Covid Live Updates: In Reversal, F.D.A. Delays Decision on Shots for Children Under 5

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WASHINGTON — In a striking reversal, federal regulators said on Friday that they would wait for data on whether three doses of Pfizer-BioNTech’s coronavirus vaccine are effective in children younger than 5 before deciding whether to authorize a vaccine for the age group.

The Food and Drug Administration will postpone a meeting of outside experts that was scheduled for Tuesday; the experts were to weigh the evidence and make a recommendation on whether to authorize two doses of the vaccine in young children, as Pfizer had requested.

In a news release, Pfizer-BioNTech said that their three-dose trial for young children was moving briskly, and that the new timetable would allow the F.D.A. to get more data and thoroughly review it. Results are expected in early April.

“Given that the study is advancing at a rapid pace, the companies will wait for the three-dose data as Pfizer and BioNTech continue to believe it may provide a higher level of protection in this age group,” the companies said.

At a news conference, Dr. Peter Marks, who heads the vaccine division of the F.D.A., said that parents would have to wait another two months for a decision while regulators gather and analyze more data. “Yes, some of this was late breaking, but that’s what our job is — to adjust to it,” he said.

Regulators and vaccine manufacturers have been wrestling with how quickly to move to vaccinate roughly 18 million children under 5, the only Americans still ineligible for shots. The highly transmissible Omicron variant is receding in much of the nation, but federal officials have said that nearly 400 children under 5 have died of Covid-19.

In Pfizer’s clinical trial, which tested one-tenth of the adult dosage in the youngest group, its vaccine failed to produce the desired immune response in children ages 2 to 4, producing only 60 percent of the level of antibodies identified for success, according to multiple officials. Children ages six months to two years produced the sought-after level of antibodies. There were no serious safety concerns, officials have said.

The F.D.A. made the highly unusual decision to push for authorization with data from Pfizer-BioNTech on two doses, knowing the results the company had were mixed.

Tuesday’s meeting had been expected to focus on just how urgent the F.D.A. and its outside advisers consider the need for vaccination to be in the youngest age group. The panel’s recommendations to the F.D.A. are nonbinding, but the agency usually follows them.

Some infectious disease experts have argued that the evidence showing a benefit from two shots is not convincing enough, given that Omicron cases are falling and young children are unlikely to become severely ill from the virus. Pfizer-BioNTech is expected to deliver data on three doses by early April, and many experts predict that it will show better protection for that age group.

Others argued that the toll of the virus on children — even a smaller number of them — required the F.D.A. to stagger its review process and possibly authorize at least initial doses before regulators determine the ideal regimen. Even if Omicron is fading, they said, another variant could emergeas unexpectedly as Omicron did in November.

Pfizer-BioNTech’s trial for children under 5 was not big enough to measure their protection against infection and disease. Instead, researchers studied the antibody levels the vaccine generated, comparing them with an older age group — 16 to 25 — that had received a higher dose with proven protection. The same strategy, known as immunobridging, was used to authorize the vaccine for older children.

While Pfizer and BioNTech announced disappointing results for the immune response among 2- to 4-year-olds in December, they have also been gathering clinical data from children who became infected. Initial data suggested the vaccine lowered the rate of symptomatic infection, but the numbers were too small to be considered statistically significant. The data also suggested that two doses were more effective against the Delta variant than the Omicron variant.

Covid booster shots lose much of their potency after about four months, raising the possibility that some Americans — specifically those at high risk of complications or death — may need a fourth dose, data published on Friday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggest.

Preliminary research from Israel and Britain has hinted that protection from booster doses declines within a few months. The data released on Friday offer the first real-world evidence of the mRNA shots’ waning power against moderate to severe illness in the United States.

The analysis did not include a breakdown by age, and the researchers could not distinguish between a booster shot or a third dose given to an immunocompromised person as part of the primary series.

The study focused on people who sought medical care for symptoms of Covid, so if that population was skewed toward older adults or those who have weak immune systems, the booster shots may have seemed less effective than they really are.

