Politics

Appointments at Maryland’s COVID-19 mass-vaccination sites will be managed by a new web portal beginning in March, the state’s acting health secretary announced on Monday. Gov. Lawrence J. Hogan Jr. (R) and his health chief, Dennis R. Schrader have resisted calls for a state-run sign-up system, but Schrader told lawmakers that “the new pre-registration system will improve the user experience, and better prepare for the day when supplies are very abundant.”

In a city battered by the coronavirus, one biomedical plant is churning out enough vaccine doses to inoculate every resident hundreds of times over. The lifesaving medicine is brewed in stainless steel vats and bottled at subfreezing temperatures — then loaded into trucks that carry the vaccines hundreds of miles away. Most will never return. At the eastern edge of Baltimore, Emergent BioSolutions is manufacturing almost all of the yet-to-be approved Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccines for the U.S. population — an anticipated hundreds of millions of doses in the coming months.

The Baltimore Sun is poised to be acquired by a nonprofit founded last month by Stewart Bainum Jr., a Montgomery County-raised business owner who has also been active in Maryland politics and philanthropy. The acquisition would include The Sun, The Capital Gazette in Annapolis, the Carroll County Times and other community newspapers in the Baltimore metro region.

Many homeowners and renters continue to fall behind on monthly payments during the COVID-19 pandemic, and now there’s a renewed push to ensure they don’t lose their homes or get evicted. Maryland has one of the highest foreclosure rates in the country, according to Sen. Chris Van Hollen, who is hopeful that states will get more help addressing housing issues in President Joe Biden’s $1.9-trillion pandemic-relief package working its way through Congress. Speaking with state lawmakers during a virtual meeting on Tuesday, the Democrat noted that by the end of last year, the delinquency rate on residential properties was 8.8%.

When they pull back the blinds, staff members in the office of U.S. Rep. C.A. Dutch Ruppersberger can look across Independence Avenue at the U.S. Capitol, which seems to glow at night. The view, once stirring, now unleashes more complicated emotions. The Baltimore County Democrat’s staff can’t uncouple the dome’s majesty from stomach-churning memories of the Jan. 6 Capitol siege — when they peeked out to watch rioters scaling the building — or from ongoing threats posed by right-wing extremists.

When Gov. Larry Hogan put pen to paper and signed the RELIEF Act into law, he triggered a series of maneuvers that will enable hundreds of thousands of state residents to get stimulus payments and many businesses to get tax breaks. The RELIEF Act is the Republican governor’s signature effort of the current General Assembly session. It’s a more than $1 billion combination of direct payments, tax breaks and business aid aimed at helping those taking the worst financial hit from the coronavirus pandemic. Lawmakers expanded on the governor’s proposal and the bill won bipartisan support.