Dr. Peter Marks, who directs the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, said the idea is to streamline COVID-19 vaccine guidance as the country transitions to managing the virus as an endemic or ever-present concern while spurring interest in the shots, particularly among those who are most vulnerable.

“COVID-19 continues to be a very real risk for many people,” Marks said in a statement. “The available data continue to demonstrate that vaccines prevent the most serious outcomes of COVID-19, which are severe illness, hospitalization, and death.”

The FDA’s changes are:

• The original COVID shots are no longer authorized in the U.S. That’s the Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 messenger-RNA vaccines based on the original strain of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that emerged in Wuhan, China, in late 2019 and were given as a two-dose primary series starting in December 2020. That strain has long been replaced by a series of variants, including the current omicron.
• One shot gets you caught up. Most people who haven’t yet had a shot of the updated “bivalent” vaccine based on both the Wuhan and more recent omicron strains can now receive a single dose. That includes the 30% of Americans who didn’t get vaccinated with the two-shot primary series of the original vaccine. Children 6 months to 5 years old who are unvaccinated or who had the original vaccine can receive multiple doses of the bivalent vaccine for kids.
• Older and vulnerable adults can get another booster. If you are 65 or older and already had a dose of the bivalent vaccine, you can now get a second booster of that shot after at least four months. Those with compromised immunity who had a dose of the bivalent vaccine also may receive another shot after at least two months, and additional doses at the discretion of their doctor. Most other people who already had the bivalent shot are not eligible for another.

The bivalent boosters could become available later this week after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention weighs in with its recommendation, which could come as early as Wednesday.

Dr. Bob Wachter, who chairs the University of California-San Francisco’s medical department, said “the FDA made a reasonable call, and it’s also reasonable to offer it to people without pushing it too hard.”

Another booster after six months should offer some short-lived protection against infection and boost protection against severe infection, which he said has waned by about half after the initial booster. He’ll urge his 87-year-old mother to get the booster, and he and his wife in their mid-60s will get it because “there is a decent chance of benefit and next-to-no risk,” but he’s fine with his 30-something kids putting it off.

“For people at low risk of a bad outcome,” Wachter said, “the additional benefit of another boost may not be worth it. For those at higher risk, it probably is.”

But the FDA’s announcement left other medical experts with questions about who besides those at high risk still needs a booster.

Dr. Paul A. Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital Of Philadelphia, co-inventor of a rotavirus vaccine and a member of the FDA’s vaccine advisory panel, said the good news is prior infection or vaccination still provides durable protection against severe illness from current omicron strains.

But Offit hasn’t seen convincing evidence additional doses will significantly boost protection for those who aren’t old or chronically ill.

“We’re the only country in this world that recommends a booster dose for everyone over 6 months of age,” Offit said in an interview Tuesday. “I’ve had three doses of the vaccine and an infection. I’m not going to get a booster, and I’m older than 65.”

The United Kingdom, for example, offers a seasonal COVID-19 vaccine booster if you’re age 75 or older, living in elder care homes or for those 5 and up with weakened immunity. Germany recommends a booster at 12 and up, or 5 and up with health conditions, but a second dose only for 60 and older, health workers and those with weak immunity.

Only 17% in the U.S. have had the updated bivalent booster, with the highest uptake among people 65 and older, at 43%. Among other age groups only one in five or fewer have had the bivalent booster.

The virus does continue to mutate. One new strain that the World Health Organization has been monitoring is the XBB.1.16, dubbed “Arcturus,” which has spread in India and other parts of the world and seems to cause conjunctivitis, or red and itchy eyes, in young people. That variant is now about 7% of U.S. cases, which mostly are XBB.1.5.

But all circulating strains remain in the omicron family that first emerged in November 2021, against which people’s protection against severe illness has held up, Offit said.

Marks said the FDA plans to convene its vaccine expert panel in June to discuss a possible update to the strain composition of the COVID-19 vaccines for the fall, much like it does each year for influenza shots. But Offit isn’t convinced a new formula is needed.

The omicron strains that the current bivalent booster was tailored to combat already are long gone, he said, yet the vaccines still protect against severe disease and death, unlike with the flu, where a mismatch to the circulating strain provides little protection at all.

