COVID-19 updates: Anti-vaccine protesters halt vaccinations at Dodger Stadium

The California Department of Public Health lifted a stay-at-home order for all regions statewide on Monday.

Four-week intensive care unit capacity projections for the three regions that had still been under the order -- San Joaquin Valley, Bay Area and Southern California -- are now above 15%, the threshold that allows regions to exit the order. The Sacramento region exited the order on Jan. 12 and the Northern California region never entered the order, according to a press release from the California Department of Public Health.

The move allows all counties statewide to return to the rules and framework of California's "Blueprint for a Safer Economy" and color-coded tiers that indicate which activities and businesses are open based on local COVID-19 infection rates and test positivity. The majority of the counties are in the strictest -- or purple -- tier. Individual counties may choose to impose stricter rules, according to the press release.

"Californians heard the urgent message to stay home as much as possible and accepted that challenge to slow the surge and save lives," Dr. Tomas Aragon, director of the California Department of Public Health, said in a statement. "Together, we changed our activities knowing our short-term sacrifices would lead to longer-term gains. COVID-19 is still here and still deadly, so our work is not over, but it’s important to recognize our collective actions saved lives and we are turning a critical corner."

California, home to nearly 40 million people, has the highest tally of diagnosed COVID-19 cases of any U.S. state, with more than 3.1 million, according to a real-time count kept by Johns Hopkins University.

Laboratory experiments that tested Moderna's COVID-19 vaccine against new variants of the novel coronavirus show little to no impact on its efficacy, according to a press release from the company.

The vaccine produced antibodies that neutralized all key emerging variants tested, including B117 and B1351, which were first identified in the United Kingdom and in South Africa, respectively. The study showed "no significant impact" on neutralizing titers against the B117 variant. Meanwhile, a six-fold reduction in neutralizing titers was observed with the B1351 variant but remain above levels that are expected to be protective, according to the press release.

Although the two-dose regimen of the vaccine is expected to be protective against emerging strains to date, Moderna announced Monday that it will test two additional strategies: one to explore whether adding an extra dose could offer more protection, and another to study a version of their original vaccine that's more tailored to the South Africa variant.

"As we seek to defeat the COVID-19 virus, which has created a worldwide pandemic, we believe it is imperative to be proactive as the virus evolves. We are encouraged by these new data, which reinforce our confidence that the Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine should be protective against these newly detected variants," Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel said in a statement. "Out of an abundance of caution and leveraging the flexibility of our mRNA platform, we are advancing an emerging variant booster candidate against the variant first identified in the Republic of South Africa into the clinic to determine if it will be more effective to boost titers against this and potentially future variants."

ABC News' Sony Salzman contributed to this report.

France's world-renowned Pasteur Institute announced Monday that it is stopping development of one of its COVID-19 vaccine candidates, after finding the shot to be less effective than hoped.

The vaccine candidate, based on an existing measles vaccine, was being developed with American pharmaceutical company Merck and was put into phase 1 clinical trials last August. A review of interim results from the trials showed the shot "was well tolerated but produced immune responses that were inferior to those observed in people who had recovered naturally and to those observed in the authorized vaccines," according to a statement from the Pasteur Institute, which is located in Paris and is named after French scientist Louis Pasteur who created successful vaccines against rabies and anthrax in the 19th century.

The decision to abandon development of the drug does not have any impact on the institute's continued research of two other prospective vaccines, which are "based on different methodologies" and are not yet ready for clinical trials, according to the statement.

"The Pasteur Institute will continue to develop other vaccine candidates that have reached the end of the preclinical phase, and maintain its strong scientific mobilization to fight the COVID-19 epidemic," the institute said.

ABC News' Ibtissem Guenfoud contributed to this report.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the top infectious disease expert in the United States, said he believes a new, more contagious variant of the novel coronavirus that was first detected in the United Kingdom is also more virulent.

When British scientists first studied the mutation "intensively" on a case-by-case basis, Fauci said they initially thought the variant was more transmissible but not necessarily more likely to cause serious illness or death.

"When they went and became more gradual and looked at the data, they became convinced that it is in fact a bit more virulent, namely making it more difficult when you get to the point of serious disease and even death. So I believe their data. I haven't seen all of it, but from what I've heard I believe the data," Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told ABC News chief anchor George Stephanopoulos in an interview Monday on "Good Morning America."

ABC News has learned that U.S. President Joe Biden plans to impose a ban on most non-U.S. citizens entering the country who have recently been in South Africa as well as reinstate an entry ban on almost all non-U.S. citizens from Brazil, Ireland, the United Kingdom and 26 other European nations that allow travel across open borders. The move comes as a new, more contagious variants of the novel coronavirus have emerged out of South Africa, Brazil and the U.K. Some researchers worry that the mutations could reduce the potency of the two COVID-19 vaccines currently being used in the U.S.

Fauci, who is Biden's chief medical adviser, said he believes the South Africa travel ban was "prudent" and "the right decision," though he admitted "there's always a possibility and even a likelihood of some slippage."

"Right now, even though our surveillance isn't as comprehensive as we'd like it to be yet, it doesn't appear that this particular mutant is in the United States -- although it well may be," he said. "But if you have a free inflow of people from a country in which that mutant is clearly dominant -- I talk to my colleagues often in South Africa, it clearly is dominant there -- I believe the travel ban will be important, in addition to having a situation where anybody coming into the country now is going to be required to have a negative test before they even get on the plane, when they land to have a degree of quarantine as well as another test.

Fauci expressed hope that the vaccine shortages and delays in many communities across the U.S. will be corrected "within a very reasonable period of time," while cautioning, "it's going to take a little time."

"We've got to pull out all the stops," he said. "We've got to get into the trenches and figure out exactly at that local level what's going on and how to fix it."

He said "getting the vaccine situation on track" is Biden's "highest priority."

"The president has said it publicly, but in a private session, just sitting down with him and with the medical team, he's very serious. He said: 'Science is going to rule. We're going to go by the facts. We're going to go by the evidence. We're going to go by the data,'" Fauci recalled. "So the idea that the president himself sits down with you, says, 'I want science to rule, go out there and do everything we need to do to get it done,' just is really very refreshing."