WEST CHESTER

The Michigan General Election will be held on Tuesday, Nov. 8, with several key statewide races and ballot proposals up for voting.

The 8-year-old Philadelphia Phillies fan caught on TV praying for Bryson Stott in the ninth inning of a game this week got to meet his new favorite player before Friday's game.

The Supreme Court is allowing elections officials to count mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania that lack a handwritten date but were received in time.

Clinics to administer booster doses of the Moderna and Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccines will launch this week in Oakland County.

Michigan voters who are voting absentee in the Aug. 3 primary election should return ballots in person or at a local drop box.

Kroger is joining the vaccine lottery craze, offering major prizes for people who get their COVID-19 shot through Kroger Health.

Michigan Republicans have revised a contentious bill that would have required voters to attach a copy of their photo ID when mailing an absentee ballot application, saying they could include their driver’s license number or the last four digits of their Social Security number instead.

Pharma firms Sanofi and GlaxoSmithKline say they will begin production of another potential vaccine against COVID-19 within weeks.

Here are tonight's top stories.

Moderna says its COVID-19 vaccine strongly protects kids as young as 12.

The Biden administration’s call to lift patent protections on COVID-19 vaccines to help poor parts of the world get more doses has drawn praise from some countries and health advocates.

Here are tonight's top stories

(AP Photo/Matt Slocum, File)This is one of the top questions we receive right now:How long after receiving a COVID-19 vaccine shot does it take for it to be effective? “That means it’s possible a person could be infected with the virus that causes COVID-19 just before or just after vaccination and still get sick. It typically takes a few weeks after vaccination for the body to produce T-lymphocytes and B-lymphocytes. There have been cases of people being inadvertently billed after they received the vaccine, but those errors were identified and corrected. Are the precautions after receiving the vaccine (and waiting two weeks) the same for a high risk person as for the general population?

(AP Photo/Matt Slocum, File)A new study raised questions about how well COVID-19 vaccines protect organ transplant recipients — and what precautions people with suppressed immune systems should take after the shots. Transplant recipients take powerful immune-suppressing drugs to prevent organ rejection, which also increases their risk from the coronavirus — but excluded them from vaccine studies. Specialists say the shots appear safe for transplant recipients and any protection is better than none. A few weeks after the first dose, 17% of the transplant recipients had developed antibodies against the coronavirus, said Dr. Dorry Segev, a Hopkins transplant surgeon who co-authored the study. Those waiting for a life-saving organ transplant might be able to get vaccinated first.

More recently, he said the spread of more contagious variants of the virus increases the need for more people to get their shots — and quickly. The poll of 1,055 adults, taken Jan. 28 through Feb. 1, provides insight into the skepticism. About the same percentage said they don’t trust COVID-19 vaccines. And 38% said they don’t believe they need a vaccine, with a similar share saying that they don’t know if a COVID-19 vaccine will work and that they don't trust the government. ___The AP-NORC poll of 1,055 adults was conducted Jan. 28-Feb. 1 using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population.

The state Supreme Court, which has a 5-2 Democratic majority, granted the Democratic Party’s request to order an extension of Pennsylvania’s Election Day deadline to count mailed-in ballots. The rulings came amid a flurry of partisan lawsuits and a partisan stalemate over fixing gray areas and glitches exposed during a test-run of Pennsylvania's mail-in voting law during June 2's primary election. Losing Pennsylvania could prove fatal to Biden’s chances of defeating Trump: No Democrat has won the presidency without winning Pennsylvania since Harry S. Truman in 1948. Democrats and liberal groups cheered the court's decisions on the mail-in voting law. Mail-in voting will help “protect our right to vote in the most critical election of our lifetimes," NextGen Pennsylvania said.

FILE - In this May 28, 2020, file photo, mail-in primary election ballots are processed at the Chester County Voter Services office in West Chester, Pa. Gov. Tom Wolf's top election official said Friday, Aug. 14, that the administration had to take action after receiving a blunt warning from the U.S. Postal Service that it may be unable to deliver some mail-in ballots in the November presidential election by the deadline in state law. That warning precipitated Thursday night's filing in the state Supreme Court asking for an order to extend the deadline for mail-in ballots to be received in the Nov. 3 election when Pennsylvania will be a premier presidential battleground. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke, File)