In The News (3)

We Came All This Way to Let Vaccines Go Bad in the Freezer? America did not sufficiently plan for how to get millions of people vaccinated. ........... Operation Warp Speed has failed to come anywhere close to its original goal of vaccinating 20 million people against the coronavirus by the end of 2020. Of the 14 million vaccine doses that have been produced and delivered to hospitals and health departments across the country, just an estimated three million people have been vaccinated. .......... Poor coordination at the federal level, combined with a lack of funding and support for state and local entities, has resulted in a string of avoidable missteps and needless delays. We have been here before, in other words. With testing. With shutdowns. With contact tracing. With genomic surveillance. ............ Officials have long prioritized medicine (in this instance, developing the coronavirus vaccines) while neglecting public health (i.e., developing programs to vaccinate people).   

Why Is It Taking So Long to Get Americans Vaccinated? The country is millions of doses behind expectations. Here’s how it could pull ahead. ............ “We are at a pace right now to deliver vaccines in L.A. over five years, instead of over half a year” ............ Joe Biden, who has promised to “move heaven and earth” to vaccinate 100 million Americans in his first 100 days. ............. the administration will do so by invoking the Defense Production Act to ramp up vaccine manufacturing, deploy mobile vaccination units and lobby Congress for more state and local funding. But even Mr. Biden warned that it might take until March to see significant improvement. ........ While the administration has paid pharmaceutical companies more than $12 billion to develop the vaccines, it has allocated only $340 million to states for their distribution — a small fraction of the $8.4 billion health departments told Congress they needed for training, record-keeping, staffing and communications. ........... New York, for example, has given out only 32 percent of its roughly 930,000 doses ........ In Israel, which has vaccinated 15 percent of its population, more than 100,000 young adults have received surplus doses that otherwise would have gone to waste .......... once vaccines become more widely available, the federal government plans to rely on some 40,000 pharmacies to vaccinate the broader population. ..........  In Georgia, so many rural health care workers have declined the vaccine that the state decided to expand access to its doses because they were “literally sitting in freezers.” ........ With the exception of Israel and the United Arab Emirates, the pace of vaccination in the United States is comparable to or better than that of most other countries. 

As the Georgia Runoffs Arrive, a New Book Says the Senate Is Broken The South Carolina senator’s soaring rhetoric about minority rights revolved around protecting the interests of wealthy slavers in the South and their vision of white supremacy. It’s not for nothing that the historian Richard Hofstadter called Calhoun “the Marx of the Master Class.” ............ “In the 87 years between the end of Reconstruction and 1964,” Jentleson writes, “the only bills that were stopped by filibusters were civil rights bills.” ........... “All you have to do is call the cloakroom, tell them the senator you work for intends to place a hold on the bill, and the bill is filibustered,” Jentleson writes. “One phone call, one objection, and the threshold on any bill or nomination goes from a majority to a supermajority.” .................  “All you have to do is call the cloakroom, tell them the senator you work for intends to place a hold on the bill, and the bill is filibustered,” Jentleson writes. “One phone call, one objection, and the threshold on any bill or nomination goes from a majority to a supermajority.” ............ In “Kill Switch,” McConnell is expressly portrayed as a 21st-century version of Calhoun — infinitely blander, less extravagantly fanatical but more coldly efficient.  

The Pro-Trump Movement Was Always Headed Here For years, professional grifters, trolls, true believers and political opportunists have sowed conspiratorial lies. We are now witnessing the reaping. .......... They listened to their president say he would never concede, that American elections were no longer free or fair. Then he implored his audience to march on the Capitol building. .............. Those who’ve been cocooned in Facebook groups and fed a steady diet of lies from election-denial outlets like Newsmax and One America News are coming to a realization that there is no grand plan for Mr. Trump to magically retain office. ................ The president of the United States was caught on tape for over an hour angrily spouting QAnon conspiracy theories about voter fraud in an attempt to pressure Georgia state officials to overturn the election results. ............... the culmination of more than five years of hatred, trolling, violent harassment and conspiracy theorizing that has moved from the internet’s underbelly to the White House and back again. ................ the demand side, in which millions of Americans are actively courting conspiracies and violent, radical ideologies in order to make sense of a world they don’t trust. ............... our reality crisis is born of selfishness, shamelessness and suffering. It is bone deep. And it will only continue to escalate.  

The ‘Horrifying Events’ at the Capitol A reader reacts: “This should mark the end of the Trump presidency, before he can cause more damage.” ............... Mr. Trump is guilty of sedition at the least, and treason at the worst. This should mark the end of the Trump presidency, before he can cause more damage. Mike Pence should call the Cabinet together and invoke the 25th Amendment.  .......... Peaceful, unarmed Black protesters have repeatedly been tear-gassed and shot at by the police over the past several years, but a group of violent armed white men, insurrectionists attempting to overthrow the presidential election, were allowed to run roughshod in the nation’s capital? The double standard is monstrous. .............. After the actions Wednesday by both some legislators and the mob, no one should have any doubt that we must pass a constitutional amendment rescinding both the Electoral College and the Second Amendment. For our nation’s security, we need to elect the president directly, and we need to disarm civilians.  

We Need a Second Great Migration Georgia illuminates the path to Black power. It lies in the South. Follow me there.