“I think most people don’t fear this disease anymore. Right now it’s pretty reasonable to not fear this disease,” Offit said. “I’m a vaccine advocate, I’m for vaccines, but I’m not for them if it’s not clear I need them.”

The judge’s excoriation came in a multi-lawsuit legal action involving dozens of states, including California, accusing the Mountain View-based digital advertising giant of monopolizing the distribution of apps that use Google’s Android operating system.

Judge James Donato found Google broke federal court rules, and potentially weakened the antitrust case against the company, by auto-deleting internal employee messages the firm was obligated to hand over to the states and other plaintiffs as evidence.

“Google has tried to downplay the problem and displayed a dismissive attitude ill tuned to the gravity of its conduct,” Donato wrote in his decision Tuesday in U.S. District Court in San Francisco.

The plaintiffs, in a court filing Monday, had claimed Google engaged in “a company-wide culture of concealment coming from the very top, including CEO Sundar Pichai.”

Bonta responded Tuesday to Donato’s findings, saying in a statement, “This egregious behavior demonstrates the lengths that Google will go to maintain its anticompetitive stronghold on the marketplace.”

Google did not respond to a request for comment on Donato’s decision and the plaintiffs’ allegations. The company is accused in the four related lawsuits of putting up contractual and technological barriers to block Android users from using other app-distribution platforms than the Google Play store.

The communications at issue in Donato’s ruling took place in Google’s internal instant-messaging system known as “Chat.” Donato found that Google in the litigation had cast Chat as “primarily a social outlet akin to an electronic break room,” but in fact, company employees routinely used it to “discuss substantive business topics, including matters relevant to this antitrust litigation.”

Chats involving hundreds of specific Google employees were supposed to be preserved for the court case via a “history on” setting in the messaging platform, the judge wrote in his decision. Those communications would then be given to the plaintiffs to use as potential evidence, in a process called “discovery.” Instead, Google “intended to subvert the discovery process” and the Chat evidence “was lost .. with the intent to deprive (the plaintiffs) of the information’s use in the litigation,” Donato found.

Google initially claimed it had no ability to change default settings for individual employees’ Chat history, but evidence in a court hearing “plainly established that this representation was not truthful,” Donato wrote. He added that Google had the ability to set the Chat history function to “on” for all the employees whose communications were relevant to the case, but chose not to.

Shortly after the case was filed in October 2020 and before the issue with the Chat function arose, the company “falsely assured the Court” that it had taken appropriate steps to preserve all relevant evidence “without saying a word about Chats,” Donato wrote. “The Court has repeatedly asked Google why it never mentioned Chat until the issue became a substantial problem. It has not provided an explanation, which is worrisome, especially in light of its unlimited access to accomplished legal counsel, and its long experience with the duty of evidence preservation.”

The plaintiffs claimed in their filing Monday that Google CEO Pichai in one Chat started to discuss a matter relevant to the antitrust case, then immediately asked if the Chat setting could be set to “history off” so the message would auto-delete, before unsuccessfully trying to delete the “incriminating” message himself.

“Like Mr. Pichai, other key Google employees, including those in leadership roles, routinely opted to move … to history-off Chats to hold sensitive conversations … in order to avoid leaving a record that could be produced in litigation,” the filing alleged.

Donato ordered that Google pay the plaintiffs’ attorney fees and other costs related to litigation over destruction of the messages, and said “determination of an appropriate non-monetary sanction requires further proceedings.” The additional proceedings will shed light on how consequential Google’s failure to preserve the communications evidence is for the plaintiffs’ case, Donato indicated.

The group of lawsuits also includes as plaintiffs millions of consumers and several companies.

In the early Eighties, when “High Tech” was still written with quotation marks and the region was starting to become known as The Silicon Valley, tennis buddies Bob Medearis and Bill Biggerstaff took their idea for a new bank to a poker game in Pajaro Dunes.

Their wives and children would be joining them at their Monterey Bay beachfront rentals the next day, but Friday night the two men gathered their close friends, made a big dinner and explained the plan to open a bank specifically for tech companies. They would call their customers “clients” and name their business after the region’s trendy new moniker: Silicon Valley Bank.

