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Pandemic is starting to hit North American meat plants again (nationthailand.com)

Pandemic is starting to hit North American meat plants again

InternationalDec 19. 2020The Cargill Inc. meat plant in Chambly, Quebec, on May 11, 2020. MUST CREDIT: Bloomberg photo by Christinne Muschi. 

By Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg · Isis Almeida, Michael Hirtzer

Meat packers across North America are bracing for a resurgence of coronavirus cases, trying to avoid the shutdowns that left supermarket shelves empty earlier in the pandemic.

Cargill Inc. has temporarily idled one of its beef plants in Canada after some employees tested positive. JBS, the world’s top meat producer, sent thousands of vulnerable U.S. workers home on paid leave, while Sanderson Farms Inc. said it’s now facing higher absenteeism at its plants than earlier in the pandemic.

Producers of everything from beef to chicken are looking to prevent the sort of disruption that shut several plants during the spring, curbing meat supplies when consumers were stocking up their fridges. Executives now say companies are better prepared, having spent millions of dollars to reconfigure factories, implement social distancing and distribute the protective equipment workers need to stay safe while keeping the food supply chain running. A labor union executive warns that efforts to keep plants running comes at a cost, with extra hours taking a physical toll on workers.

“I don’t expect to see the same issues,” Jon Nash, head of protein for Cargill in North America, said in an interview. “Generally speaking, our industry is better prepared to handle the challenges. We know what we are dealing with.”

“We know a lot more than we ever did and I think our food supply chain is resilient to the point we will be OK,” he said.

Closely-held Cargill, the world’s largest agricultural commodities trader, said Thursday it was temporarily shutting down its beef processing plant in Ontario due to “an abundance of caution as our local workforce deals with the community-wide impacts of covid-19.”

“This is not just a Cargill spread, but community-wide spread in Guelph,” about 56 miles (90 kilometers) west of Toronto, said April Nelson, a spokeswoman for the company.

Earlier this month, JBS said it had sent more than 5,000 workers home in the U.S. since coronavirus cases began to accelerate in October. Joe Sanderson, chief executive officer of the third-largest U.S. chicken producer, said infections are rising among its workers as cases increase in Texas, Mississippi, Georgia, the Carolinas and Louisiana.

“We’re still running and we’re still running at our capacity, but there have been more instances of absentees now than we had all summer or back in the spring,” he said at an earnings call Thursday. “It’s becoming more of a challenge for us right now than it has been since this pandemic started.”

The increase in cases across rural North America highlights the challenges meat packers face in preventing the virus from entering their facilities and spreading among the workforce. More than 50,000 meatpacking workers in the U.S. have tested positive for the virus and more than 260 have died, according to data from the Food and Environment Reporting Network.

Meat packers have spent millions installing plexiglass dividers, expanding locker and cafeteria areas, providing masks and face shields. Foster Farms, a chicken producer in California, said it’s testing workers twice a week and has also removed at-risk employees from its factories.

Tyson spent $540 million to adapt its U.S. facilities in the 2020 fiscal year, adding temperature scanners, workstation dividers and social distance monitors, the company said in a statement earlier this month. It’s testing thousands of employees every week, including ones that don’t present any symptoms, a Tyson spokesman said, adding that the company has appointed a chief medical officer and hired 200 additional nurses.

JBS invested more than $200 million in health and safety measures and over $160 million to pay higher wages, according to a company spokesman. The company has also staggered start times and breaks to promote social distancing, installed UV germicidal air sanitation and plasma bipolar ionization technologies to neutralize potential viruses in the air, and instituted temperature checks.

“Smithfield has invested more than $700 million in extensive measures aimed at Covid-19 prevention,” a company spokesperson said.

People are working more extra hours and Saturdays, and since the lines can’t go the same speed with fewer people, what used to take about 16 hours now takes 20, according to Mark Lauritsen, director of food processing, packing and manufacturing at the United Food and Commercial Workers union, which represents 1.3 million workers in the U.S. and Canada. “All those extra hours is going to take its toll eventually,” he said.

Some contracts have caps on hours, and for others, the union is pushing employers to guarantee days off to make sure toll on their bodies is not too severe, he said.

