In Washington:

• The White House is reportedly considering mailing masks directly to Americans. The plans have been discussed but no formal proposal has been delivered to Biden, a White House official told NBC News. Discussions include whether the masks would be cloth or disposable and how many each household would receive. While 73 percent of all Americans wear a mask every time they leave the house according to a December Kaiser Family Foundation poll, that number dropped to 55 percent among Republicans polled. It remains unclear whether a mask delivery would persuade the holdouts given the partisan breakdown in mask-wearing. 
• The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is planning to release new standards for Covid-19 vaccine booster shots, tests and drugs in two to three weeks.  The guidance is a strategy against fast-spreading virus variants that are less susceptible to existing vaccines.  U.S. federal and state officials are working to track how widely the variant strains have spread in the U.S. and head off any threat they have on the slow progress the country has made in vaccinating the population.  Officials at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) are working with at least two vaccine manufacturers to start human trials next month of variant-targeting vaccines.
• The U.S. Capitol Police force has secured enough coronavirus vaccine doses to inoculate every officer. Acting Capitol Police Chief Yogananda Pittman said in a statement Thursday that the department “expects delivery of the vaccines to occur shortly, and is already working with the Office of Attending Physician on logistics to administer them to our employees as quickly and safely as possible.” Capitol Police and congressional leaders fear many officers may have been exposed to the coronavirus during the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol.

• New claims for jobless benefits came in a bit less than expected last week, according to Labor Department data released Thursday, though U.S. employment gains remain sluggish. First-time claims for unemployment insurance totaled 779,000 for the week ending January 30. That was below the 830,000 estimate from economists surveyed by Dow Jones. The total number of people receiving benefits fell by nearly 500,000 to 17.8 million. That reflects a continuing decline of those getting benefits under pandemic-related programs that was slightly offset by people on extended benefits.

• On Feb. 3, Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) sent a letter to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Rochelle Walensky and COVID-19 task force coordinator Jeffrey Zients urging them to study and consider working "to gather and consider data" on the effectiveness of single-dose vaccinations as a strategy to get more doses to Americans as variant strains are spreading.  "Every person we vaccinate today is a life potentially saved. If clinical data supports an effective one-dose vaccine regimen, it could nearly double our daily vaccination numbers, simplify administration, and reduce COVID-19 deaths in the long run," Khanna wrote.  At this point, there is no clinical data to support the idea that one dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines is sufficient to provide protection against COVID-19.

In the News:

• On Thursday, Johnson & Johnson announced that it had filed an application for emergency authorization of its coronavirus vaccine by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).  The company's vaccine can be administered as one dose and it can be stored in refrigerators. Johnson and Johnson said in late January that the vaccine was 66 percent effective in a global study, with efficacy ranging as high as 72 percent in the U.S. and as low as 57 percent in South Africa, where a highly transmissible variant predominates.  The vaccine showed complete protection against hospitalization and death and 85 percent efficacy against severe disease.

• British researchers are beginning to study whether inoculating people with two different COVID-19 vaccines results in same or better immune responses.   Researchers will be testing with a dose of the fizer/BioNTech shot as their first dose, followed by the Oxford/AstraZeneca’s vaccine as the second. They'll also swap the order and compare immune responses with those of people who received two doses of the same vaccine.

• California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) faces a growing recall effort based on his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. Recall organizers claim they’ve collected 1.3 million of the 1.5 million signatures required to force a vote. The state has found about 85 percent of signatures submitted thus far are valid. The signatures are due March 17. Newsom has “failed miserably not only on the pandemic, but people are hurting. People are out of work,” organizer Randy Economy argued to The Hill. 

• One in three Americans who relocated during the COVID-19 pandemic cited financial issues as the cause, according to polling from Pew Research Center released Thursday. That’s up from 18 percent in June 2020. Seventeen percent said they had moved to be closer to a relative or partner, while 14 percent cited a particular risk from the virus where they lived.