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Biden calls Trump pandemic effort a ‘travesty’ and vows extensive federal effort to blunt virus spread

InternationalDec 30. 2020Patricia Cummings gives Vice President-elect Kamala Harris the Moderna coronavirus vaccine at the United Medical Center in Washington on Tuesday, Dec. 29, 2020. MUST CREDIT: Photo for The Washington Post by Evelyn Hockstein

By The Washington Post · John Wagner, Amy B Wang, Chelsea Janes

WASHINGTON – President-elect Joe Biden on Tuesday called President Donald Trump’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic a “travesty” and vowed to fully use the federal government’s powers once inaugurated to speed the production and dispersal of vaccines and protective equipment.

Biden said he would invoke the Defense Production Act to ramp up production of coronavirus vaccines. The law, enacted in 1950, gives the president the power to compel companies to produce and distribute supplies.

In the earliest weeks of the pandemic, Trump was criticized for not using the law to counter the country’s shortage of ventilators and personal protective equipment for front-line health workers. Trump later invoked the act to require General Motors to manufacture ventilators and to order meat processing plants to stay open.

Biden said Trump’s vaccine distribution efforts were falling far behind what had been promised and said he would “move heaven and earth” to bring an end to the coronavirus pandemic. But he also warned Americans that the worst of the coronavirus assault – “maybe the toughest of this entire pandemic” – remained ahead of them, despite early rounds of vaccinations underway.

With domestic air travel hitting record highs over the holiday weekend, Biden said he anticipated that infections now would produce increased cases in January and increased deaths in February.

“I can see a return to normalcy in the next year,” Biden said, but he warned that the country might not see improvements until well into March. “I know it’s hard to hear, but it’s the truth.”

He said the nation needed not only more vaccines and protective equipment but also a massive increase in testing to stem outbreaks that by now are occurring nationwide.

“After 10 months of the pandemic, we still don’t have enough testing,” he said. “It’s a travesty.”

As he has for months, Biden encouraged people to continue wearing masks, social distancing and practicing other measures to slow the spread of the virus. His remarks were his most extensive comments on the coronavirus since early this month, when he outlined a plan for his first 100 days in office that included imploring all Americans to wear masks.

“My ability to change the direction of this pandemic starts in three weeks,” Biden said.

Earlier Tuesday, Vice President-elect Kamala Harris became the latest high-profile politician to be vaccinated in a bid to build public trust in the process.

The setting for her shot was calculated: the United Medical Center in Washington, which serves the predominantly Black communities of the city’s Southeast quadrant and the southern part of Prince George’s County, Md. Harris said she hoped she could allay the mistrust that many Black Americans are expressing about the vaccine by getting hers in a hospital that serves Black neighborhoods.

Biden’s chief medical adviser, Anthony Fauci, said earlier that the nation was suffering a surge of cases “that has just gotten out of control in many respects.”

Fauci, appearing on CNN, lamented what he expects to be a post-holiday increase in cases and the strong possibility than January’s caseload will exceed even that of December.

“You just have to assume it’s going to get worse,” he said.

Fauci also acknowledged that the rollout of vaccines was not reaching as many Americans as quickly as the 20 million the Trump administration had pledged by the end of the month.

“We certainly are not at the numbers that we wanted to be at the end of December,” said Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. “We are below where we want to be.”

But Fauci expressed hope that by “showing leadership from the top,” Biden could make an impact – comments that appeared to be an implicit criticism of Trump, who has said little publicly about the crisis since Election Day.

“What he’s saying is that let’s take at least 100 days and everybody, every single person, put aside this nonsense of making masks be a political statement or not,” Fauci said of Biden. “We know what works. We know social distancing works. We know avoiding congregant settings works. For goodness’ sakes, let’s all do it, and you will see that curve will come down.”

In his remarks earlier this month, Biden also pledged to distribute 100 million vaccine shots in his first 100 days in office and said he wanted to open as many schools safely during the period as possible. He has also promised to sign an executive order requiring masks to be worn on federal property. He reiterated those pledges Tuesday.

About 200,000 new coronavirus cases have been reported daily in recent weeks, with a record high of 252,431 on Dec. 17.

The nation’s overall caseload surpassed 19 million on Sunday, even as the holidays were expected to cause a lag in reporting. Hospitalizations have exceeded 100,000 since the start of December and hit a peak of 119,000 on Dec. 23. Deaths are averaging more than 2,000 a day, with the most reported to date – 3,406 – on Dec. 17.

Harris chatted with her nurse, Patricia Cummings, as she received her first dose of the Moderna vaccine Tuesday, an event broadcast on live television.

Calling her “Nurse Patricia,” Harris thanked Cummings, the daughter of immigrants from Guyana who has been a nurse for a decade and a half, for her work and chatted with her about her day.

If Harris had any reaction to the shot, it was hidden by the two masks she was wearing, and she told Cummings afterward that “that was easy” and that she “barely felt anything.”

“I want to encourage everyone to get the vaccine. It is relatively painless, it happens really quickly, and it’s safe,” Harris told a dozen or so reporters who had gathered for the event.

“We have hospitals and medical centers and clinics like this all over the country that are staffed by people who understand the community, who often come from the community, and who administer all year round trusted health care,” she said. “I want to remind people that right in your community is where you will take the vaccine . . . by folks you may know who have been working in the same hospital where your children were born.”

Biden received his first shot of the coronavirus vaccine last week.

On her way out of the room, Harris was asked for her thoughts on the House passing legislation to bump upcoming stimulus checks from $600 to $2,000. Harris referenced a bill she introduced with Sens. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Ed Markey, D-Mass., in May recommending $2,000 monthly stimulus checks.

“I urge Mitch McConnell to put my bill on the floor for a vote,” Harris said, referring to the Republican Senate majority leader from Kentucky.

Biden on Tuesday called the deal a “down payment” and vowed to push for more coronavirus relief as soon as he takes office next month.