Other studies have shown that while vaccines may lose some ability to prevent severe illness and hospitalization in adults older than 65, they remain highly protective in younger adults in good health. Federal health officials will need to know who exactly is at high risk even after three doses before considering recommending a fourth shot.

“There may be the need for yet again another boost — in this case, a fourth-dose boost for an individual receiving the mRNA — that could be based on age, as well as underlying conditions,” Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the Biden administration’s top Covid adviser, told reporters on Wednesday.

The C.D.C. has previously published data showing that second and third doses of the Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines were less effective at fending off the Omicron variant than the Delta variant. Third doses enhanced that protection, at least in the short term.

In the new study, a team of researchers funded by the C.D.C. collected data from 10 states between Aug. 26, 2021, and Jan. 22, 2022. The data include periods during which the Delta and Omicron variants, respectively, accounted for more than 50 percent of cases in the country.

The team analyzed 241,204 visits to emergency departments or urgent care facilities and 93,408 hospitalizations among adults older than 18. The researchers did not include milder coronavirus infections.

Protection against emergency department and urgent care visits declined from 69 percent within two months of the second dose to 37 percent after five months or more. Booster shots restored those levels to 87 percent.

The effectiveness of boosters also waned. Protection against emergency department and urgent care visits dropped to 66 percent within four or five months, and to just 31 percent after five or more months of receiving the third shot, the researchers found. The latter estimate may not be reliable because few people received boosters more than five months ago, and so the data is limited, the researchers said.

But the protection provided by both second and third shots against hospitalization was generally higher than for emergency department and urgent care visits.

With Covid treatments still in short supply in the United States, the Food and Drug Administration on Friday gave emergency authorization to a new monoclonal antibody drug that has been found in the laboratory to be potent against the Omicron variant of the coronavirus.

The Biden administration said it would make the therapy immediately available to states free of charge.

The authorization of the treatment, bebtelovimab, means that the United States now has four drugs available for high-risk Covid patients early in the course of their illness that have been found to neutralize the Omicron variant. While there is a greater menu of Covid pills and treatments now than at any other point in the pandemic, the drugs have been so scarce that doctors have been forced to make painful rationing decisions during the Omicron surge.

The drug that the F.D.A. authorized on Friday is manufactured by Eli Lilly, which said on Thursday that it had signed a contract with the Department of Health and Human Services to provide the government with up to 600,000 courses of the treatment for at least $720 million. The company said it had already manufactured hundreds of thousands of doses and was ready to begin shipments within 24 hours.

The Lilly drug has not been tested in a study that can show whether it can stave off severe disease. The F.D.A. said it should not be a preferred product and instead should be used only when alternative treatments are not “accessible or clinically appropriate.” Federal health officials have given a similar designation to a Covid pill from Merck and the Covid vaccine from Johnson & Johnson.

However, there are data suggesting Eli Lilly’s drug is safe and may reduce the amount of virus that builds up in people who are sick with Covid.

Like other drugs for recently diagnosed Covid patients, Lilly’s new treatment is authorized for people who are vulnerable to becoming seriously ill because they are older or have a medical condition like obesity or diabetes. People as young as 12 can be eligible.

The drug is meant to be given as a quick intravenous injection by a health care provider, typically at a clinic or hospital. It must be administered within seven days of symptoms starting.

Poly Prep Country Day School, an elite, expensive Brooklyn institution, will continue to require students and staff to wear masks in school, reversing a decision to make masks optional starting Monday.

A statewide mask mandate for schools remains in place until at least Feb. 21. Officials at Poly Prep, which had been the first New York City school to make masks optional despite the mandate, said in an email to parents on Friday afternoon that they had received guidance from the state and city health departments that the policy shift was “not permissible under current state- and city-wide restrictions.”

The school said it would delay the policy shift and asked parents to make sure their children were masked starting on Monday.

“Please continue to send students to school with masks on Monday, as has been the policy throughout this year,” Sarah Zuercher, the school’s director of health and well-being, said in the email.

