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Michael McCaul and Ryan C. Crocker PAGE A19

OPINION A18-19

The news longed for by so manyfor so long landed like a joltingboom: New York City is reopening— not someday, not hopefullysoon, but in two weeks. Last year’serasure of the city’s nightlife, cul-ture, dining and shopping — thethings that make New York NewYork — would be suddenly un-done.

By Tuesday, a day after Gov. An-drew M. Cuomo’s announcement,New Yorkers were respondingwith a mix of joy, did-I-hear-that-right double-takes and doubt. Theidea of having so much come backso soon — on May 19, a seeminglyrandom Wednesday around thecorner — was, for many, dizzying.

“It doesn’t quite feel real,” saidCharlie Cloud, 16, a high schoolsophomore from Manhattan.“We’ve lived like this for quite along time, this happened all a littlefast.” But that’s not stopping himfrom making plans to get back tohis hangouts: “My favorite placeis Bowlmor,” he said.

The reopening coincides withsimilar measures in Connecticut

and New Jersey. From the KababKing in Queens to Our Hero’sSandwich Shop in Jersey City tothe Atticus Bookstore Cafe in NewHaven, people reacted happily orwarily to the news, a moment to beremembered by a generation, asclearly as the one when every-thing suddenly shut down.

Some doubted the safety andlogic of the timing. Too soon, too

New Yorkers on the Reopening:‘It’s About Time’ or ‘It’s Too Fast’

By MICHAEL WILSON

Continued on Page A7

The Charging Bull statue, apopular draw near Wall Street.

KIRSTEN LUCE FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

WASHINGTON — PresidentBiden, confronting lagging vacci-nations that threaten his promiseof near normalcy by July 4, onTuesday overhauled the strategyto battle the pandemic, shiftingfrom mass vaccination sites tomore local settings to targetyounger Americans and thosehesitant to get a shot.

In a speech at the White House,Mr. Biden said he was launching anew phase in the fight against thecoronavirus, with a goal of at leastpartly vaccinating 70 percent ofadults by Independence Day andwith a personal plea to all of theunvaccinated: “This is yourchoice. It’s life and death.”

After three months of battlingsupply shortages and distributionbottlenecks, the Biden adminis-tration is confronting a problemthat the president said was inev-itable: Many of those who weremost eager to get vaccinated havealready done so. Vaccination sitesat stadiums once filled with car-loads of people seeking shots areclosing, and states that once clam-ored for more vaccines are findingthat they cannot use all of thedoses that the federal governmentwants to ship to them.

Yet the administration’s ownhealth experts say tens of millionsmore Americans must be vacci-nated before the infection rate islow enough to return to whatmany people consider ordinarylife.

The administration now wantstens of thousands of pharmaciesto allow people to walk in forshots. It has also ordered up pop-up and mobile clinics, especially inrural areas, and it plans to devotetens of millions of dollars for com-munity outreach workers to pro-vide transport and help arrangechild care for those in high-riskneighborhoods who want to bevaccinated.

To build up confidence in vac-cines, federal officials plan to en-list the help of family doctors andother emissaries who are trustedvoices in their communities.

In a new effort to match supplywith demand, federal officials in-formed states on Tuesday that ifthey did not order their full alloca-

As Vaccinations Slow,Biden Adjusts StrategyToward Local Response

Targeting the Youngand the Reluctant

By SHARON LaFRANIEREand NOAH WEILAND

Continued on Page A6

The contrast could hardly besharper.

In much of the developed world,vaccine orders are soaring intothe billions of doses, Covid-19cases are easing, economies arepoised to roar to life and peopleare busy lining up summer vaca-tions. In many less developed na-tions, though, the virus is ragingon, sometimes out of control,while vaccinations are happeningfar too slowly to protect even themost vulnerable.

That split screen — clubs andrestaurants reopening in theUnited States and Europe whilepeople gasp for oxygen in India —was never supposed to be sostark. Some 192 countries signedup last year for Covax, a vaccine-sharing partnership, and theGates Foundation poured $300million into an Indian factory tomake doses for the world’s poor.The European Union’s top execu-tive told a global summit lastJune: “Vaccination is a universalhuman right.”

