Puzzling COVID-19 vaccine distribution | Morning Newsletter

Good morning from The Inquirer newsroom. A “Snow Moon” is coming this weekend. Seriously.

First: Pennsylvania sent thousands of COVID-19 vaccine doses to children’s doctors, even though most kids aren’t eligible and physicians statewide struggle to vaccinate the most vulnerable.

Then: A Black novelist’s genius was overlooked at first. Now, the West Philadelphia woman’s 1974 novel is considered a masterpiece.

And: Are Philadelphia public schools any closer to opening?

— Tommy Rowan (@tommyrowan, morningnewsletter@inquirer.com)

The Pennsylvania Department of Health sent more than 12,000 COVID-19 vaccine doses to pediatric offices statewide.

But older teens must have serious underlying health conditions to get the vaccine now. And the Food and Drug Administration has not authorized emergency use of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine for anyone younger than 16 or the Moderna vaccine for anyone under 18.

And what is puzzling many doctors is why practices that cater to seniors, who are the most vulnerable to serious illness and death from COVID-19, weren’t able to get doses.

Today, the critical consensus is that Oreo — the story of a 16-year-old half-African American, half-Ashkenazi Jewish teen who leaves her grandparents’ house in West Philadelphia to find her absentee dad in New York — is a masterpiece.

But when Fran Ross published her novel in 1974 it received little attention. The book, one of a few satirical novels written by a Black woman, was the West Philadelphia native’s first and last novel.

Ross died of cancer in 1985 at age 50 — 15 years before readers started calling her a genius.

Great shot, @philly_music_dad.

Tag your Instagram posts or tweets with #OurPhilly and we’ll pick our favorite each day to feature in this newsletter and give you a shout out!

“In 2021, a slow-motion Selma is unfolding in statehouses from Harrisburg to Phoenix, with Republican lawmakers — using a falsehood so monstrous that critics are right to call it ‘the Big Lie,’ even with its echoes of Nazi Germany — racing to roll back voting rights at a faster pace than any time since the Jim Crow laws of the late 19th Century,” writes columnist Will Bunch, calling for President Biden to declare war on voter suppression in a prime-time, Oval Office speech.

The riddle of who or what killed nine young hikers has inspired conspiracy theories for decades, writes Ivan Nechepurenko and Alan Yuhas in the New York Times. And now, two scientists say a natural disaster may be to blame.

A network of farmers, distillers, and one particularly determined whiskey buff is working to bring back a famous Pennsylvania rye varietal that was almost lost to time.