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Trump lashes out at ‘weak and tired’ Republican congressional leadership

InternationalDec 30. 2020President Donald Trump arrives in an auditorium at the White House complex before signing an executive order on vaccines earlier this month. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Jabin Botsford.

By The Washington Post · John Wagner

President Donald Trump on Tuesday lashed out at fellow Republicans who lead his party on Capitol Hill both for not fully embracing his unfounded claims of election fraud and for allowing an override of his veto of a $741 billion defense authorization bill to advance.

“WE NEED NEW & ENERGETIC REPUBLICAN LEADERSHIP. This can not stand,” Trump said in a string of morning tweets in which he continued to air grievances about the election, including baseless claims of fraud in Pennsylvania, one of the battleground states Trump lost to President-elect Joe Biden.

Trump did not single out any Republican leaders by name, but Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., appeared to be among those he was targeting. Two weeks ago, McConnell recognized Biden as the president-elect. He has also discouraged GOP senators from participating in challenges to the electoral college votes when Congress meets to certify the results next week.

“Can you imagine if the Republicans stole a Presidential Election from the Democrats – All hell would break out,” Trump said in one of his tweets, which Twitter noted made “disputed” claims about election fraud.

“Republican leadership only wants the path of least resistance,” Trump continued. “Our leaders (not me, of course!) are pathetic. They only know how to lose! P.S. I got MANY Senators..and Congressmen/Congresswomen Elected. I do believe they forgot!”

Earlier, Trump also took aim at members of his own party, protesting the House’s vote on Monday to override his veto of the defense bill. The 322-87 vote was comfortably more than the two-thirds of the House that was needed to pass the measure.

“Weak and tired Republican ‘leadership’ will allow the bad Defense Bill to pass,” Trump wrote.

“Negotiate a better Bill, or get better leaders, NOW! Senate should not approve NDAA until fixed!!!” Trump added, referring to the bill by its title, the National Defense Authorization Act, an annual measure authorizing funds for everything from overseas military operations to pay increases for service members.

A few hours after Trump’s tweet, McConnell signaled during a speech on the Senate floor that his chamber would override Trump’s veto Wednesday.

“Soon this important legislation will be passed into law,” McConnell said. “I would urge my colleagues to support this legislation one more time when we vote tomorrow.”

Trump made good on repeated threats to veto the legislation last week, when he sent the bill back to Congress with a laundry list of objections.

Among the president’s complaints were that it ordered the Pentagon to change the names of military installations commemorating Confederate generals; restricted his ability to pull U.S. troops out of Germany, South Korea and Afghanistan; and did not repeal an unrelated law giving liability protections to technology companies.

Later Tuesday, Trump sought to raise the stakes for Senate Republicans as they consider increasing stimulus payments to eligible recipients from $600 to $2,000, as he has advocated.

“Unless Republicans have a death wish, and it is also the right thing to do, they must approve the $2000 payments ASAP,” he tweeted shortly after McConnell declined to hold an immediate vote on the issue. “$600 IS NOT ENOUGH!”

Trump also again urged Republicans to address the law related to liability protections for technology companies and said his fellow party members should not “let the Democrats steal the Presidential Election.”

“Get tough!” Trump urged.

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McConnell blocks Democrats’ attempt to quickly approve $2,000 checks amid pressure on GOP to act

InternationalDec 30. 2020

Mitch McConnell

By The Washington Post · Mike DeBonis, Tony Romm

WASHINGTON – Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., on Tuesday blocked consideration of a House bill that would deliver $2,000 stimulus payments to most Americans – spurning a request by President Donald Trump even as more Senate Republicans voiced support for the dramatically larger checks.

McConnell’s move was just the beginning of a saga that is likely to engulf the Senate for the rest of the week. Democrats are pushing for an up-or-down vote on the House bill, while more Republicans acknowledge a need for larger stimulus checks.

Tension within the Republican party spilled into public view on Tuesday, with Trump leveling pointed attacks at GOP leaders for failing to act, accusing them of being “pathetic” and suggesting they had a “death wish.”

New proponents of the $2,000 checks include Georgia’s two embattled Republican senators – David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler – who find themselves in tough re-election battles that will decide the fate of the chamber next week. GOP Sen. Deb Fischer of Nebraska also lent support Tuesday, declaring that “people are hurting and we need to get them more aid.”

Before adjourning the Senate Tuesday, McConnell began the process of bringing up both the House-passed bill as well as a new bill combining larger checks with the establishment of a commission to study election fraud and a repeal of liability protections for the technology companies and other firms.

While McConnell’s move does not guarantee that either measure will get voted on, it could be a prelude to a “side-by-side” deal between Senate leaders that would secure votes on both bills with the understanding that neither is likely to garner the necessary 60 votes. All of these issues could lead to a showdown on the Senate floor on Friday.

This sort of hesitancy is what has led Trump to escalate his blistering attacks on GOP leaders in recent days, something he continued Tuesday.”WE NEED NEW & ENERGETIC REPUBLICAN LEADERSHIP,” he wrote.

He also said there would be consequences for the party if they didn’t act.

“Unless Republicans have a death wish, and it is also the right thing to do, they must approve the $2000 payments ASAP,” Trump wrote. “$600 IS NOT ENOUGH! Also, get rid of Section 230 – Don’t let Big Tech steal our Country, and don’t let the Democrats steal the Presidential Election. Get tough!”

The shifting Senate winds come a day after the House passed a bill to increase stimulus checks with a bipartisan 275-to-134 vote. That proposal, called the Caring for Americans with Supplemental Help (Cash) Act, aims to boost the $600 payments authorized in the massive year-end spending-and-relief package that Trump signed Sunday by another $1,400 and expand eligibility for them.

After McConnell spoke Tuesday, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., made a request to take up the House-passed bill.

