This is part of a Yahoo News series honoring some of the American lives lost to COVID-19. Their stories are told by family and friends, who were left to deal with their often sudden and painful deaths.

Terrence James, 49, of Galveston, Texas, died on Feb. 19, 2021, after becoming ill with COVID-19. He is among the more than 565,000 Americans who have succumbed to the disease since the first known fatality in the United States in early 2020.

His wife, Ebony James, told Yahoo News that her husband was a man of faith who loved God and his family fearlessly and that he was also passionate about helping people.

“If someone

On Thursday, Rep. Jim Jordan’s aggressive questioning of Dr. Anthony Fauci seemed to epitomize the partisan divide between individual liberties as defined by the Constitution and public health measures that have been enforced in an attempt to curb the coronavirus pandemic. 

“We had 15 days to slow the spread turn into a year of lost liberty,” Jordan, R-Ohio, said during a House Coronavirus Crisis Subcommittee hearing where Fauci, the nation’s leading expert on infectious diseases, was testifying. “What metrics — what measures — what has to happen before Americans get more freedoms?”

“You’re indicating liberty and freedom,” Fauci responded. “I look at it as a public health measure to prevent people

WASHINGTON — Surgeon General Vivek Murthy had a message Friday afternoon for the 6.8 million Americans who have received the Johnson & Johnson coronavirus vaccine and who, in recent days, have read concerning reports about blood clotting: “The vast and overwhelming likelihood is that you will be just fine,” Dr. Murthy said during a briefing of the White House COVID-19 response team.

He added that the response team was quite confident in that assertion, which is in keeping with what scientists know about the vaccine.

Surgeon General Vivek Murthy. (Caroline Brehman/CQ Roll Call/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

The Biden administration told states on Tuesday to stop using the Johnson & Johnson vaccine after

On a chilly Monday morning, the first day of March, airport workers in Košice, Slovakia, unloaded crates marked “Sputnik V” and stamped with the accompanying boast “the first registered COVID-19 vaccine,” from a military cargo plane that had just landed from Russia.

Slovakia’s Prime Minister Igor Matovič, a media mogul in office for only a year who had earned a reputation as a showman while heading the anticorruption Ordinary People and Independent Personalities party, staged a press conference in front of the plane to unveil the surprise that he’d negotiated in secret with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s government: 200,000 doses of Sputnik V — with another 2 million doses on

WASHINGTON — President Biden’s top intelligence chiefs have yet to determine how people first became infected with COVID-19, but they say they haven’t ruled out the possibility that it escaped from a lab in Wuhan, China.

“It is absolutely accurate that the intelligence community does not know exactly where, when or how the COVID-19 virus was transmitted initially,” Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines told lawmakers Wednesday during a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing.

“Basically, components have coalesced around two alternative theories. These scenarios are, it emerged naturally from human contact with infected animals or it was a laboratory accident,” she said in response to a question from the committee’s vice chair,

Associated Press

Stars keep playoff hopes alive with 5-2 win over Lightning

Joe Pavelski had two goals and two assists to help keep the Dallas Stars’ postseason hopes alive with a 5-2 victory over the Tampa Bay Lightning on Friday night. The win moved Dallas within two points of Nashville heading into the final weekend of the regular season. The Stars play Chicago on Sunday and Monday, while the Predators host Carolina, which clinched its first division title since 2006 on Friday with Tampa Bay’s loss, on Saturday and Monday.

WASHINGTON — The Biden administration said on Tuesday that it had plenty of doses of the Pfizer and Moderna coronavirus vaccines, making assurances just hours after many states stopped administering the Johnson & Johnson vaccine over concerns of blood clotting.

“We have plenty of supply,” said White House coronavirus response coordinator Jeff Zients during a press briefing Tuesday afternoon, calling the remaining two vaccines now in the nation’s arsenal “clearly safe.”

White House coronavirus response coordinator Jeff Zients. (Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images)

Zients vowed that the administration was committed to reaching 200 million vaccinations by Biden’s 100th day in office, which comes at the end of April. Earlier, in a White

WASHINGTON — As the coronavirus was spreading throughout the United States last spring, Gov. Larry Hogan of Maryland emerged as a refreshingly sensible leader willing to put political ideology aside for the sake of public safety.

Even as other Republicans rushed to reopen their states to cater to an impatient President Trump, Hogan vowed to stick to his cautious approach. “We’re not going to do anything that’s going to put anybody in more danger,” he said in a television appearance at that time.

But last month, Hogan moved abruptly to reopen the state at a time when public health officials were continuing to plead for caution. They have pointed to the

WASHINGTON — Just days after Johnson & Johnson announced that 15 million doses of its coronavirus vaccine had been contaminated at a Baltimore plant, federal officials recommended that states stop using that vaccine altogether, citing reports of blood clots.

In a joint statement issued on Tuesday morning, the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said the agencies were acting “out of an abundance of caution,” noting that “adverse events appear to be extremely rare.”

There had been six such reports in the U.S., out of nearly 7 million doses administered. All six of the cases involved women between the ages of 18 and 48. One