But the virus is spreading morerapidly than ever, driven largelyby gains in South America and In-dia, and the campaign to vacci-nate the world is floundering.

India, an important source ofvaccines in normal times, hashalted exports as it fights a recordsurge in the virus and an expand-ing humanitarian crisis. That hasdelayed critical shipments, withIndia making the majority of Co-vax supplies.

In Brazil, where thousands aredying daily, officials have receivedonly a 10th of the AstraZenecadoses they were promised by mid-year.

And in countries as varied asGhana and Bangladesh, whichblew through their initial vaccinesupplies, the lucky few who re-ceived a first shot have been un-sure of when they will receive an-other.

“It’s a moral issue,” said BostonZimba, a doctor and vaccine ex-pert in Malawi, which has vacci-nated only 2 percent of its people.“This is something rich countriesshould be thinking about. It’s theirconscience. It’s how they definethemselves.”

The problems go well beyond

As the West Emerges,Poor Nations Reel

By BENJAMIN MUELLER

BRAZIL Spraying disinfectant in the Santa Marta neighborhood of Rio de Janeiro last month.BRUNA PRADO/ASSOCIATED PRESS

BRITAIN A concert on Sunday in Liverpool, England, where the audience was tested for the virus.PAUL ELLIS/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES

Continued on Page A6

MEXICO CITY — The capitalhad been bracing for the disasterfor years.

Ever since it opened nearly adecade ago, the newest MexicoCity subway line — a heralded ex-pansion of the second largest sub-way system in the Americas —had been plagued with structuralweaknesses that led engineers towarn of potential accidents. Yetother than a brief, partial shut-down of the line in 2014, the warn-ings went unheeded by successivegovernments.

On Monday night, the mountingproblems turned fatal: A subwaytrain on the Golden Line plungedabout 50 feet after an overpasscollapsed underneath it, killing atleast 24 people and injuring doz-ens more.

The accident — and the govern-ment’s failure to act sooner to fixknown problems with the line —

Alarms Ignored Before Disaster

In Mexico CityThis article is by Maria Abi-

Habib, Oscar Lopez, NatalieKitroeff and Mike Ives.

Continued on Page A12

The birthrate declined for thesixth straight year in 2020, thefederal government reported onWednesday, early evidence thatthe coronavirus pandemic accel-erated a trend among Americanwomen of delaying pregnancy.

Early in the pandemic, therewas speculation that the majorchanges in the life of Americanfamilies could lead to a recovery inthe birthrate, as couples hunkereddown together. In fact, they ap-peared to have had the oppositeeffect: Births were down mostsharply at the end of the year,when babies conceived at thestart of the pandemic would havebeen born.

Births declined by about 8 per-cent in December, compared tothe same month the year before, amonthly breakdown of govern-ment data showed. December hadthe single largest decline of anymonth. Over all for the year, birthsdeclined by 4 percent, the datashowed. There were 3,605,201births in the United States lastyear, the lowest number since1979. The birthrate — measuredas the number of babies per thou-sand women ages 15 to 44 — hasfallen by about 19 percent since itsrecent peak in 2007.

The declining birthrate is justone piece of America’s shiftingdemographic picture. Combinedwith a substantial leveling-off ofimmigration, and rising deaths,the country’s population over thelast decade expanded at the sec-ond-slowest rate since the govern-ment started counting in the 18thcentury. The pandemic, whichpushed the death rate higher andthe birthrate even lower, appearsto have deepened that trend.

Kenneth Johnson, a demogra-pher at the University of NewHampshire, has calculated that to-gether with the rise in deaths —up by about 18 percent from 2019— the drop in births is contribut-ing to the aging of the Americanpopulation: A total of 25 states hadmore deaths than births last year,Dr. Johnson said, up from five atthe end of 2019.

“The birthrate is the lowest it’sever been,” he said. “At some pointthe question is going to be: Thewomen who delayed having ba-bies, are they ever going to havethem? If they don’t, that’s a per-manent notch in the American

Pandemic LedTo Faster Drop

In U.S. Births

Long Trend of DelayingPregnancy Continues

By SABRINA TAVERNISE

Continued on Page A16

Precious Coleman helping her 11-year-old son, Jordyn, with his schoolwork in Clarksdale, Miss.TAMIR KALIFA FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

CLARKSDALE, Miss. — By thetime Precious Coleman returnedhome from her overnight shift at acasino, it was past 9 in the morn-ing. It had been another night ofdealing with belligerent patronswho refused to wear their facemasks and drunks who needed tobe escorted to the curb. Her eyesstung.