Cargill is still running its plants in the mid to high 90s% of capacity as it has been able to compensate for localized issues by increasing output at other facilities, Nash said. The company has also changed its product mix to adapt to the tight labor availability and a switch to serving more retailers as restaurants shut down.

Consumers may now find bigger packages at supermarkets, with ground beef being a case in point, Nash said. Cargill is also making more in-bone products, he said. JBS also said earlier this month that it was simplifying its product mix and that the more labor-intensive processing jobs such as removing bones from pork hams or beef loins had been delayed as workers focus on essential tasks.

“Could we have issues where we may have to slow down in some spots as an industry? Potentially,” Nash said. “For us, if we get to a point where we can’t run a part of our facility or a facility safely or with the same food safety controls in place, we will shut it down.”

The U.S. meat industry wants its workers to be among the top priority for vaccines once health-care workers and people in long-term care facilities get shots, the North American Meat Institute said earlier this month. Joe Sanderson has pledged to take the vaccine on video and broadcast to factories to incentivize workers to be inoculated as well.

“We’re providing flu shots for everybody and we are preparing hopefully to give Covid vaccinations when that becomes available, we think in March or April,” Sanderson said.

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Bank of Russia warns on inflation risks as it holds rates (nationthailand.com)

Bank of Russia warns on inflation risks as it holds rates

InternationalDec 19. 2020A Russian national flag flies above the headquarters of Bank Rossii, Russia’s central bank, in Moscow, on .Oct., 11, 2016… MUST CREDIT: Bloomberg photo by Alexander Zemlianichenko Jr. 

By Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg · Anya Andrianova

The Bank of Russia warned growing risks of higher inflation may leave no room for further monetary easing after it kept the key rate unchanged at a third consecutive policy meeting.

The key rate was kept at 4.25% on Friday, the lowest level on record, after 200 basis points of cuts earlier this year. The central bank left the door open to further monetary easing, but altered the language in the statement to suggest there may not be any further reductions. Russian government bonds fell for the first time in four days.

“We continue to talk about space for easing, but probably not as confidently as before,” Governor Elvira Nabiullina said at a news briefing following the rates decision. “There is lots of uncertainty now about the outlook for the economy and inflation.”

Inflation has become a political issue, with President Vladimir Putin last week ordering the government to take urgent measures to reduce prices of key staples. The central bank raised its forecast for year-end inflation to 4.6%-4.9% from its previous forecast in October of 3.9%-4.2%. The estimate for the end of next year was kept at 3.5%-4%.

“With headline inflation surging toward 5%, the central bank had little choice but to introduce some hawkish undertones into its statement,” said Tatiana Orlova, an analyst at Emerginomics in London. “Still, there is no hint that they could start considering rate hikes if inflation continues to rise.”

The central bank said pro-inflationary factors are lasting longer than expected, but monetary policy will still remain accommodative for all of next year. A handful of economists had suggested that the bank may consider a rate increase if inflation continues to climb.

Measures to control food prices aren’t likely to have a full impact this month, Nabiullina said, adding that price controls shouldn’t be implemented before the government has tried out other economic measures to curb volatility.

The jump in inflation was partly caused by a nearly 16% slump in the ruble this year, which has fed through into consumer prices. The currency has appreciated in the past two months, but slumped with other emerging-market currencies on Friday due to a drop in oil prices and reports of a Russian hacking campaign in the U.S.

The hawkish tone dimmed expectations for a cut in the months ahead and 10-year government bonds, also known as OFZs, fell for the first time in four days, lifting the yield three basis points to 5.83%.

“A lot was already priced into OFZs, but given the harsh rhetoric, the pressure continues,” said Iskander Lutsko, a strategist at ITI Capital in Moscow.

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Trump fills government boards with loyalists as term nears end (nationthailand.com)

Trump fills government boards with loyalists as term nears end

InternationalDec 19. 2020Kellyanne Conway, senior adviser to President Donald Trump, center, speaks with attendees following the announcement of Judge Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination for associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court during a ceremony in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington on Sept. 26, 2020. MUST CREDIT: Bloomberg photo by Stefani Reynolds. 

By Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg · Jordan Fabian

President Donald Trump has appointed a slew of prominent aides, supporters and fundraisers to federal advisory boards since losing re-election, a sometimes controversial practice that indicates recognition his time in office is coming to a close.

Roughly three dozen Trump allies have received appointments to federal boards and commissions in recent weeks — including some who bring no apparent expertise to the posts.

For instance, Trump appointed two of his 2016 campaign officials, Corey Lewandowski and David Bossie, to the traditionally nonpartisan Pentagon Defense Business Board. Andrew Giuliani, the 34-year-old son of Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, secured a spot on the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s board, along with the president’s close aide and body man, Nick Luna.

Other appointees are overseeing the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and military service academies and supervising funding for organizations and programs including the Library of Congress and education research. The positions can be highly coveted, as they represent affiliations with prestigious Washington institutions.

The appointments are yet another implicit recognition by the president that he will soon leave office, even as he continues to refuse to concede defeat to President-elect Joe Biden. The largely ceremonial and unpaid appointments, which don’t require Senate confirmation, typically happen at the end of a presidency.

The appointments aren’t extraordinary — President Barack Obama named his close aides Susan Rice and Valerie Jarrett to the Kennedy Center board with three days remaining in his second term, and some of his appointees remain on government advisory committees today.

“These are things you want to put your friends on because it’s a nice thing to do for somebody or it’s something they care about,” said Terry Sullivan, executive director of the White House Transition Project.

But some of Trump’s selections have drawn backlash from critics who say the backgrounds of the appointees aren’t suited for the positions they’ll hold, or that they lack qualifications.

On Wednesday, Trump announced the appointment of Andrew Giuliani, a White House aide who works as a liaison to sports teams. The elder Giuliani, the former New York mayor, has been representing Trump in his effort to overturn the election results.

Andrew Giuliani referred to a statement he posted on Twitter saying that the appointment “by this president, who has been a champion for our Jewish brothers and sisters all around the world, makes this honor that much more humbling.”

Earlier this month, Trump appointed Lewandowski and Bossie to the Pentagon board, which provides advice to senior officials on business management.

Members of the board are supposed to have experience running large corporations and organizations or posses a “wealth of top-level, global business or academic experience,” according to its website. The former Trump aides were named to the board after other members were dismissed.

“It’s not standard practice to put your former campaign manager and a campaign adviser onto a core defense advisory board. That is not typical fare,” said Max Stier, president and chief executive officer of the Partnership for Public Service, a nonprofit that seeks to make government more effective and efficient.

President-elect Joe Biden’s administration could replace Lewandowski and Bossie upon taking office since their board seats do not carry a fixed term, Stier said.

The Anti-Defamation League last month demanded that Trump rescind the appointment of Darren Beattie to the Commission for the Preservation of America’s Heritage Abroad, which identifies cemeteries and historic buildings in Europe, including Holocaust sites. Beattie was ousted in 2018 from his job as a White House speechwriter after he participated in a conference of the H.L. Mencken Club, a right-wing group that has hosted racist speakers.

The unpaid commission seat carries a three-year term that will last into the Biden administration.

Heidi Stirrup, a White House liaison at the Department of Justice, was named to the board of visitors of the U.S. Air Force Academy on the same day the Associated Press reported that she was banned from DOJ headquarters after pressuring officials for information on sensitive investigations and work on election irregularities.

Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s 2016 campaign manager and former White House counselor, was also named to the board of visitors of the U.S. Air Force Academy.

Matt Schlapp, the American Conservative Union chairman who has amplified Trump’s unfounded claims of election fraud, will serve on the Library of Congress Trust Fund Board.

Paul Light, a professor of public service at New York University, said that with some of Trump’s appointments, it appears “there’s no effort whatsoever to match names with interest.” While it’s not unusual for presidents to make last-minute picks for boards and commissions, Light said, political loyalty seems to be the overriding factor for Trump even more so than his predecessors.

“It’s about the prestige and it’s about the favors owed,” he said.