Who’s in?

Everyone around the table – including a Lockheed engineer in charge of pilotless drones in the 1970s and a Memorex executive – ponied up $10,000 each. They turned for support to a cast of luminaries, including a legendary NFL coach, a maverick congressman and the founder of one of the Valley’s signature law firms.

And the bank that collapsed this month in spectacular fashion was born.

From white glove to black swan

After 40 years of riding waves of tech booms and busts, Silicon Valley Bank disappeared faster than an errant tweet from Elon Musk, spooking customers into a run on deposits, which in turn jolted the banking industry and roiled the U.S. economy and global markets. The fallout has raised major questions about how the blunders of a single medium-sized bank could unleash a torrent of panic in a region so accustomed to risk.

But Silicon Valley Bank’s origin story — and its seemingly prosperous four-decade ride – in many ways mirrors the generations of startups and gambles that turned fields of orchards into the capital of innovation.

“Silicon Valley wouldn’t be Silicon Valley without Silicon Valley Bank,” said Varun Badhwar, a serial entrepreneur who had millions of dollars at stake in the crisis.

Tech companies across the region and around the globe had come to expect white-glove treatment from Silicon Valley Bank, not a black-swan event.

Yet the company whose founders once boasted of their PR acumen – mailing out one-sheet newsletters to 10,000 potential clients in the 1980s and dressing up in clean room “bunny suits” to show off their connection to the tech industry – would in many ways be undone by it.

Money for new ideas

When Silicon Valley Bank opened its doors in 1983, Ronald Reagan was president and Congress was deregulating the banking industry. Tom McEnery was mayor of San Jose, redeveloping the downtown core and trying, unsuccessfully, to entice Steve Jobs to build a new Apple headquarters within the city limits. Hewlett Packard, IBM and Lockheed were still the best-known companies in the Valley.

And Medearis, who earned a Harvard MBA and taught construction management part time at Stanford, had come up with the tech-focused concept for the bank.

“The original idea sort of kept hitting me in the head with my students, because they literally, really wanted to find money to start backing a new idea,” Medearis said during a 2014 interview at a Computer History Museum event, where he also shared the poker story.

He approached his friend Biggerstaff, a Wells Fargo executive, and together they recruited Roger Smith, another Wells Fargo exec, as president and CEO.

The “who’s who” list of founders served as the calling card for the new bankers. As Smith, the CEO, said at the history museum event, “I never went anywhere in the world that I would not share our founders group, that somebody didn’t know or know of somebody.”

Former congressman and Republican presidential candidate Pete McCloskey – who had represented the Valley in Washington for 16 years – was asked to join the bank’s board of directors right after losing a campaign for the U.S. Senate.

He was a lawyer, not a banker, said McCloskey, who is 95 now and recovering from a stroke in the home he shares in the high-desert town of Madrid, N.M., with his wife, Helen. “But I think people who organized the bank felt my name and reputation would add dignity to the board because I have so many friends in the venture capital business.”

Larry Sonsini, who got his start in California at McCloskey’s law firm of McCloskey Wilson and Mosher before spinning off with John Wilson to form the preeminent Wilson Sonsini law firm, was an early legal adviser to the new bank. Just three years earlier, Sonsini had represented Apple in its much-anticipated IPO.

“Roger would come to me and say, ‘Do you think Silicon Valley is sustainable?’ That was always the question. Is the valley going to die out?” Sonsini said in an interview Friday. “Having been there at the beginning of 1966, I’d say,  ‘Hell no!’”

‘Never call first’

Medearis, Biggerstaff and Smith quickly established a disciplined work culture. Their daily 8:30 a.m. meetings would always start at 8:25. As the company grew, hundreds of employees joined the call on speaker phone from four offices. Loan committee meetings began at 7 a.m.

Biggerstaff had his own method for success, saying in a 1999 company newsletter that he used a “unique and foolproof” system for recruiting new customers.

“Every Monday, I read the San Jose Mercury News classified from front to back,” he said. He would search employment ads for companies that mentioned start-ups, pre-IPOs or entrepreneurs, then drive to their offices and introduce himself.