“There’s a major difference in saying you support $2,000 checks and fighting to put them into law,” he said. “The House bill is the only way to deliver these stimulus checks before the end of session. Will Senate Republicans stand against the House of Representatives, the Democratic majority in the Senate and the president of their own party to prevent these $2,000 checks from going out the door?”

McConnell objected without making further comment.

Despite the new pressure from Trump, some other Senate Republicans expressed reservations about voting for a bill with the larger payments. Some of them cited the rising debt and pointed to the extraordinary amount of federal aid that Congress had already approved.

“This is all funny money, borrowed money at this point, and that’s another consideration,” Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, said Tuesday. “I mean, (we’re) being just frivolous about the way we spend money and rack up debt. I think people are willing to do what we need to do if they feel like it’s an immediate need and it’s an emergency, which we have already done and we’ll probably continue to do.”

Still, the addition of new Republican support further intensified the political pressure on the Republican leader, who now must navigate a path that addresses the president’s concerns without exposing his party to additional political attacks one week before the pair of Georgia special elections determines the Senate majority.

The debate has created strange political bedfellows, aligning Trump with his Democratic foes in Congress, who have sought larger stimulus payments for months amid signs that the economy has worsened.

The Georgia senators joined Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., one of the earliest GOP proponents for sizable checks; Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., who endorsed the idea on Monday; and Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., who helped persuade Trump to sign the bill by backing a push for larger checks.

“Absolutely, we need to get relief to Americans now, and I will support that,” Loeffler said on Fox News. Perdue, meanwhile, tweeted hours later that he backs “this push for $2,000 in direct relief for the American people.”

Fischer would not say if she would vote for the House bill but said she opposes combining the question of larger payments with other issues: “I don’t like everything rolled in together. I think you end up with bad policy.”

Both Loeffler and Perdue have taken public credit in their campaigns for delivering the $600 checks in the signed bill. But they had not weighed in on the $2,000 checks before Tuesday, while their Democratic opponents – Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, respectively – have both enthusiastically embraced the larger amounts for days.

The new wave of Republican support left Hawley convinced Tuesday that the Senate had the necessary 60 votes to advance the proposal, adding in a tweet: “Let’s vote today.”

But the Senate now appears to be in a holding pattern. An emboldened Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., who pushed for bigger checks for weeks, issued his own ultimatum Tuesday, blocking a planned Wednesday vote to override Trump’s veto of the annual defense policy bill unless McConnell relents and allows a stand-alone vote on the House checks bill.

“I don’t know what he has in mind, but the House passed, to their credit, a simple straightforward bill,” Sanders told reporters. “Let’s not muddy the waters: Are you for $2,000 or are you not?”

Sanders’s threat scrambled a tight timeline for the final days of the current Congress, which will end on Sunday when the new class of lawmakers is sworn in. Without unanimous agreement, the Senate cannot vote on the veto override until Friday at the earliest – raising the prospect that the two Georgia senators would have to spend several unexpected days in Washington amid the closing week of their reelection campaigns.

The House voted overwhelmingly to override the veto Monday. Speaking on the floor Tuesday, McConnell left little doubt about the final outcome once the Senate vote is taken: “Soon this important legislation will be passed into law,” he said of the defense bill.

Acceding to Sanders and Democrats is not an easy choice for the majority leader: There is still major opposition to the larger checks among Senate Republicans, who insisted for months than any pandemic relief measure following on the March Cares Act cost taxpayers no more than $1 trillion.

Adding $2,000 checks to the roughly $900 billion package that Trump signed Sunday would add $464 billion to the cost of the legislation – a staggering price tag for many Republicans who have spent years fretting publicly about a growing national debt.

As McConnell acknowledged, Trump’s demands are not limited to larger checks. In a Sunday statement released after he signed the massive stimulus bill, Trump said the Senate would “start the process for a vote that increases checks to $2,000, repeals Section 230, and starts an investigation into voter fraud.”

“Section 230” is a reference to a 1996 federal law that broadly indemnifies tech platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Google for the actions of their users. Trump has railed against the tech companies as they have started to crack down on his unfounded postings alleging voter fraud in the November election, as well as much more aggressive actions targeting postings made by his supporters containing threats and disinformation.

Graham said in an interview Monday that there would be a vote on the checks and on the law governing tech companies, but he did not know if those votes would be held before the current Congress adjourns.

He predicted that if there was a stand-alone vote on the $2,000 checks, it would pass the Senate with the necessary 60 votes.

“What drove (Trump’s) thinking was, I’m not going to give in until I get a vote on the checks in the Senate, and I’m not going to sign this bill until we finally address section 230,” he said. “I don’t know how Mitch is going to do it.”

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British army to help coronavirus testing as Johnson faces school pressure

InternationalDec 30. 2020

Prime Minister Boris Johnson

By Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg · Stuart Biggs

The British government will draft in the armed forces to help with coronavirus testing in schools, as pressure builds on Prime Minister Boris Johnson to delay the return of students after the holidays amid a surge in cases.

The Ministry of Defence said 1,500 personnel will help ensure testing systems are up and running when schools reopen next week. The government has previously said students facing public exams this year will return on Jan. 4, with other pupils back later in the month.

But a growing number of unions, politicians and scientists called for more time to prepare testing to prevent virus transmission in schools. The number of new cases in the U.K. surged to a daily record of more than 41,000 on Monday and hospitalizations exceeded the peak recorded in the first wave in the spring, as a more virulent strain of the virus takes hold.

Johnson has made keeping schools open a key priority as he looks for ways to kick start the U.K. economy after months of restrictions left it facing its worst downturn for 300 years. Ministers threatened legal action to stop schools offering home learning before Christmas, but a government statement late Monday left open the possibility of that position being reversed in the new year.

“We want all pupils to return in January as school is the best place for their development and mental health,” it said. “But as the prime minister has said, it is right that we follow the path of the pandemic and keep our approach under constant review.”