More than anything, shewanted to fall into bed. But her 11-year-old son, Jordyn, was waitingfor her.

Or, more specifically, for hercellphone: Because their Missis-sippi apartment has no internet,Jordyn uses her phone to log intohis virtual classroom two days aweek.

By the time Jordyn signed in, hehad already missed two periods ofclass. And he would miss more. Bythe sixth period, he had fallenasleep, cheek smushed into hispalm. His mother, who tries ashard as she can to stay awake sothat she can supervise him, wasalso sound asleep in the nextroom.

And so neither of them heardJordyn’s math teacher announcean upcoming test, one that wasparticularly critical for Jordyn,

who was failing the class. “If youdon’t make at least a C,” theteacher said, in a tone both playfuland serious, “we’re going to fight.”

Jordyn is at risk of becomingone of the lost students of the co-ronavirus pandemic in the mostdisrupted American school yearsince World War II. By one esti-mate, three million students na-tionwide, roughly the school-agepopulation of Florida, stopped go-ing to classes, virtual or in person,after the pandemic began.

A disproportionate number ofthose disengaged students arelower-income Black, Latino andNative American children whohave struggled to keep up in class-rooms that are partly or fully re-mote, for reasons ranging frompoor internet service to needing to

A Tough School Year Risks Becoming a Lost OneBy RUKMINI CALLIMACHI

Continued on Page A20

As Families Struggle toStay Afloat, Students

Are Falling Behind

The soccer club, which reached theChampions League final, is also waginga secret legal battle in England. PAGE B7

SPORTSWEDNESDAY B7-9

Manchester City’s Yin and YangLegal experts said it was unlikely thatDerek Chauvin, convicted of murderingGeorge Floyd, would win an appealbecause of a juror’s actions. PAGE A16

Chauvin Seeks New Trial

Some parents are opting to retake thedangerous trek north to join the chil-dren who were kept in the U.S. PAGE A10

Pulled Apart at the BorderJ. Kenji López-Alt revisits a 2006 recipeby Jim Lahey and Mark Bittman thatchanged the face of baking. PAGE D1

On a No-to-Knead Basis

Jacques d’Amboise, who died Sunday,lived to the fullest — and danced withthat same spirit. An appraisal. PAGE C1

ARTS C1-6

Recalling a Ballet LegendPrime Minister Benjamin Netanyahuhas failed to form a government, so hisrivals may now get a chance. PAGE A9

INTERNATIONAL A8-13

No Consensus in IsraelState Senator Jessica Ramos speaks upfor street vendors, farmworkers and themany restaurants in Queens. PAGE D1

FOOD D1-8

A Lawmaker With a CauseA federal judge said the former attor-ney general’s team misled her about itsdeliberations on whether to prosecutePresident Donald J. Trump. PAGE A15

NATIONAL A14-17, 20

Barr’s Justice Dept. Is Rebuked

Conservatives are plotting to dethroneRepresentative Liz Cheney. Her offense:continued repudiation of Donald J.Trump and his election lies. PAGE A15

G.O.P. Spurns a Truth-TellerThe company said its Covid vaccinegenerated $3.5 billion in revenue in thefirst three months of this year. PAGE B1

Huge Profits for Pfizer A performer seeks reassurance, andsleeves, to face a crowd again. PAGE C1

Fitting-Room Confessions

Janet Yellen, the Treasury secretary,clarified that she was not providingadvice to the Federal Reserve, whichsets monetary policy. PAGE B3

BUSINESS B1-6

Yellen Says Rates May Rise

Late Edition

VOL. CLXX . . . No. 59,049 © 2021 The New York Times Company NEW YORK, WEDNESDAY, MAY 5, 2021

Today, cloudy, showers, thunder-storms, high 67. Tonight, eveningthunderstorms, clearing, cool, low50. Tomorrow, mostly sunny, high65. Weather map is on Page B12.

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