“I never call first,” he said.

As the Valley evolved, those classified ads that once filled the newspaper would be usurped by online sites like Craigslist and Monster.com.

Some of the bank’s first customers were Bay Networks, Chips & Technologies and Cisco Systems, whose “two owners did not know how to assemble the company’s balance sheet” when they first connected with SVB, Biggerstaff, who died in 2010, said in a company newsletter his daughters keep in a scrapbook.

They also had a system to vet promising technologies through Medearis’ connections at Stanford.

“We’d talk with our friends at the university,” Medearis, who is now retired in Davis, said at the history museum. “What do you know about this field? Is this something that’s really good? … If they said there was no fatal flaw, then I’d go ahead and process the loan.”

In 1989, Peter Mok came from a competing bank to join SVB’s division that focused on technology clients, which was 90% of the bank’s deposits.

“It was like Seal Team Six,” Mok said, comparing his group to the Navy’s special operations force.

There was so much energy and motivation there, he said, that “I would go to work at 7:30 a.m. and most people were there already.”

When Smith announced during a morning meeting sometime in the early Nineties that the bank had reached a milestone – $1 billion in deposits – a cheer went up from the speaker phones and employees high-fived each other, he said.

Over the next few years, the bank would open a Pacific Rim group to attract foreign investors and continue to grow through the dot-com boom into a new century.

“We used to say at the bank,” Smith told the audience at the history museum, “don’t ever do anything that you wouldn’t want to be on ‘60 Minutes’.”

Old-fashioned bank run

On the morning of March 9, news of Silicon Valley Bank’s troubles pinged, chimed and buzzed through social media platforms after CEO Greg Becker told customers that the bank was forced to sell bonds at a $1.8 billion loss, and implored venture capitalists not to panic.

By the afternoon, an old-fashioned run on the bank ensued at an institution that served more than half of the Valley’s venture capital-funded startups, including Pinterest and ZipRecruiter. On that one day, $42 billion was withdrawn. The next day, the federal government took over, marking the second-largest bank failure in U.S. history, after Washington Mutual in 2008.

Wok called the SVB’s blink-of-the-eye demise “a tragedy and a travesty.”

The drama rocked the Valley, sending customers into a tailspin.

“Being in a startup culture in the valley, I’ve flown close to the sun on many occasions, with my companies teetering on the brink of success or failure, but I’ve never felt the stress that was involved with trying to make payroll when you had zero access to your cash,” said Mike Morgan, CFO at San Mateo data storage management start-up Cloudian.

Morgan has been with eight startups since the early 1990s, including seven that did business with Silicon Valley Bank. “We had emergency board meetings where everybody was screaming anything from ‘Stay the course, don’t worry about it,’ to ‘My God, let’s break into the bank and take our money.”

At the Palo Alto offices of Endor Labs on University Avenue, Varun Badhwar was in a Zoom meeting behind his desk when a Slack message from a colleague buzzed through with the news: Silicon Valley Bank’s stock prices had tanked 60%.

“Honestly, my first reaction was, ‘Wow, what an overreaction,’” he said. “This sounds like a great time to buy SVB stock.”

But by noon, his phone was flooded with texts from other startup founders asking for advice: “What are you doing? What are you hearing?”

By 2:30, as the run on the bank was underway, Badhwar decided to act. But he had only a half hour before the typical wire transfer cutoff time.

He texted the “relationship manager” at the bank and asked if a transfer would go through. She called him back within two minutes.

Like George Bailey in “It’s a Wonderful Life,” she tried to talk him out of it.

“Our books are fundamentally sound,” Badhwar said the manager told him. “I don’t foresee any problems.”

With minutes to spare, he clicked through a $5 million transfer.

“You’ve got to, at the end of the day, just listen to your heart,” he said. “Not that I expected them to collapse the next morning, but you don’t want to be the last guy with money left behind.”

‘We’ll get stronger’

Four decades after the poker game near the Pajaro River that gave rise to Silicon Valley Bank, a levee upstream burst, flooding a nearby town with misery – just as the federal government stepped in to rescue Silicon Valley Bank and make its customers whole.