Earlier this week, school officials had said that because coronavirus cases citywide and at the school were declining, they would not require students or staff members to wear face coverings starting Monday. The change in policy was going to apply to both the Lower School campus, in Park Slope, and the Middle and Upper School campus, in Dyker Heights.

Before the rollback, a spokeswoman for the New York State Department of Health had described the school’s policy change as a “violation.”

“We worked with the school and the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, and the school agreed to delay its plan to no longer require masks until such a policy is permitted,” the spokeswoman, Jill Montag, said on Friday. “We are glad they decided to do the right thing.”

Gov. Kathy Hochul announced this week that she would let a rule expire that required businesses to ask people to either show proof of full vaccination or wear masks indoors at all times. That mandate was separate from the rule requiring masks to be worn in schools.

Ms. Hochul has said state officials would reassess the school mask mandate in early March, once students returned from midwinter break. The governors of two neighboring states, New Jersey and Connecticut, have said that their mask mandates for schools would end in the coming weeks.

The Polygon, Poly Prep’s student newspaper, which broke the news about the changing policy on Wednesday, noted that all students ages 5 and older are vaccinated, while students ages 16 and up are vaccinated and boosted.

Poly Prep has 1,151 students, according to its website. Yearly tuition ranges from about $32,000 for nursery-school students to about $58,000 for 12th graders.

In the email on Wednesday announcing that masks would be made optional, Ms. Zuercher had said that the school would continue to require weekly testing.

She also said that more than 20 percent of the Poly Prep community had tested positive for the virus since mid-December. “Almost all cases have been mild to asymptomatic with no cases of severe disease or hospitalization,” she said.

With thousands of New York City workers facing a deadline to get vaccinated or lose their jobs, Mayor Eric Adams said on Friday that he was “encouraged” by the rush of workers getting vaccinated at the last minute.

Nearly 3,000 city workers were required to get one vaccine dose by Friday or be fired. Another 1,000 recent hires had to show proof that they had received both shots of a two-dose vaccine, or one shot of the single-dose version.

Mr. Adams said at a news conference in Brooklyn that his administration was compiling data on the vaccination status of those workers and determining how many would be terminated. The mayor said he planned to release that information over the weekend.

“We have had an amazing response from city workers,” Mr. Adams said. “We are truly encouraged by those numbers.”

The roughly 3,000 workers make up less than 1 percent of the city’s work force but they are believed to be the largest group in the nation facing the prospect of termination because of a vaccine mandate. An additional 9,000 unvaccinated workers are seeking exemptions or working with unions to avoid being fired.

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N.Y.C. Firefighter Union Opposes Covid Vaccine Mandate

New York City is expected to fire as many as 3,000 unvaccinated municipal workers on Friday. The president of the Uniformed Firefighters Association of Greater New York argued that “natural immunity” from contracting Covid-19 should be recognized as a form of vaccination.

Today, approximately a dozen New York City firefighters are among countless other New York City employees that are facing termination for refusing to get vaccinated on New York City vaccine mandate program. These firefighters spent a career in service to the city, protecting the lives and property of New York City residents at the risk of their own lives, health and safety. Most, if not all, of them became infected with Covid directly from their work for the city, and it is appalling to myself and many others that natural immunity that was gained by the infection from working for New York City was then ignored by New York City as an acceptable alternative vaccination. The irony of this situation is that since the beginning of the mandate, tens of thousands of New York City employees filled the reasonable accommodation out, then went to work unvaccinated anyway, and they were allowed to test each week. Currently, this wave of the pandemic is winding down, and those of us that refuse to submit to the vaccine now will lose their jobs. To those of my members facing termination, I have to say I am proud of you for holding the line, but I still encourage you to get the vaccination before it’s too late. In the end, I’m hoping that the decision you make in the long run is the right decision for you and your family. And if you choose not to get vaccinated, please get your affairs in order with the department, and resign on your own terms before New York City fires you.