Schools should remain closed for “a week or two” to ensure testing is effective, Steve Chalke, founder of the Oasis chain of academy schools, told BBC radio on Tuesday. His intervention followed similar calls for a delay from the National Education Union on Monday.

“We would ask government to pause, to come up with a clear strategy for the continuity of education,” Chalke said. “We think that if you really care about kids you would do this well — to invest now, to give time now makes sense.”

Roger Gale, a member of Parliament in Johnson’s Conservative Party, said schools should remain closed until vaccines have been made available to teachers.

“Education is important, but so are the lives and well-being of teachers,” Gale, the MP for North Thanet, said on Twitter.

Since the fallout from the decision to close schools in March, which led to the cancellation of exams and a furor over university admissions in the summer, ministers have repeatedly said education must continue even if other parts of society and the economy have to close to accommodate it.

But the government’s pandemic strategy has been uprooted in recent weeks by the emergence of a new strain of the virus, which has spread rapidly in London and surrounding areas and led many countries to block arrivals from the U.K.

The government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies told Johnson to keep secondary schools closed in January and to consider another national lockdown, Politico reported Monday, citing an adviser familiar with the group’s conclusions.

The group said a lockdown on the same terms as November may not be enough to control the new strain of the virus, according to the report.

National restrictions are needed to prevent a “catastrophe” at the start of year, a member of the government’s advisory group on new respiratory virus threats — which itself advises SAGE — told the BBC on Tuesday.

“We are entering a very dangerous new phase of the pandemic and we’re going to need decisive, early, national action to prevent a catastrophe in January and February,” said Andrew Hayward, professor of infectious diseases epidemiology at University College London. “Previous levels of restrictions that worked before won’t work now.”

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Wuhan’s covid cases may have been 10 times higher than reported, study shows

InternationalDec 30. 2020

By Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg

The scale of the covid-19 outbreak in Wuhan early this year may have been nearly 10 times the recorded tally, a study conducted by China’s public health authorities indicates, leaving the city where the coronavirus first took hold still well short of the immunity required to protect against a potential resurgence.

About 4.4% of those tested were found to have specific antibodies that can fight off the pathogen that causes covid-19, indicating they were infected some time in the past, according to a serological survey of more than 34,000 people conducted in April by the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention. The data was released late Monday.

That ratio would suggest that with Wuhan home to about 11 million people, as many as 500,000 residents may have been infected, nearly 10 times more than the 50,000 confirmed covid-19 cases reported by health authorities in mid-April, when the survey was conducted.

China has been criticized internationally for its initial handling of the outbreak, which has spread around the world in a global pandemic in the year since the first cases emerged. The U.S. has raised questions about China’s accounting of the virus fallout in Wuhan, which was quickly eclipsed by larger outbreaks in Europe and North America. A number of revisions of the case and deaths data added to suspicions China was massaging the numbers.

While the serological data may reignite those claims, it is common for health authorities to underreport cases during an acute outbreak, given testing capabilities can be limited and hospitals overwhelmed with a sudden surge in patients. The coronavirus’s ability to quietly infect people without making some of them sick until later or even throughout the infection period only exacerbates the problem.

Serological surveillance has been widely used by health professionals around the world to gauge the true scale of epidemics, from covid-19 to AIDS and hepatitis. The prevalence of disease derived from such studies can guide mitigation and vaccination efforts.

The China CDC survey showed a far less impact of the virus outside Wuhan, which was effectively shut off as a way of containing the outbreak. The positive rate for antibodies dropped to 0.44% for the broader Hubei province, which was also placed under a three-month lockdown. Only two people tested positive for the antibody among the 12,000 surveyed in six other Chinese cities and provinces, including Beijing, Shanghai and Guangdong, suggesting an extremely low prevalence of the virus across the rest of the country.

The results for Wuhan mean even China’s worst-hit city is still vulnerable to covid-19. Epidemiologists say at least half a population needs to have come into contact with the virus for even the minimum threshold for herd immunity. But the city’s rate of infection is generally in line with those found in other countries after the first wave of coronavirus infections, the China CDC said in a news release published on its website.

The antibody positive rates in Spain and Switzerland this spring, for example, were as much as 6.2% and 11%, respectively, the China CDC said. While those are higher than the 4.4% found in Wuhan, and come before later waves that have swept across Europe, they still fall short of the herd immunity threshold.

Since quelling the Hubei outbreak, China has largely contained the coronavirus, with sporadic flare-ups since April snuffed out through aggressive contact tracing and quickly testing millions of people in a matter of days.

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Argentina kicks off vaccination drive with Russia’s Sputnik V

InternationalDec 30. 2020A screen displays images of the Russian Sputnik V vaccine arriving during a press conference at Ezeiza International Airport airport in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on Dec. 24, 2020. Argentina approved the emergency use of Russia’s vaccine to combat the spread of Covid-19, becoming the first nation outside the former Soviet Union to authorize the shot. MUST CREDIT: Bloomberg photo by Anita Pouchard Serra

By Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg · Scott Squires, Jake Rudnitsky

Argentina became the third country worldwide to begin inoculating its citizens against covid-19 with the Sputnik V vaccine outside of trials, boosting Russia’s attempts to push the shot into developing nations.

Vaccinations began around 9 a.m. local time Tuesday in the capital, Buenos Aires, and in provinces with some 300,000 people expected to be given the shot. Argentina’s health regulator gave swift emergency approval for the vaccine last week, following earlier clearances from Russia and Belarus.

“I think people have a lot of faith in the vaccine,” President Alberto Fernandez said on state television, according to Telam. “They aren’t paying attention to attempts to scare them.”

With the initiative, Argentina joins North America, the U.K., EU, China and Chile in offering preventive shots that are expected to bring the pandemic, its deaths and its disastrous economic effects, to an end. More than 1.7 million people have died worldwide from the new coronavirus that surfaced almost a year ago in China.