And just as the levee will be rebuilt into something more secure, Sonsini is confident that something will rise up to replace Silicon Valley Bank.

Silicon Valley, he said, is much bigger than one bank, and it will continue to endure beyond any company, even the titans such as Shockley Labs, Fairchild Semiconductor, Intel and Apple.

“I’m an optimist, maybe because I’m in my sixth or seventh decade in the business and still at it,” said Sonsini, who is 82. “We’ll get stronger, but we just cannot panic about it.”

Staff researcher Veronica Martinez contributed to this report.

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., which insures bank deposits, said Monday that it moved to protect depositors by transferring all of Silicon Valley Bank’s insured and uninsured deposits, “and substantially all assets” of the former bank, to a “newly created, full-service FDIC-operated ‘bridge bank.’ ” The bank was the largest bank to fail since the 2008 financial crisis.

The regulatory actions came after the bank for numerous Silicon Valley startups and tech companies spiraled into insolvency and was seized on Friday. On Sunday, regulators closed a second bank, the New York City-based Signature Bank, which lends money to law firms and real estate companies. Officials said clients there would also be able to access all of their money.

Federal officials said they will also attempt another auction of Silicon Valley Bank after a first failed attempt to find a buyer, the FDIC told U.S. senators during a briefing, the Wall Street Journal reported.

On Monday, President Joe Biden sought to reassure worried depositors and called for stricter regulations aimed at preventing bank failures. “Americans can have confidence that the banking system is safe,” Biden said during a short speech.

The move to protect Silicon Valley Bank depositors arose over fears that tech startups, which favored the bank, might be forced to shut down or furlough employees due to a cash squeeze if their uninsured deposits weren’t available to tap for their ongoing operations — and to ward off runs against other banks with a high percentage of uninsured deposits.

Still, uneasy customers, such as Platina Systems, a San Jose-based software firm, waited for hours outside the Silicon Valley Bank headquarters on Monday.

“We didn’t know what was going to happen, so I decided to come here in person,” said Meichi Lai, vice president of finance with Platina Systems, which has been a customer of Silicon Valley Bank since 2014. “I tried to get into the bank’s online system, but it put me into an infinite loop and kept kicking me out.”

Platina is under time pressure because the tech startup is due to issue the next round of paychecks to its employees by Thursday. “We’re really trying to get this done as soon as possible,” Lai said. “We didn’t know what was going to happen.”

Bank officials told the company that wire transfer requests at the bank were backed up and delayed, according to Lai.

One San Jose resident said he endured an anxious few days after hearing the bank had collapsed — worrying through the weekend.

On Monday, the shares of another bank, San Francisco-based First Republic Bank, nosedived and plunged about 62% to close at $31.21, a precipitous drop of $50.55 in a single day. Like Silicon Valley Bank, First Republic is a regional bank with a considerable number of wealthy depositors.

Investors became queasy about First Republic Bank after the bank announced Sunday that the FDIC and JPMorgan Chase had teamed up to provide access to $70 billion in funds through an array of sources.

Still, not everyone was worried.

Joe O’Neal, a customer with First Republic Bank, said he retained confidence in the bank. “They said they got a loan from Chase Bank but they didn’t really need it. They’re more than capitalized for this,” he said. His deposits are below the $250,000 FDIC insurance threshold and fully insured.

A shareholder filed a class-action lawsuit against Silicon Valley Bank and its top executives, in a complaint that claims the bank failed to disclose to investors the potential effects on the bank of Federal Reserve interest rate hikes, one of a multitude of factors leading to its demise.

“The second quarter of 2021 report did not disclose the risk that future interest rate hikes posed to the company’s business, despite the Fed signaling that it might raise interest rates in the future, and was certainly prepared to do so in the event of rising inflation,” the litigation stated in part. Bank shareholder Chandra Vanipenta claimed in the complaint that she purchased shares in Silicon Valley Bank’s holding company at “inflated prices.”

On Feb. 27, Chief Executive Officer Greg Becker sold $3.6 million of stock in Silicon Valley Bank, an insider trade that occurred less than two weeks before the bank’s problems began to surface publicly.