The mandate, put in place by Mr. Adams’s predecessor, Bill de Blasio, has been effective: About 95 percent of the city’s 370,000 workers have received at least one vaccine dose, up from 84 percent when the policy was announced in October.

Mr. Adams has insisted in recent days that workers who refuse to be vaccinated are effectively quitting. He said that increasing the vaccination rate was the only way to avoid additional shutdowns when future variants arise.

“I don’t want to see the city close down,” Mr. Adams said. “All we can do is continue to encourage people get vaccinated and hopefully people get the booster shot as well.”

Two new reports lay out the added difficulties that unvaccinated women with Covid have during pregnancy and childbirth, adding to research showing that they face elevated risks.

One study, published Thursday in the Archives of Pathology & Laboratory Medicine, suggests that the coronavirus can invade and destroy the placenta, through which the mother passes nutrients to the fetus.

The other, published this week in the Journal of the American Medical Association, found that pregnant women infected with the coronavirus are about 40 percent as likely to develop serious complications or die during pregnancy than those who aren’t infected.

The study of the effects of the virus on the placenta found that infection may deprive the fetus of oxygen in unvaccinated pregnant women, leading to a higher risk of delivering stillborn babies. While other infections can cause stillbirth by passing through the placenta and damaging the fetus, Covid-19 takes a different, dangerous tack.

“It causes extensive damage to the placenta, and stillbirth occurs from lack of oxygen,” said Dr. David Schwartz, a perinatal pathologist in Atlanta and the lead author of the study. “The placental destruction is so severe that whether or not the fetus becomes infected might be irrelevant.”

Dr. Schwartz’s research team analyzed 64 stillbirth cases and four neonatal deaths in 12 countries. All the pregnant mothers were unvaccinated, and all were thought to have been infected with the Delta variant. In the 68 cases, an average of 77 percent of the placenta had been destroyed.

Although stillbirths attributed to Covid-19 are uncommon — overall, about 24,000 babies are stillborn in the United States each year — a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study released in November found that pregnant women who had Covid-19 when they delivered their babies were almost twice as likely to have a stillbirth as healthy women who did not have Covid.

The new study about complications for mothers found that the severity of their Covid symptoms was the key factor in their heightened risk. The most severely ill women were three times more likely to develop pregnancy complications than those who tested negative or had milder symptoms.

The researchers analyzed electronic medical records of about 14,000 pregnant women between March 1 and Dec. 31, 2020, before vaccines were widely available. Of those, about 2,350 tested positive during pregnancy or within six weeks of delivery.

The study also pointed to increased danger for newborns: Covid-19 was significantly associated with premature birth and admission to newborn intensive care units.

“We know from other studies that vaccination prevents the most severe symptoms of the disease,” said Dr. Torri D. Metz, an associate professor of obstetrics and gynecology at University of Utah Health, who led the study. “So, this is just another piece of the puzzle that should encourage pregnant people to get vaccinated.”

The new studies add to research showing the danger of Covid-19 to pregnant women and their babies. The C.D.C. has strongly encouraged vaccination for women who are pregnant, breastfeeding or planning to become pregnant. But vaccination rates are low among pregnant women, even though early research has found no evidence that the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccines pose serious risks during pregnancy.

As the Omicron wave subsides in regions across the world, more governments, politicians and health officials are telling us that it’s time to start “living with the virus.”

But what does that mean? And how do we do that?

For guidance, The Times asked more than a dozen epidemiologists about the next phase of the pandemic and how they’re approaching it.

Living with the virus “is an acknowledgment that eradication of SARS-CoV-2, like what we did with smallpox, is not feasible,” said Maria Sundaram, an infectious disease epidemiologist at the Marshfield Clinic Research Institute.

Instead, we’ll need to rely on an arsenal of tools — including vaccines, paid sick leave and masks — to coexist with the virus while reducing our own risk and protecting others.

Eventually, the thinking goes, we’ll get to a point where the coronavirus is incorporated into other common viruses we are used to dealing with all the time, said Pia MacDonald, an infectious disease epidemiologist at RTI International, a nonprofit research institute. “We should each reflect on how we live with other viruses that routinely circulate, such as influenza, respiratory syncytial virus, noroviruses and others.”

