COVID vaccines could begin going into kids' arms as early as next week, Axios health care editor Tina Reed writes.

• Why it matters: Parents have been awaiting this moment for months, especially as schools went back in-person. Doctors, pharmacists and federal regulators have a plan in place to get kids vaccinated ASAP.

What's happening: The FDA is expected to sign off today on an emergency use authorization for Pfizer's vaccine in kids ages 5-11 — two shots that are each about a third of the size of the adult dose.

• The Biden administration and Pfizer have coordinated to make sure more than 25,000 pediatric and primary care offices — along with hundreds of community clinics, and tens of thousands of pharmacies — will have doses available as soon as they get federal approval.

Pfizer is expected to begin shipping vaccines, specifically packaged for child-sized doses, as early as this weekend, said Christopher Cox, an SVP in CVS Health's pharmacy division.

• The vaccines may not be available everywhere all at once. CVS will have the vaccine in "thousands" of locations on day one, but not in every store, Cox said.

What we're watching: Experts think about a third of families will want to get their newly eligible kids vaccinated right away.

Reality check: Kids won't be fully vaccinated by Thanksgiving.

• Like the adult shots, the first and second doses must be spaced at least three weeks apart.

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Mark Zuckerberg's speech to a virtual developers' conference yesterday focused on a far-off vision for a virtual world — the metaverse — which can be entered through a range of devices, many not yet technologically feasible, Axios' Ina Fried writes in her weekly Signal Boost column.

• This embodied Internet would allow people to live and work in virtual space, using a mix of realistic and fantastic avatars, donning all manner of virtual clothes and accessories.
• Keep reading.

Most of the attention went to Zuckerberg's big finish, when he announced that the parent company will now be rebranded as Meta. (The app will still be Facebook.) Here's how he explained it:

• "The metaverse ... can finally put people at the center of our technology and deliver an experience where we're present with each other. ... [W]e can unlock a massively bigger creative economy."
• "From now on, we're going to be metaverse first, not Facebook first. ... [I]t's a story that started in the dorm and grew beyond anything we could imagine."

Go deeper: How Facebook plans to build its metaverse, by Ina Fried.

The Biden administration is in talks to offer $450,000 per person to immigrant families separated under the Trump administration's "zero-tolerance" border policy, The Wall Street Journal scoops (subscription).

• Why it matters: Lawsuits allege the U.S. government caused children and parents lasting psychological trauma, after government investigations found "families were forcefully broken up with no provisions to track and later reunite them."

The payouts could total over $1 billion.

• The ACLU, which is representing some of the families, identified 5,500 children separated under the policy, though not all are expected to be eligible, per The Journal.

The pandemic pushed more than 3 million baby boomers into early retirement, Axios' Erica Pandey writes from a new analysis by Miguel Faria e Castro, a senior economist at the St. Louis Fed.

• Why it matters: The wave of early retirements is contributing to the labor shortage roiling the U.S. economy.

What happened: Many older workers faced layoffs. Others left the workforce to protect themselves from the risk of infection.

• It's much harder for workers in their 50s and 60s — or older — to re-enter the workforce after a period of unemployment, due to persistent ageism in corporate America.
• It's likely that many of those who left jobs got discouraged and chose to retire instead.

The big picture: The total number of people who left the workforce during the pandemic — including the 3 million early retirees — is around 5.25 million, per Faria e Castro's analysis.

• That includes working mothers who left jobs to care for kids and immunocompromised people who stayed home. Many could return.

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A summons charges former Gov. Andrew Cuomo with misdemeanor forcible touching and directs him to appear in Albany City Court on Nov. 17, the Albany Times Union reports.

• The complaint says that in the governor's mansion, Cuomo "did intentionally, and for no legitimate purpose, forcibly place his hand under the blouse shirt of the victim and onto her intimate body part" for "the purposes of degrading and gratifying his sexual desires."

With paid family leave OUT of the Build Back Better framework released by the White House yesterday, the U.S. remains one of seven countries without paid leave for new moms, Bloomberg reports.

• The others: Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, Palau, Papua New Guinea and Tonga, per UCLA's World Policy Analysis Center.

"The heroes of this week's school opening in the South," thundered a New York Times editorial on Sept. 3, 1970, "were a Republican Governor and a seventeen year‐old [Black] high school student":

Virginia's Gov. Linwood Holton Jr. personally accompanied his thirteen‐year‐old daughter to the hitherto all‐[B]lack John F. Kennedy High School in Richmond; Gregory Thomas, commanding officer of the, school's corps of cadets, taking apprehensive white students in tow, told them: "This is now your school, too."

Abner Linwood Holton Jr., Virginia's first Republican governor since Reconstruction, who turned 98 last month, died yesterday at his home in Kilmarnock, Va. — at "The Rivah," as they say in the Commonwealth.

• "To the world," said a statement from his children, released by his son-in-law, Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), "Governor Linwood Holton is known as a giant of civil rights and change. When others stood in the doorways of schools to block desegregation, our Dad walked us (and bused us) to integrated schools to show the rest of the world the way of justice. ... Dad helped break the back of the [Byrd] political machine that had called the shots in Virginia."
• "But to us, he was simply a great Dad ... who always helped us see that every day is Opportunity Time — the chance to go make right in the world, for our families, our friends, and our communities."

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This combined image from NASA shows Jupiter as seen by the Juno orbiting spacecraft's microwave radiometer (left) and in visible light, captured by the Gemini Observatory.

Jupiter's Great Red Spot, a storm so big it could swallow Earth, extends surprisingly deep beneath the planet's cloud tops, scientists reported yesterday, according to AP's Marcia Dunn.

• The Great Red Spot on the largest planet — 10,000 miles wide — resembles a fat pancake in new 3D images of the planet.

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