Plus, an unknown number of bank employees received their annual bonuses on Friday, just ahead of the fed takeover.

Staff writer Aldo Toledo contributed to this report

And, she performed while pregnant with her second child, her representatives confirmed.

Known for hits such as “We Found Love” and “Umbrella,” the Grammy-winning Rihanna, 34, last toured in 2016.

She says she drew inspiration from Beyoncé’s Super Bowl performances in 2013 and 2016 before she headlines her own halftime show at Sunday’s Super Bowl LVII between the Kansas City Chiefs and Philadelphia Eagles.

“I watched Beyoncé’s halftime performances a couple times,” Rihanna said. “She’s a beast and a whole other level.”

But unlike most gigs, Rihanna won’t be paid for this one.

Surprisingly, Super Bowl halftime show performers don’t get paid for their concerts. Instead, the NFL pays for all expenses associated with putting on the halftime show, including travel costs.

However, putting on a halftime show can come at a huge price. Production for the Super Bowl halftime show can cost up to $10 million dollars. In 2021, The Weeknd reportedly spent $7 million of his own money to put on the show, as Dr Dre did the year before that.

Click here if you’re unable to view the photo gallery on your mobile device.

Chunli Zhao, of Half Moon Bay, was arrested nearly two and a half hours after Monday’s shootings, which rocked the tranquil surfside community widely known for its Mavericks wave break and an annual pumpkin festival that draws thousands to the intersection of Highway 92 and Highway 1.

“I am offering my heartfelt condolences to the families of victims, the coastal community and the city of Half Moon Bay. This kind of shooting is horrific, and today it has hit home,” San Mateo County Sheriff Christina Corpus said at a news conference Monday night.

It was just off Highway 92, less than a mile east of the highway intersection, that sheriff’s deputies were called to Mountain Mushroom Farm around 2:20 p.m. Monday for a report of a shooting with multiple victims.

Deputies found four people, both male and female, dead from multiple gunshot wounds. A fifth shooting victim was still alive when found, and was rushed to Stanford Medical Center with life-threatening injuries.

A short time later, deputies discovered a second shooting scene, this time about three miles south on Highway 1 near a series of farming businesses where three more people were found shot to death.

The second shooting occurred at Concord Farms at 2125 Cabrillo Highway South, according to Kathy Rice, one of the owners of neighboring Rice Trucking-Soil Farm.

“It’s shocking, absolutely shocking. Totally unexpected,” Rice said.

The three people who died at Concord Farms were all employees of the business, said an owner of the business, who asked not to be named. Among the dead was a manager who had worked at the small mushroom farm for 27 years.

The owner also said she did not recognize the name of the alleged gunman.

The slain employees were “good working people — they are so good,” the owner said, adding that “they were like our family.”

“This kind of thing should never happen, no matter where,” the owner said. “They are innocent. Nobody knows why this happened — why this guy came to our farm.”

There was no immediate sighting of a gunman, but the manhunt was over around 4:40 p.m. when a sheriff’s deputy spotted Zhao in his car in the parking lot of the Half Moon Bay sheriff’s substation and ordered him out of the vehicle. In an arrest captured on video, several deputies could be seen with guns drawn and as Zhao walked toward them with his hands up. The deputies quickly took him to the ground and subdued him. Zhao acted alone, the sheriff’s office said.

Kati McHugh, who described herself as a member of the local agricultural community, was at the substation for a news conference on the shooting when the suspect arrived and was quickly taken into custody by deputies.

“I was surprised to see (the suspect) here and of course hopeful that he came to turn himself in,” McHugh said. “It was shocking and I was very impressed with the way the officers took care of the takedown. It wasn’t in any way adding energy to the situation.”

“He was quiet,” McHugh said about the suspect. “He didn’t react much when he was taken down and it all happened pretty calmly.”

https://twitter.com/aldot29/status/1617702820702212097?s=20&t=r-tvUUndwNM7f2GlFzfQmA

The devastation that has so far been blamed on Zhao soon became clear. Local elected officials and media reports stated that Zhao had been an employee at Mountain Mushroom Farm and that several of the dead were his co-workers. San Mateo County Supervisor Dave Pine told The Associated Press that Zhao was a “disgruntled co-worker.”

