Joe Biden calls it 'a big mistake' for states to lift mask mandates; North Dakota has nation's worst virus rate: Latest COVID-19 updates

The White House was bullish on vaccines, masks and its stimulus bill Wednesday as the Senate prepared to tackle the $1.9 trillion package that could start putting $1,400 in the pockets of most Americans – although fewer than the House version allowed – in two weeks.

What the White House is not keen on is states lifting pandemic restrictions at a time when experts warn the nation is till susceptible to a major surge in infections driven by coronavirus variants.

President Joe Biden slammed those decisions Wednesday, a day after the Texas and Mississippi governors said they're discarding masking mandates, and said they're "a big mistake.'' Only about 8% of the U.S. population is fully vaccinated against COVID-19.

"The last thing we need is Neanderthal thinking that, in the meantime, everything's fine, take off your mask, forget it," Biden said. "It still matters."

Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves responded on Twitter, saying, “I just think we should trust Americans, not insult them.”

Earlier Wednesday, the Biden administration announced it will invest $100 million to prep Merck Co. factories to produce COVID-19 vaccine developed by rival Johnson & Johnson. Biden said Tuesday that sufficient vaccine should be available for all adults by the end of May.

Far outside Washington's political beltway, governors were preparing to return some semblance of normalcy to their states. Texas and Mississippi dropped all mask mandates. New York state was testing a high-tech "Excelsior Pass'' allowing participants to confirm vaccinations or recent negative COVID-19 tests and gain entry to events at theaters and arenas.

Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has warned that "now is not the time to release all restrictions."

The Senate was initially expected to begin debating the pandemic stimulus bill Wednesday but that has been delayed. Under the plan, according to two sources familiar with the deliberations not authorized to speak on the record, the stimulus checks would start to phase out for Americans earning $75,000 a year and phase out entirely at $80,000 of income for individuals. The House bill had capped income at $100,000.

The bill also includes funding for state and local governments, tax credits for families and bigger unemployment checks.

Also in the news:

►Sparsely populated North Dakota has reported its 100,000th coronavirus case, according to John Hopkins University data. With about 762,000 people, more than 1 of every 8 residents in the state has tested positive. That's about 13.1 percent, the worst rate of any state. The best-performing state is Hawaii, where about 1 in every 51 people has tested positive.

►Federal health officials have ended a research trial of convalescent plasma on COVID-19 patients with harsh symptoms after a study showed no benefits from the treatment, which involved using blood from recovered patients.

►NYC Health + Hospitals announced a partnership with the City University of New York that will provide almost 1,000 nursing students to 11 hospitals and clinics to support with the system’s vaccination program. Responsibilities include vaccine administration, clerical tasks, appointment logistics and monitoring patients who receive an injection.

►The rash some people develop after their first shot of the Moderna vaccine doesn't get worse with the second dose and typically doesn't happen at all, a new study shows.

►A report by the Geneva-based Insecurity Insight and the University of California-Berkeley’s Human Rights Center identified more than 1,100 threats or acts of violence against health care workers and facilities last year. Researchers found that about 400 of those attacks were related to COVID-19.

📈 Today's numbers: The U.S. has more than 28.7 million confirmed coronavirus cases and 519,000 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University data. The global totals: More than 115.1 million cases and 2.55 million deaths. More than 107 million vaccine doses have been distributed in the U.S. and about 80.5 million have been administered, according to the CDC.

📘 What we're reading: More COVID-19 variants are emerging closer to home: What to know about the ones discovered in Brazil, New York, California.

USA TODAY is tracking COVID-19 news. Keep refreshing this page for the latest updates. Want more? Sign up for our Coronavirus Watch newsletter for updates to your inbox and join our Facebook group.

California officials dispute local report of underdosing at Oakland Coliseum

The California Office of Emergency Services is disputing a local television report that some people who were vaccinated on Monday at the Oakland Coliseum received too little of the Pfizer dose.