Controversy has swirled around Sputnik V since Russian President Vladimir Putin announced its registration for use before large-scale clinical studies were completed. Its developers have since said that an interim analysis of final-stage studies indicated it was more than 91% effective after volunteers received two doses.

The Kremlin is seeking to promote the Russian vaccine as a cheap, effective defense against the coronavirus. A course of two doses taken three weeks apart will cost $20, which is significantly less than shots being produced by Pfizer Inc. Over 50 countries have expressed interest in obtaining Sputnik V, according to its developers.

Russians remain skeptical of their homegrown vaccine, despite suffering one of the highest covid-19 tolls globally. Only 38% are ready to take Sputnik V, according to a Dec. 21-23 poll conducted by the Levada Center.

Argentina became the first country outside the former Soviet Union to begin administering the shot, which has yet to publish data from late-stage trials in a peer-reviewed journal. Venezuela, however, has vaccinated 120 people with Sputnik in a trial, its health minister said on Sunday.

Argentina expects to receive 20 million doses of the Sputnik V vaccine over the next two months, and may add 5 million more in March. The government plans to prioritize health workers. Fernandez, 61, said earlier this month he would be among the first to take the vaccine to show that it’s safe.

Axel Kicillof, a former Economy Minister and current Governor of Buenos Aires Province was among the first to receive the shot, according to television network TN. He posed for photos and showed his vaccination card.

In the rest of Latin America, Mexico, Chile and Costa Rica have begun giving the Pfizer vaccine. Many other countries in the region are either awaiting final approval for the shot being developed by AstraZeneca Plc. and Oxford University or for deliveries from Covax, a World Health Organization-backed effort to provide a coronavirus vaccine to developing nations.

Brazil’s Sao Paulo state has partnered with China’s Sinovac Biotech Ltd., though publication of final-stage trial results has been delayed.

With a population of around 45 million people, Argentina ranks 11th worldwide in covid deaths with 42,868 and 12th in cases with 1.6 million. After weeks of declines, Argentina’s covid curve has begun to rise again amid more international travel and holiday gatherings.

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Just how much of a rebuke to Trump is Congress’s veto override?

InternationalDec 30. 2020

By The Washington Post · Amber Phillips

WASHINGTON – Republicans in Congress are about to hand President Donald Trump the biggest legislative loss of his presidency by helping Democrats override a Trump veto for the first time. On Monday, the House of Representatives overwhelmingly voted to override his veto of what is normally a broad bipartisan defense bill. The Republican-controlled Senate is setting up a vote to do the same this week.

It’s worth asking how much of a rebuke this is by Trump’s own party. In one sense, it’s big. In today’s hyperpartisan environment, members of a party don’t willingly and easily override the president of the same party. This veto override is coming from a GOP that has been consistently loyal to Trump, even as he has forced party members to overturn many of their core principles.

Republicans have been willing to distance themselves these past four years from their previous views on immigration, government spending, election security and even acknowledgment of the results of a free and fair election. But most drew the line here, on funding and supporting the military.

But there are also plenty of reasons not to read too much into this. The first is the most obvious: Trump is leaving office in a few weeks. It’s simply less risky for Republicans to override a veto now that he won’t be president much longer. The Washington Post’s Karoun Demirjian counts that Congress has tried and failed to override eight other Trump vetoes.

Republicans have occasionally voted in ways that rebuke Trump, if not this forcefully. Most notably, in 2018, Congress took a historic vote to end the Trump administration’s participation in the war in Yemen. But most often, their concerns about the president have been expressed only in private rooms.

This veto override is happening after Trump significantly weakened his negotiating power with Congress on a separate matter, a dual bill on coronavirus relief and government spending. After his administration negotiated key parts of the package and Congress passed it by wide margins, Trump publicly opposed it.

He kept Congress in doubt for days about the fate of perhaps the most important legislation of 2020 before eventually signing it Sunday. He exacted precisely zero concessions, and he arguably made his party look bad in the process. Coronavirus stimulus is popular, but Trump cast a spotlight on the fact that Republicans didn’t want to do it, writes The Post’s Aaron Blake.

Republicans saw no reason to negotiate with the president during or after his holdout on the coronavirus bill. Earlier Monday, most Republicans in the House voted against a Democratic-approved bill to increase the coronavirus stimulus checks in the legislation from $600 to $2,000, a move Trump supports. It’s not clear if the Republican Senate will take this up, even though Trump has made expanded stimulus checks one of his core issues this past week.

Perhaps things would have been different for Trump on the defense bill had he not severely frustrated members of his own party just days before they were scheduled to consider overriding him.

Finally, some powerful Republicans did side with Trump on the defense bill. Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California, the top House Republican, said he would vote against overriding Trump’s veto, even though just weeks earlier he voted for this very legislation. (He wasn’t able to vote Monday because he was recovering from elbow surgery, reported C-SPAN’s Craig Caplan.) A handful of other House Republicans who originally supported the legislation before Trump’s veto also effectively voted against it Monday.

In the Senate, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., a Trump ally, may do the same. Graham made regular appearances on the president’s Twitter feed Monday, urging Republicans to consider Trump’s demands. (Chief among them is an unrelated provision to make it easier to sue social media companies for content on their sites.)

We’ll see how many, if any, Senate Republicans join Graham.

The reality is that Trump has never been very good at dealing with Congress. Its members have often played along, at least rhetorically. He has kept Republican lawmakers from publicly criticizing him. And he did get a remarkable number of them to deny that he lost the presidential election, a moment without parallel in modern American history.

But Monday’s veto override in the House underscores that Trump has struggled to actually change their minds on policy. He never got the money he sought for his border wall with Mexico. He was forced to accept harsher policies toward Russia than he wanted. And he’s going to leave office without Congress acquiescing to his last-minute demands.

That Republicans are rebuking Trump so forcefully and clearly suggests a significant weakening of his power over Congress when it comes to policymaking. But there are also reasons not to read too much into this in regard to Republicans’ relationship with Trump. We’ll never know what may have happened if Trump were heading into a second term, rather than out of the White House in a few weeks.