The sheriff’s office said in a statement that a weapon was found in Zhao’s car and that “there is no further threat to the community.” Corpus, the newly installed sheriff, called the shooting “a (devastating) tragedy for this community and the many families touched by this unspeakable act of violence.”

People who were displaced or separated from their loved ones as a result of the shootings were being tended to at a family reunification center set up at the IDES Hall at 735 Main St. in Half Moon Bay.

Grief and mourning filled the hall as members of the tight-knit community searched for answers and updates on the status of loved ones, according to witness accounts.

“There’s a lot of sadness. There’s grief (inside),” said Half Moon Bay resident Lizette Diaz, a volunteer with the nonprofit ALAS, which seeks to help those impacted by disaster. “We can hear people crying.”

As vehicles entered and exited the site, teenagers were often alongside their grieving parents, bringing perspective to the losses caused by the shootings.

“It’s palpable. It’s devastating (inside),” said ALAS volunteer Kate Shea. “I have four boys and I cannot imagine what those kids witnessed today.”

The pair of volunteers said the two shootings combined with the devastating effects of the recent storms have brought shock to the coastal community of about 11,000.

“I would never have thought something like this would happen in a small, close community. We’re all very close,” Diaz said. “We all know each other, we know our neighbors, we know people that work within our community. It was heartbreaking.”

Alejandro Lopez said one of the victims was a longtime friend and coworker.

“He was like my brother,” he said in Spanish to a Bay Area News Group reporter.

Lopez said he learned of the shooting from his wife when he got home and tried to call his friend, but he did not pick up. Another coworker told him that his friend had died.

“(I am feeling) bad, very bad,” Lopez said.

At a news conference Monday night, elected officials including Pine and Vice Mayor Joaquin Jimenez offered their condolences to those affected by the shooting and called for an end to gun violence.

“We grieve tonight for the deceased neighbors of our community,” Pine said. “It’s a horrific incident. Gun violence in this country is at really unacceptable levels, and it hit home tonight. Our hearts our broken. But in the end, there’s simply too many guns in this country and there has to be a change. This is not the way for a modern society to conduct its affairs.”

“This is something we get to watch on the news and I never thought it would hit home,” Jimenez said. “This should be an eye-opener for what’s going on in this community regarding gun violence.”

The mass shooting follows one Saturday in Monterey Park — in the Los Angeles area — that left 11 people dead, all of them Asian American.

“First Monterey Park and now Half Moon Bay. Enough is enough. How many more must die?” San Mateo County Supervisor David Canepa said in a statement. “Although the details are sparse, one thing is true. The victims died from guns. My heart breaks for the families.”

Canepa said the county has pledged $2 million over the next two years to launch a gun violence prevention program. The program, he added, aims to improve public safety by “boosting efforts to remove guns from the hands of felons, stalkers and other people prohibited from firearm possession.”

Congresswoman Anna Eshoo said she was also monitoring the situation in Half Moon Bay.

“My gratitude to the San Mateo Sheriff’s Office who took the suspect into custody and are working the two scenes of the murders,” Eshoo said in a statement. “Half Moon Bay is a beloved and tight-knit community, and we all stand with them and the families of the victims during this dark hour.”

The Bay Area has seen a string of mass shootings in recent years, including its deadliest in May 2021 when a disgruntled mechanic killed nine people then himself at a Valley Transportation Authority light rail yard near the Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Office in San Jose.

Staff writers Austin Turner, Jakob Rodgers and Elissa Miolene contributed to this report.

Brain

Alcohol can affect the way different immune cells in the brain express themselves, altering the molecular pathways that regulate neuroinflammation. This is why long-term alcohol abuse can cause the brain’s neuroimmune function to become imbalanced – which could lead to:

* Riskier decisions.

* Increased drinking.

* Decreased behavioral flexibility.

Gut

One of the first points of contact for alcohol in the body is the gastrointestinal system, where alcohol enters the bloodstream. Here’s how that can affect the immune system:

* The number and abundance of microbes in the microbiome can be altered by alcohol, which then affect the immune system’s functionality.

