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The White House is standing firm on President Joe Biden’s weekly Covid testing regimen, even after the president had two close calls with the virus since Tuesday. Biden was last tested on Sunday, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said during Thursday’s briefing with reporters at the White House. She said multiple times that Biden’s “weekly testing cadence remains as it has been.” The White House has been vague about how often the president is tested, so it’s not clear whether he is just tested once a week, or whether this varies on a week-to-week basis. (Ward, 3/17)

Conservative Republican lawmakers on Thursday revived a proposal to weaken Kansas’ vaccination requirements for children enrolling in school and day care and to make it easier for people to get potentially dangerous treatments for COVID-19. The Senate health committee approved a bill that would allow parents to get a no-questions-asked religious exemption from requirements to vaccinate their children against more than a dozen diseases, including measles, whooping cough, polio and chickenpox. (Hanna, 3/17)

Even before she was pregnant, Athena Salman was extra cautious about avoiding exposure to COVID-19. The Arizona representative has asthma, which means she’s more likely to be hospitalized if infected. So Salman was relieved when the Arizona legislature approved several mitigation policies for the 2021 session. Lawmakers could cast votes virtually for committee meetings and chamber floor activity. There was a mask mandate and plexiglass separating lawmakers when they chose to meet in person. The public could also testify on bills virtually, reducing crowds. (Rodriguez, 3/17)

An appellate court on Thursday sided with Texas school districts in their dispute with state officials over mask mandates, which numerous school systems already have lifted as pandemic conditions have eased. The state’s the 3rd Court of Appeals affirmed a trial court’s orders that granted school districts temporary injunctive relief from the enforcement of an executive order from Gov. Greg Abbott prohibiting mask mandates. (Serrano, 3/17)

It’s 2 p.m. on a Wednesday in Chester, and nurses Susan Pollock and Carol Von Colln are inside a Delaware County vaccine clinic doing what they spend a lot of time doing these days: waiting. Last spring, Americans were in a frenzied rush to get the COVID-19 vaccine; this spring, business has slowed to a crawl. Now, whenever someone walks in, “we’re ready to throw a party,” Von Colln said. That day, they vaccinated eight people in six hours. It’s a scene playing out across the region and the United States as the number of shots being given each day is at an all-time low — even though a third of Americans are still unvaccinated. (McDaniel and McCarthy, 3/18)

KHN: Sharing Covid Vax Facts Inside ICE Detention, One Detainee At A Time 

The sounds of wailing ambulances, car horns, and bustling traffic filtered into the high-rise home office of Dr. Daniel Turner-Lloveras in downtown Los Angeles as he settled into a brown leather couch to take a call. On the other end of the line, staring at a mint-green wall inside a plexiglass phone booth with little privacy, sat Pedro Figueroa, 33, a detainee at the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Mesa Verde detention facility in Bakersfield, California. “Is it mandatory to get the booster?” Figueroa asked in Spanish. “And why do I need it?” (de Marco, 3/18)

KHN: It Was Already Hard To Find Evusheld, A Covid Prevention Therapy. Now It’s Even Harder 

As immunocompromised people across the country work to get Evusheld, a potentially lifesaving covid therapy, several hundred providers of the injections were removed from a federal dataset on Wednesday night, making the therapy even harder to locate. White House officials had announced March 15 that a planned purchase of more doses would have to be scaled back without new federal funding. (Recht, 3/17)