The Bay Area's KTVU reported Wednesday that two EMTs told them they had received a number of 0.3-mL syringes at the site that day just before 2 p.m. that left about a third of the vaccine stuck in the bottom of the plunger.

But Cal OES spokesman Brian Ferguson said in an email to USA TODAY that neither the state nor the Federal Emergency Management Agency “are aware of any instance of even a single individual being under-vaccinated” at the site.

“The public should rest assured that vaccines administered at the Coliseum are being dispensed in a manner consistent with medical and scientific best practices and will work as designed,” he wrote.

Even if people were underdosed, they can make it up in the second shot, Dr. Peter Chin-Hong, an infectious disease physician at UCSF, told KTVU.

Vaccine-related crime burgeoning across the world, Interpol says

The scarcity of a potentially life-saving product amid a pandemic that has led to more than 2.5 million deaths worldwide was bound to result in counterfeits, and Interpol has confirmed that COVID-19 vaccines are the target of organized crime networks.

The global police agency has broken up a smuggling operation that involved shipping at least 2,400 fake vaccine doses from China to South Africa, according to Time magazine, and that's merely one of what figure to be many such attempts.

“This is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to COVID-19 vaccine related crime,” said Jürgen Stock, Interpol's secretary general, said in a statement Wednesday.

Health insurers to arrange COVID vaccinations for 2 million elderly

The White House on Wednesday unveiled plans by large health insurers to accelerate vaccination of 2 million people 65 and older "as soon as possible."

The insurers will reach out to vulnerable seniors with information on the safety and effectiveness of the vaccine and also help schedule and arrange transportation to the vaccination site, White House coronavirus adviser Andy Slavitt said.

Dolly Parton, who helped fund vaccine, gets 'dose of her own medicine'

Exhale, country music lovers. Dolly Parton has received a dose of the COVID-19 vaccination. The country music legend – who helped fund the Moderna vaccine with a $1 million donation to Vanderbilt researchers – received her shot Tuesday in Nashville, Tennessee, per an Instagram post. Her caption simply reads: "Dolly gets a dose of her own medicine."

In a video published Tuesday, Parton, 75, encouraged viewers to get vaccinated because "the sooner we get to feelin' better, the sooner we are gonna get back to being normal."

Fed's high-tech vaccine tracker is too complicated for many states

Operation Warp Speed spent $16 million on Tiberius, a high-tech system meant to track shipments of vaccines and guide local decisions of where to send them. Tiberius – also the name of a tyrannical, moody Roman emperor and the middle name of Star Trek's Captain James Kirk – would allow “granular planning” all the way down to the doctor’s office, provide “a ZIP code-by-ZIP code view of priority populations” and “ease the burden” on public health officials, the federal government said.

But for many states, Tiberius proved either irrelevant or too complicated. That has contributed to a patchy vaccine rollout, where access depends mostly on where you live and how Internet savvy you are.

Even if local officials opted to use Tiberius, “they would be giving us data that they got from us,” said Dr. Bela Matyas, deputy director of public health for Solano County, California. “Local public health officials have an immense amount of data and know their communities well.

– Aleszu Bajak and David Heath

COVID-19 can affect immune system in complex ways, research shows

In some COVID-19 patients, scientists say unprepared immune cells appear to be responding to the coronavirus with a devastating release of chemicals, inflicting damage that may endure long after the threat has been eliminated.

“If you have a brand-new virus and the virus is winning, the immune system may go into an ‘all hands on deck’ response,” said Dr. Nina Luning Prak, co-author of a January study on COVID-19 and the immune system. “Things that are normally kept in close check are relaxed. The body may say, ‘Who cares. Give me all you’ve got.’”

While all viruses find ways to evade the body’s defenses, a growing field of research suggests that the coronavirus unhinges the immune system more profoundly than previously realized.

– Liz Szabo, Kaiser Health News

Contributing: Mike Stucka, Nicholas Wu and Ledyard King, USA TODAY; The Associated Press

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: COVID update: Biden says lifting mask mandates 'big mistake'; stimulus