That’s going to require a huge mental shift and acceptance of “a new element of manageable risk in our lives,” said Eduardo Franco, the director of the Division of Cancer Epidemiology at McGill University. “It means reacquiring behaviors, attitudes and social norms,” that have always been part of who we are.

In practice, this readjustment will vary widely for different people depending on our personal health circumstances and the needs of those closest to us.

“My family has moved away from restricting our activities as the Omicron surge has receded,” said Kate Eisenberg, an assistant professor of family medicine at the University of Rochester. “We do not have anyone with high-risk health conditions in the household, and we’re all vaccinated and boosted.”

Ms. Eisenberg is currently planning some family trips, including air travel, and she is allowing her 12- and 15-year-old children to participate in most social activities. She has been avoiding indoor dining and crowded indoor settings, but as cases continue to come down, she plans to go out more.

“I am taking my daughter to a Billie Eilish concert this weekend, which we’ve really been looking forward to,” she said. “We do still wear well-fitting masks, take home tests before getting together with friends and family, and assess the level of risk and local case levels before we go out.”

For Ms. MacDonald, the drop in cases has made her more comfortable entering other people’s homes without a mask, and having her older parents over for visits.

“I will still wear a mask to the grocery store for the foreseeable future and opt for restaurants that have good ventilation and where tables are well spaced out,” she said. “So long as cases are not surging locally, I will take advantage of mixing with my community at music, movie, theater and other venues, though will likely wear a mask out of habit.”

Coronavirus in the U.S.: Latest Map and Case Count

Track Covid-19 in your area, and get the latest state and county data on cases, deaths, hospitalizations, tests and vaccinations.

For many Americans, however, any big adjustments are still on hold until young children can get vaccinated.

“Our children are both in child care, and we’ll go into uncrowded shops, museums and libraries with masks on, though we don’t do any indoor dining and haven’t flown on a plane,” said Julianne Meisner, a clinical assistant professor at the University of Washington School of Public Health.

But after her 1- and 3-year old are vaccinated, she said, “we’re planning to resume indoor dining and take some trips to visit family and take some outdoorsy vacations. But we’ll have our eye on what’s going on and be ready to revisit plans if local transmission goes up or health care capacity begins to suffer.”

After we’ve spent two years of living in fear of the virus, being asked to “live with” it now may seem daunting. But in many ways, we’ve been preparing for this moment since the outbreak and it can be easy to forget how far we’ve come.

“For the first year of the pandemic, I routinely received questions from friends, family, patients and acquaintances about how to think about risk in different situations before making decisions,” Ms. Eisenberg said. “Now, hardly anyone asks those questions and most people have settled on their own conclusions about what works for them.”

As Russia commands the world’s attention with a military buildup around Ukraine, it faces a stubborn domestic challenge: the coronavirus.

On Friday, the country reported a daily record of 200,000 new coronavirus cases, as the highly transmissible Omicron variant sweeps across the remote parts of the vast country. Though deaths in Russia are off their November peak, the surge has served as a reminder of the vulnerability of Russia’s vaccine-skeptical population.

Omicron, which has also driven case counts up to extraordinary levels in many other European countries, began spreading across Russia in the middle of January, quickly becoming dominant in Moscow and other urban centers. The country recorded more than 170,000 cases over the past week, or 122 cases per 100,000 people, according to the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University.

The number of deaths, however, has remained steady, hovering at about 650 per day. That number is about half of what it was during its peak in November.

Moscow’s mayor, Sergei Sobyanin, said on Friday that the city had passed the peak of the Omicron wave, but that the situation remained difficult in other cities, including Russia’s second-largest, St. Petersburg.

Russia has been hit hard by the pandemic. The total number of deaths has exceeded 338,000, according to the official government tally. Some statisticians, however, point to the number of excess deaths as the more reliable measure. By that metric, the number of deaths in Russia has exceeded one million since the start of the pandemic. In 2020, life expectancy in the country decreased by two years, the first decline since 2003.