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Biden accuses Trump appointees of obstructing transition on national security issues

InternationalDec 29. 2020

By The Washington Post · Amy B Wang, Jenna Johnson, Dan Lamothe

President-elect Joe Biden on Monday accused President Donald Trump and his political appointees of obstructing the transition of power to his incoming administration, particularly in the national security sphere, an escalation in tone after reports of isolated difficulties in the transition process last week.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/c/embed/7d8fe81e-2fc6-49d0-bb07-314b2e830f59?ptvads=block&playthrough=false

Biden specifically called out the Office of Management and Budget and the Defense Department as agencies where his transition team had encountered “roadblocks” from political leadership.

“Right now, we just aren’t getting all the information that we need from the outgoing administration in key national security areas. It’s nothing short, in my view, of irresponsibility,” Biden said of the resistance his team was facing. He warned that such delays could allow enemies of the United States to take advantage of vulnerabilities, citing a recent massive cybersecurity breach that compromised several U.S. agencies.

“As our nation is in a period of transition, we need to make sure that nothing is lost in the handoff between administrations. My team needs a clear picture of our force posture around the world and our operations to deter our enemies,” Biden said in remarks from Wilmington, Del. “We need full visibility into the budget planning underway at the Defense Department and other agencies in order to avoid any window of confusion or catch-up that our adversaries may try to exploit.”

The pointed accusation by a president-elect that the incumbent was putting national security at risk by refusing to cooperate underscored the unprecedented and divisive nature of the current transition.

With less than a month before Inauguration Day, Biden has been laying the groundwork for how to tackle the gargantuan twin challenges that he will face as soon as he assumes the presidency – ending the coronavirus pandemic and rebuilding the economy. He has steadily filled vacancies in his Cabinet and in senior positions in his government, which will take over at noon on Jan. 20.

He has been met with remarkable resistance from Trump, who has refused to concede the election and has continued attempting to overturn the results. Trump blocked any transition efforts outright for more than two weeks before relenting, at least initially. He has declined to say whether he will attend Biden’s inauguration, and the incoming team planning the event assumes he will not.

Trump also has appeared increasingly uninterested in the nation’s most critical matters, instead pressuring allies to change the results of an election that his own administration said had been free of widespread fraud. On Dec. 23, he vetoed a defense authorization bill that included raises for service members, forcing a veto override effort this week. He complained that the measure would allow the renaming of military facilities honoring Confederate soldiers and had not included an unrelated measure punishing social media companies. He threatened to veto a coronavirus relief measure, delaying benefits before he eventually signed it Sunday.

On Monday, Trump continued to tweet conspiracy theories about the election – at one point retweeting a view that opponents were guilty of “treason” – and spent much of the day at his private golf club in Florida.

Meanwhile, Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris attended a virtual briefing with 15 national security and foreign policy advisers, including several would-be Cabinet nominees. In comments that followed, Biden said the advisers told him that many of the agencies critical to national security have sustained “enormous damage” during the Trump administration.

“Many of them have been hollowed out in personnel, capacity and in morale, in the policy processes that have atrophied or have been sidelined, in the disrepair of our alliances . . . in the general disengagement from the world,” Biden said. “And all of that makes it harder for our government to protect the American people, to defend our vital interests in a world where threats are constantly evolving and our adversaries are constantly adapting.”

Acting defense secretary Christopher Miller disputed Biden’s accusation, saying in a statement Monday night that more than 400 defense officials have participated in 164 meetings with the transition team and provided more than 5,000 pages of documents. Miller said these efforts “already surpass those of recent administrations,” despite a compressed time frame.

Miller had, however, abruptly postponed all transition meetings on Dec. 18, saying in a statement then that the Biden team and Trump administration had mutually agreed on a pause through the holiday season. Biden team officials have denied that was the case. An official familiar with the situation who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the matter said no meetings have occurred since then. The Defense Department announced late Monday that three meetings are scheduled for this week, two related to the pandemic and one on cybersecurity.

The Office of Management and Budget did not immediately respond to Biden’s comments.

Biden said Monday that most government agencies have shown “exemplary cooperation” with his transition team, especially given the challenges of the pandemic and the Trump administration’s effort to stall conversations, but that his staff has encountered “obstruction from political leadership” when they could not afford to waste any time. He noted that four years ago, he and then-President Barack Obama gave the incoming Trump-Pence administration “access to all that we had.”

In raising concerns about the transition, Biden was careful to distinguish between political appointees in the agencies and the career professionals who he said had cooperated fully.

“They never stopped doing their job and continued to serve our country, day in and day out, to keep their fellow Americans safe,” Biden said of the career government workers. “These agencies are filled with patriots who’ve earned our respect, and who should never be treated as political footballs.”

As an example of the potential impact of the obstruction, Biden pointed to the pandemic, which in December killed more Americans than in any previous month. More than 330,000 have died since March, with nearly 19.3 million sickened.

“We’ve learned so painfully this year the cost of being unprepared,” Biden said.

Biden said that under his administration, the Federal Emergency Management Agency will play an “enormous part” in the “safe, equitable and efficient distribution of vaccines to as many Americans as possible, as quickly as possible.” Harris and her husband plan to receive vaccinations in Washington on Tuesday.

“We want to make sure that our administration is poised to make full use of FEMA’s domestic reach and capacity,” Biden said.

In his Monday remarks, Biden also took issue with Trump’s handling of foreign affairs, repeatedly saying that the United States needs to strengthen its alliances with like-minded countries, not just to confront the pandemic but also to address climate change and “strategic challenges” from China and Russia.

“Right now there’s an enormous vacuum,” Biden said. “We’re going to have to regain the trust and confidence of a world that has begun to find ways to work around us or work without us.”

Biden said he was also briefed Monday on the steps needed to “clean up the humanitarian disaster that the Trump administration has systematically created on our southern border.”

