
Georgia’s network of college and career academies give high school students a chance to develop skills in demand in the state’s workforce.
“The addition of these three College and Career academies in Georgia means we are providing more students with learning opportunities that link directly to workforce needs,” said Greg Dozier, commissioner of the state’s technical college system.
“More high school students will experience an education that connects the classroom to a career through valuable partnerships made with local industry.”
The three new academies will bring the number of College and Career academies in Georgia to 52. More than 38,000 students are enrolled in academies throughout the state.
