Stop and reflect on the success of the coronavirus vaccines. While most vaccines take five to 10 years to develop and manufacture, the remarkable mRNA shots appeared in less than a year. They were safe, efficacious, free, and dramatically reduced serious illness and death, one of the great biomedical achievements of all time. Yet their results could have been even better. A study by Oliver J. Watson and colleagues at the MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis at Imperial College London, published June 23 in the Lancet, sheds light on the scope of the achievement.

Democrat Wes Moore led gubernatorial candidates in fundraising during the waning weeks of the 2022 campaign. Between June 8 and July 3, Moore and running mate Aruna Miller, a former state delegate from Montgomery County, raised $576,054. The campaign spent about $1.9 million in the same time period, also the most among all candidates for governor. For the final weeks of the campaign, Moore and Miller also retain the most cash on hand across three campaign accounts: $809,659. Republican Kelly Schulz and her running mate, Jeff Woolford, both veterans of the Hogan administration, retain the second largest bank balance: $733,596.

One Friday evening last November, a man stepped out of a minivan on President Street and beat a young squeegee worker bloody with a small wooden bat. Brandon Mead, a Baltimore attorney, witnessed the attack. “Clearly, this guy was ready for it,” Mead told me, referring to the white, middle-aged driver of the van, which had Pennsylvania plates. Mead heard the man yell. He saw him get out of the van and raise the bat against a Black teenage boy. The boy raised a squeegee in defense, but his attacker swung the club, broke the squeegee, then struck the boy in the face. The boy went down in front of Mead’s car.

Ridership for Maryland Transit Administration bus and rail lines, hard hit by the onset of COVID-19 in early 2020, has yet to rebound to pre-pandemic levels. In February 2020, bus ridership was just above 5 million. Two years later, in February 2022, bus ridership did not reach 3 million. This decrease is seen across all of the MTA’s services, with Metro Subway ridership standing at 612,000 in February 2020, compared to 122,000 in February 2022. The light rail system has grown the most percentage-wise since its lowest point during the pandemic. In April 2020, light rail saw 46,000 riders, and that number has more than quadrupled, up to 188,000 as of February 2022.

As a lawyer with a physical disability who also has experienced depression, I’m disappointed at the tenor of how our society discusses a disease of millions of Americans – mental illness. Each tragic occurrence of a mass shooting results in the specter of mental health disability blamed as a factor. Most people both with physical and invisible disabilities, however, are doing their best merely to exist much less to thrive. It does these citizens a profound disservice to equate them as the problem to be solved through catchy-sounding legislation.

St. Mary’s County’s third-largest employer, a defense contractor that employs more than 900 people in the county of just under 114,000 residents, is leaving the area. DynCorp International, which was acquired in late 2020 by Amentum, a Germantown-based federal contractor, had served the Patuxent River Naval Air Station for more than 48 years, according to Amentum’s website. But few, if any, jobs will be lost; the company’s contract in the area, doing maintenance on five squadrons of aircrafts known as the Naval Test Wing Atlantic, has been taken over by another contractor, The Vertex Company, that county officials anticipate will maintain all 937 employees. 

Maryland’s candidates for governor, doing everything in their power to reach undecided voters in a heated primary season, combined to spend more than $5.3 million in new television, radio and online advertisements in the weeks leading up to early voting, new campaign finance reports show. Both the Democratic and Republican nominating contests to replace outgoing Republican Gov. Larry Hogan are coming down to the wire. One week of early voting began Thursday, and more than 90,000 voters had turned in mail-in ballots as of Friday.

Screeches of plastic against hardwood fill the room as a sweat-drenched skater flies around the edge of the track. Colorful makeup radiates above and below her eyes. With her left hand behind her back to preserve momentum, she sweeps through a long section of the track and comes up behind eight skaters. A referee skates beside her with their right arm pointed toward her and left arm raised up in the air. She skates up to the pack, where four skaters match her in blue and another four look ready for battle in bright orange.