Biden said that the work will start on his first day in office but could take some time, especially when it comes to rebuilding the nation’s capacity for processing asylum claims. He has previously pledged a comprehensive immigration plan on his first day in office.

“We’re going to work purposefully, diligently and responsibly to roll back Trump’s restrictions starting on day one,” he said. “But it’s not as simple as throwing a switch to turn everything back on, especially amid a pandemic.”

Biden opened his comments by addressing the Christmas Day explosion in Nashville, Tenn., saying federal, state and local law enforcement “are working around-the-clock to gain more information on motive or intent.” He praised Nashville police and other first responders, saying that “their bravery and coolheadedness” probably saved lives. Local and federal authorities have said a local man whose remains were found in the wreckage was responsible for the explosion, which spread destruction for blocks.

“This bombing was a reminder of the destructive power that individuals and small groups can muster,” Biden said, “and the need for continuing vigilance across the board.”

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House musters votes to override Trump’s veto of defense bill, setting up first such rebuke during his presidency

InternationalDec 29. 2020

By The Washington Post · Karoun Demirjian

WASHINGTON – The House voted Monday to reject President Donald Trump’s veto of a $741 billion defense authorization bill, setting up the first congressional override of his presidency just days before he exits office.

The 322-to-87 vote was comfortably more than the two-thirds of the House that was needed to pass the measure and set up the legislation for a similar override vote in the Senate this week. But the House’s margin of victory was smaller than the support the same bill received earlier this month, before the president’s veto. Some Republicans who supported the measure three weeks ago did not vote to override the president’s veto.

Trump made good on repeated threats to veto the legislation last week, when he sent the bill back to Congress with a laundry list of objections. Among the president’s complaints were that it ordered the Pentagon to change the names of military installations commemorating Confederate generals; restricted his ability to pull U.S. troops out of Germany, South Korea and Afghanistan; and did not repeal an unrelated law giving certain liability protections to technology companies.

His move led some of his stalwart supporters, including House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., to announce that they would not cross the president’s veto, even though they had voted for the defense bill. But despite those gestures of solidarity, the president has never had the numbers to sustain a veto, according to congressional officials.

In a statement after the vote, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., called on Trump to “end his eleventh-hour campaign of chaos,” and respect the will of Congress.

Trump should “stop using his final moments in office to obstruct bipartisan and bicameral action to protect our military and defend our security,” she said.

Since the summer, the National Defense Authorization Act – an annual measure authorizing funds for everything from overseas military operations to pay increases for service members – has had overwhelming, veto-proof support in both chambers of Congress and the backing of a majority of each political party.

Over several weeks, many leading Republicans, particularly in the Senate, engaged in a concerted effort to get Trump to back off his veto threat, arguing that if the president’s push to retain the Confederate names kept the defense bill – for the first time in six decades – from becoming law, he would be on the wrong side of history.

They also appealed to Trump to abandon his insistence that the bill repeal Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a law that shields social media companies from legal liability for what third parties post to their websites. Trump has taken special aim at the law as part of his vendetta against Facebook, Google and Twitter for what he alleges is anti-conservative bias.

On Sunday night, Trump included a mention of Section 230 in a statement announcing he had signed a federal budget and pandemic relief bill into law.

“Congress has promised that Section 230, which so unfairly benefits Big Tech at the expense of the American people, will be reviewed and either be terminated or substantially reformed,” Trump said.

Trump’s statement did not represent a concession from Congress but a reflection of reality. While Democrats and most Republicans are in agreement that Section 230 needs revisiting, they also believe that it should be changed through a more careful process rather than shoehorning it into the defense bill.

Some leaders hope that Trump’s statement could free some Republicans who were loath to cross his veto over the Section 230 issue to support Monday’s override vote in the House.

Speaking on the floor just before the vote, the House Armed Services Committee’s top Republican, Rep. Mac Thornberry, R-Texas, implored his colleagues to do so.

“It’s the exact same bill, not a comma has changed,” he said, calling on those who had backed the legislation earlier this month to vote in support of it again.

Panel chairman Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., also said that the defense bill presented Congress with a rare opportunity to close the year out on a high note.

“We put together a bipartisan, bicameral product that has gotten an overwhelming number of votes,” Smith said. “Let’s show the American people that the legislative process works, at least a little better than sometimes they think it does.”

The bill now heads to the Senate, which must also pass the measure with a two-thirds majority in order for it to become law. That vote could happen as soon as Wednesday.

Congress to date has never been able to muster the votes to override a Trump veto, of which there have been nine since the start of his presidency. That is a higher rate of vetoes than either Barack Obama or George W. Bush, who each issued 12 vetoes over eight years in office. Before them, Bill Clinton issued 36 vetoes and George H.W. Bush issued 29. Each of those presidents faced at least one veto override by Congress.

Parts of the bill run against key elements of Trump’s agenda. The bill’s provisions restricting troop reductions at foreign outposts were inspired by Trump’s efforts to do so over the objections of Congress. Similarly, its prohibition on presidents using their emergency authority to move unlimited military construction funds to pay for domestic projects is a response to Trump’s efforts to siphon off billions of military funds to pay for a border wall.

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Quick Take: China’s crackdown on its internet giants

InternationalDec 29. 2020

By Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg

China’s biggest internet companies got that way with at least tacit support from the government. Now two events have raised doubts about where those giants stand: the last-minute suspension of a stock offering by billionaire Jack Ma’s sprawling Ant Group Co. due to regulatory pressure; and the introduction of a draft antitrust policy seemingly designed to rein in the most powerful, including Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. (Ant’s major backer) and Tencent Holdings Ltd., operator of the WeChat super-app.

In the final days of 2020, regulators fired their opening salvos — opening an investigation into alleged monopolistic conduct at Alibaba and ordering Ant to refocus on its roots as a digital-payments provider. All that has left investors worried about what’s next for China’s Big Tech players and if the unusual freedom enjoyed by entrepreneurs like Ma might be coming to an end.