Experts have blamed chronically low levels of vaccination for that situation. Despite being one of the first countries to develop and approve a coronavirus vaccine, Russia has fully vaccinated only 49 percent of its population, according to the Our World in Data project at the University of Oxford. Distrust of the vaccine and relatively lax and inconsistent lockdown measures have contributed to people’s reluctance to be vaccinated.

As in other countries, the Omicron variant has hit Russia’s youth, with some hospitals reporting a rapid increase in the number of hospitalized children. In January, Russia started vaccinating teenagers with a specific type of Sputnik V, the Russia-made vaccine.

On Friday, the Federation Council, Russia’s upper chamber of parliament, reported that 20 of its senators had contracted the virus. Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the populist leader of one of the country’s leading political parties, has been hospitalized since last week.

President Vladimir V. Putin lives within strict protective measures to keep the virus at bay, even as world leaders travel to Moscow to try to defuse tensions over Russia’s military buildup at Ukraine’s borders. At a recent meeting with the French president, Emmanuel Macron, the two sat some 20 feet apart.

Truck drivers protesting vaccine mandates are parking their rigs in the middle of intersections in Canadian cities, blocking traffic and disrupting daily life and commerce enough to prompt a state of emergency in Ontario.

But demonstrators must clear the area blocking the Ambassador Bridge — a vital border crossing into the United States — an Ontario court ruled late Friday afternoon.

The ruling, by Chief Justice Geoffrey Morawetz of the Ontario Superior Court, could clear the way for traffic to again move freely across the bridge. It goes into effect at 7 p.m., which would give the protesters time to disband voluntarily.

Mayor Drew Dilkens of Windsor, Ontario, requested the court’s intervention over the blockade of the bridge that links his city with Detroit and carries roughly a third of U.S.-Canada trade. Major automakers unable to get deliveries of parts have had to shut down plants from Ontario to Alabama

The Canadian convoy inspired copycats in Paris, Australia and New Zealand. How did a handful of people in Canada, whose constitution calls for “peace, order and good government,” cause such disruption and turn their country into an unlikely springboard for a budding global movement?

It began on Jan. 22, when convoys of truck drivers departed from British Columbia en route to Ottawa, Canada’s capital, to protest a vaccine mandate — imposed by the government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau — for truckers entering the country from the United States.

Mr. Trudeau initially dismissed the protesters as a “small fringe minority” — a majority of Canadians say they support public health measures intended to slow the spread of the coronavirus — but the protesters are having an outsize impact. The protests have spread to other cities, including Toronto, Quebec City and Calgary, as well as on the Ambassador Bridge, a vital link for the automobile industry.

Steve Bell, Ottawa’s deputy police chief, described the protesters as “highly determined and volatile.” Police officials there have asked for 1,800 more officers, which would more than double the current size of the force. Mr. Trudeau has ruled out calling on the military.

Once narrowly focused, the protests have mushroomed into a sprawling campaign supporting, in some case, far-right, anti-government grievances.

James and Sandra Bauder are leaders of a group calling itself Canada Unity, a main organizer of the truck convoy. According to Sky News, Mr. Bauder “is a supporter of the QAnon conspiracy theory and has openly called for Mr. Trudeau to be put on trial for treason over his Covid policies.”

There’s no immediate end to the protests in sight, especially with prominent far-right figures in several countries, including the United States, Australia and Germany, praising them.

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Thousands Join Convoy to Paris to Protest France’s Covid Measures

Inspired by trucker-led protests in Canada, French demonstrators set out from cities across the country in thousands of vehicles to oppose virus restrictions.

[cars honking] Because of the truckers and everybody, all Canadians, they kind of federate how the people, so that’s why they’re in Australia, in New Zealand and now in Europe, in France. The people look at it, and I guess you really push them to go in the street and fight for the freedom too.