* The communication between organisms and the intestinal immune system can be disrupted by alcohol.

* Cells in the gastrointestinal system can be damaged by alcohol, which disrupts the gut’s function as a barrier and allows bacterial products from the gut to leak out, leading to liver inflammation and potentially liver cancer.

Liver

The immune system is a major factor in the development and progression of alcoholic liver disease. Alcoholic liver disease occurs after years of heavy drinking and can lead to cirrhosis. Consuming alcohol contributes to the build up of fats in the liver and is linked to diets higher in fatty foods which, in turn, also add fat to the liver.

Lungs

Alcohol consumption has been linked to increased risk of pneumonia and pulmonary diseases like tuberculosis, respiratory syncytial virus and ARDS. Here’s how damaging alcohol is to the lungs:

* The cilia in the upper airways is disrupted by alcohol, which impairs the function of the immune cells there.

* The epithelia barrier in the lower airways is weakened.

Often, damage to the lungs from alcohol goes undetected until an individual contracts a respiratory infection – which can then lead to more severe lung diseases.

Pandemic Impacts

Hospitals nationwide are reporting an increase in alcohol-related admissions for liver failure and alcoholic hepatitis during the COVID-19 pandemic. The stress of disruption and uncertainty from the pandemic have caused many individuals to turn to unhealthy coping mechanisms.

These alcohol-related illnesses affect everyone differently and can show up after just months of heavy drinking. Alcohol is metabolized at different rates depending on many factors – and so one person could drink heavily without long-term side effects while another could need urgent medical care. The relationship between alcohol and the immune system is important to understand as communities prepare to return to a more normal pace of life this spring and summer.

Dr. Gina Lynem-Walker is an associate medical director at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan. For more health tips, visit AHealthierMichigan.org.

But thanks to Steve Guinn, I’m pushing that uncertainty behind me and moving forward with this idea – finally. I want Jesus to be the first one I lean on when I have a bad eating day and the first one I tell when I hit in that winning run (should that ever happen).

Steve moved to Heaven on May 8, but not before leaving countless best friends. When it came to friendships, Steve had no room for acquaintances. He was all in or not at all. When you were with Steve, you were his complete focus.

And, just in case you think I’m exaggerating that point, I declared May 9 to be “Steve Guinn Day” in my Facebook world after seeing a plethora of responses to the news. Mike, Steve’s brother, wrote a poignant tribute about Steve as only one brother of a two-brother family could do. By noon, Mike – who has 165 Facebook friends – had a list of 119 comments and 101 likes. After reading Mike’s announcement, many people stopped to write about how Steve always made them feel front and center. One friend, Joe, commented he had been frozen for hours after reading the news. That’s what happens when a permanent void first becomes part of your life.

Joe’s comment, more of a full-blown essay, described the essence of any best-friend relationship. Joe wrote about a time in junior high when he and Steve began their lifelong friendship. Joe felt comfortable enough to disclose that he had stage fright because he knew he could trust in Steve.

“Trust in Steve.” Bingo: That was my lightbulb moment.

That type of trust is what I will use to deepen my bond with Jesus. I spent May 9 reading about how much the priceless connection people had with Steve meant to them. So I am deep-kicking my hesitation into the next county and trusting that making Jesus my best pal will bring us closer.  Yes, it will be less formal than some prayer regimens, but I can be more casual – more myself – no Bible rules, just us. I picture it unfolding as one friend listening to another with no judgment, just love. In other words, a “Steveship.”

Brain cancer took Steve far too early, but not before he made multitudes of people feel like his No. 1 friend. Steve had friendship down to an art form.

I’ve been on the sidelines for years trying to figure out if having a friendship with Jesus is OK, because it feels outside the norm. But after reading about Steve’s approach to friendships, I know calling on Jesus as my best friend will make me more connected to Him – ultimately one more way to love Him.

I assumed that Steve had multiple best friends, but I had to catch my breath when I learned he had enough best friends for 20 lifetimes. He showed everyone that earnestly connecting with each of them is another way to pass around love. File that under “Lifetime Lessons.”

Patricia Cosner Kubic is a member of St. Mark Church, Roseville, and has been writing since 2003.