1. What happened?

Years of loose regulatory oversight in China helped Ant become a fintech giant, with businesses spanning payments, banking, wealth management and insurance. But just ahead of what was to be a $35 billion mega-listing in Shanghai and Hong Kong, Chinese authorities slapped new rules on the consumer-lending industry, in which Ant is the biggest player. That led to an indefinite suspension of Ant’s Nov. 5 initial public offering. The following week regulators proposed new rules intended to curb monopolistic practices across its internet landscape, spooking investors and wiping $290 billion off the value of market leaders including Tencent and Alibaba over two days.

2. Why the assault now?

We don’t know exactly. As is almost always the case, the country’s leaders have said little about their intentions, apart from protecting consumers and maintaining financial stability by mitigating risks. Some analysts and investors say they think regulators are merely reasserting their oversight power, not looking for drastic changes. Others think they may have grown frustrated with the swagger of tech billionaires and want to teach them a lesson by breaking up their companies — even if it means short-term pain for the economy and markets. What is known is that at a conference in October, Ma blasted China’s financial system as outdated and complained that regulators were shortsighted. He was summoned to Beijing for a rare joint meeting with the country’s top financial officials. The new regulations soon followed. The Wall Street Journal reported Nov. 12 that Chinese President Xi Jinping was furious at Ma’s speech and personally made the decision to halt the IPO.

3. Why is Jack Ma getting singled out?

The charismatic impresario behind two of the country’s largest corporations, Ant and Alibaba, is arguably the one person most closely identified with the meteoric rise of China’s internet sector. Long a regular face on the global conference circuit, the flamboyant billionaire has all but vanished from public view since Ant’s IPO got derailed. As of early December, he was advised by the government to stay in the country, a person familiar with the matter has said.

4. Is this a big change for China?

The government has played an important role in developing the tech sector, aided by a massive consumer market. In manufacturing, it intervened directly many times to reach the point where much of the world’s technology is made in China, even if it’s not always by Chinese companies. The central metropolis Zhengzhou, dubbed by locals as iPhone City, wouldn’t have become Apple Inc.’s biggest production base without government incentives. While less active in software and services, China facilitated their development by effectively creating its own version of the internet that’s blocked off from the rest of the world by what’s known as the Great Firewall. In the absence of Facebook Inc. or Twitter Inc., Tencent’s WeChat and Sina Corp.’s Weibo have flourished as social networks. Once Alphabet Inc.’s Google pulled out, Baidu Inc. extended its dominance of desktop search.

5. And the internet?

Early movers Alibaba and Tencent grew massively and came to dominate the entire ecosystem. Together with Ant they had a combined market capitalization of nearly $2 trillion in early November — easily surpassing state-owned behemoths like Bank of China Ltd. as the country’s most valuable companies. Their networks of investments encompass the vast majority of Chinese start-ups in arenas from artificial intelligence (SenseTime, Megvii) to fresh veggies (Meicai) and digital finance (Ant Group). Their patronage helped groom a new generation including food and travel giant Meituan and Didi Chuxing — China’s Uber. Rare are those that prosper outside their aura, the largest being TikTok owner ByteDance Ltd.

6. What are the legal issues?

China’s antitrust watchdog is seeking feedback on 22 pages of vaguely worded edicts that would establish a framework for curbing potentially anti-competitive behavior such as forced exclusivity deals, algorithm-based prices favoring new users or below-cost pricing to eliminate competitors. In that sense it echoes concerns raised by regulators worldwide who are investigating whether Facebook, Google and other internet giants are leveraging their dominance to squash competition, or abusing user data. Consumers in China in recent years also have protested against the gradual erosion of their privacy via technology from facial recognition to big data analysis.

7. What’s this about VIEs?

Embedded in the rules is a reference to the need for official approval for mergers and acquisitions involving Variable Interest Entities. The VIE model has been used by Alibaba and others to sell shares overseas, because Chinese law restricts foreign investment in internet companies (along with banking, mining and private education). The exotic corporate structure — pioneered by Sina and its investment bankers during a 2000 IPO — magically turns a Chinese company into a foreign one with shares that overseas investors can buy. But it has never been formally endorsed by Beijing, leaving investors perennially nervous about their bets unwinding overnight.

8. Has this happened before?

Yes, to an extent. China has a tradition of cracking down in fits and starts, or making examples out of high-profile companies. Tencent, for instance, became a target of a campaign to combat gaming addiction among children in 2018. While its shares took a hit, they eventually recovered to hit new highs. Alibaba has done the same after running afoul of authorities on everything from unfairly squeezing merchants to turning a blind eye to fakes. But the present scrutiny is shaping up to become one of the largest concerted actions against private enterprise in decades.

9. Is the internet being singled out?

China’s private sector has maintained a delicate relationship with the Communist Party for decades, and has only recently been recognized as central to the nation’s future (Ma was confirmed as a Communist Party member in 2018). While Xi’s government has been steadily tightening its grip on the world’s second-largest economy, it had taken a relatively hands-off approach toward the internet, e-commerce and digital-finance spheres. That could be changing as Big Tech amasses evermore influence and power through the data and loyal patronage of hundreds of millions of consumers.

10. Will Ant – or anyone else – get broken up?

Beijing told Ant to overhaul its suite of services — which include consumer loans, wealth management and insurance. It stopped short of calling for splitting the company but the language left that option open. The central bank stressed it was important Ant “understand the necessity of overhauling its business” and told it to come up with a plan and timetable as soon as possible. Authorities also berated Ant for what they said was subpar corporate governance and disdain toward regulatory requirements. As for other companies, Beijing is expected to tread cautiously, looking to rein in their growing clout without undermining some of the nation’s biggest corporate success stories. It’s unclear when or whether Beijing will wring concessions from Alibaba in its antitrust investigation, or what they could be.