Thousands of vehicles carrying demonstrators from around France were converging on Paris on Friday in a movement inspired by Canada’s trucker-led protests, despite warnings by French authorities that they would break up attempts to block the capital.

Starting in Lille, Strasbourg, Nice and other cities, convoys of cars, trucks, camping vans and other vehicles slowly made their way to Paris, bearing protesters who honked, waved French flags and held up signs protesting the government’s vaccine pass and other grievances like rising gas prices.

The Paris police issued a ban against the so-called “Convoi de la Liberté,” a direct translation of Canada’s “Freedom Convoy,” threatening to fine offenders and tow blocking vehicles. On Friday, over 7,000 police officers were deployed to tollbooths and other key sites in and around the city with bulldozers and water cannons to break up potential blockades.

Jean Castex, France’s prime minister, said on Friday it was wrong to “associate these virulent attacks against vaccination with the word freedom,” telling the France 2 television broadcaster that the protesters were free to demonstrate but not block traffic.

“If they block Paris or if they try to block the capital, we will have to be very firm,” Mr. Castex said.

But President Emmanuel Macron also appealed for calm, saying in an interview with the newspaper Ouest-France on Friday that he understood the French were exhausted by pandemic restrictions.

“Sometimes that weariness expresses itself through anger,” Mr. Macron said. “I understand it and I respect it.” He added: “But we need unity, we need a lot of collective good will.”

One of the main Facebook groups behind the movement in France has attracted over 360,000 followers over the past weeks, but it was unclear how big the demonstration would be once it reached Paris — French media, citing anonymous police sources, said an estimated 2,500 to 3,000 vehicles were heading to the capital. Some protesters seemed unfazed by the authorities’ firmness.

“It’s impossible to prevent everyone from arriving,” Michel Audidier, a 65-year-old retiree whose protest convoy left Beauvais, north of Paris, told the Agence-France Presse news agency.

It was unclear how many of the demonstrators intended to actually block the city. Some told French media they only wanted to join weekly protests against the vaccine pass that have been held on most weekends in Paris but that have waned significantly in recent months.

Still, the French government is keeping a close eye on those protests, which initially focused on France’s vaccine pass but have grown to encompass other sources of frustration, like rising gas or energy prices.

That mix of grievances and lack of any central organization, with convoys only loosely coordinated on social media and messaging platforms, have drawn comparisons to the Yellow Vest movement that rocked France in 2018 and 2019 with months of sometimes violent protests. That movement was sparked by an increase in gasoline taxes but was fueled by a much broader sense of alienation felt by those living outside Paris.

“We’re not listened to,” Sophie, a 40-year-old unvaccinated protester who set out for Paris from Valenciennes, in northern France, told Europe 1 radio.

Sophie, who did not provide her last name, said she was tired of not being able to go to the restaurant or the movie theater because of her vaccination status, and she welcomed the protests.

“To see that much energy, that much solidarity, honestly, it’s really heartwarming,” she said.

France’s vaccine pass bars most people who do not show proof of full vaccination or recent recovery from Covid from entering public establishments like bars, restaurants and museums. A negative test result is no longer sufficient for those still unvaccinated.

Bruce Blakeman, who has emerged as the leader of suburban Long Island’s revolt against mask mandates, has lost his fair share of elections.

In 1998, Mr. Blakeman — a lifelong Republican — was trounced in a statewide election for comptroller. A year later, he was stunned to be voted out of the Nassau County Legislature, losing his perch as its presiding officer and majority leader. After toying with a run for New York City mayor in 2009, he then lost a congressional race to Representative Kathleen Rice of Long Island in 2014.

But Mr. Blakeman’s surprising November win in the race for Nassau County executive — upsetting Laura Curran, a moderate, first-term Democrat — has led, after so many races, to his informal anointment as the state party’s unlikeliest new star.

Helping to fuel his rise has been Mr. Blakeman’s seemingly single-minded political mission to challenge and defy Gov. Kathy Hochul, the state’s top Democrat, over her mask mandates, as well as rising crime rates and bail reform, which have proved potent issues for Republicans.