The positions Trump has recently filled generally do not provide a salary, though reimbursements for travel expenses are allowed. While the titles pad résumés of the people appointed to the posts, they will have little to no effect on Biden’s ability to run the federal government.

The administration has made other recent personnel moves, however, that could hamper Trump’s successor. The Senate’s confirmation this month of a Trump nominee to the Federal Communications Commission will cause a 2-2 partisan deadlock on the panel once Biden takes office, with chairman Ajit Pai stepping down.

And the administration has reportedly installed a Trump supporter as general counsel at the National Security Agency, a career post that carries civil service protections.

“Trump is creating a hornet’s nest of a kind and Biden could find that those hornets are pretty damn aggressive if they are disturbed,” said Light.

Other board appointments have gone to Trump campaign fundraisers. Republican lobbyists Brian Ballard and Jeff Miller on Dec. 3 received posts on the Kennedy Center’s board of trustees and the Holocaust Memorial Council, respectively. Both raised large sums of money for Trump’s re-election.

Their board positions will last well into Biden’s presidency; the Kennedy Center seat carries a six-year term while the Holocaust Memorial Council’s term last five years.

Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao on Dec. 8 was named to the Kennedy Center board. She is the wife of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

Global warming skeptic David Legates, a top official at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, was named to the President’s Committee on the National Medal of Science. The 12-person panel evaluates nominees for the medal.

Last Friday, Trump named pro sports figures who have publicly supported him to the President’s Council on Sports, Fitness and Nutrition. The list includes New England Patriots Coach Bill Belichick, former NFL running back Herschel Walker and mixed martial artist Jorge Masvidal.

Former Trump campaign adviser Bryan Lanza, who accepted a spot on the President’s Advisory Commission on Hispanic Prosperity, described a deliberative process for his selection. He said he was in discussions with the White House about serving on various boards during the first year of the Trump administration and was asked about his interests and in what capacity he would want to work.

Lanza, a partner at the lobbying and public affairs firm Mercury, didn’t take a position at the time. But he decided to join the commission when the post was offered again following the election, he said.

Stier said the process of filling government advisory boards should be overhauled to focus on merit and qualifications.

“These positions are all highly sought after. It’s the reason why the outgoing president uses it as a chit or a recognition because they know they are doing a consequential favor for somebody,” he said. “We ought to be asking the question, ‘is that what we want to see in anything associated with the public sector?'”

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U.S. blacklists more than 60 Chinese firms, including SMIC (nationthailand.com)

U.S. blacklists more than 60 Chinese firms, including SMIC

InternationalDec 18. 2020

By Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg

The U.S. Commerce Department announced it’s blacklisting Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp. and more than 60 other Chinese companies “to protect U.S. national security.”

“This action stems from China’s military-civil fusion doctrine and evidence of activities between SMIC and entities of concern in the Chinese military industrial complex,” the Commerce Department said in a statement.

Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross confirmed the move in a Friday morning interview with Fox Business. It was reported first by Reuters overnight. Shares in China’s top chipmaker slid 5.2% Friday in Hong Kong on the news.

Other affected Chinese entities include those “that enable human rights abuses, entities that supported the militarization and unlawful maritime claims in the South China Sea, entities that acquired U.S.-origin items in support of the People’s Liberation Army’s programs, and entities and persons that engaged in the theft of U.S. trade secrets,” according to the U.S. government statement.

The majority of the newly banned companies are Chinese and will join the likes of Huawei Technologies Co. on a list that denies them access to U.S. technology from software to circuitry.

Companies including Huawei and SMIC have been caught in the middle of worsening tensions between the world’s two largest economies, which have clashed on issues from trade to the pandemic.

President Donald Trump had been widely expected to level more sanctions against China’s national champions before Joe Biden formally took office.

“If the report you mentioned is correct, it will be another example of how the U.S. is using its national power to crack down on Chinese companies,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said at a briefing in Beijing on Friday. “We urge the U.S. to stop its wrongful activities cracking down on foreign companies.”

The Shanghai-based company, a supplier to Qualcomm Inc. and Broadcom Inc., lies at the heart of Beijing’s intention to build a world-class semiconductor industry and wean itself off a reliance on American technology. Washington in turn views China’s ascendancy and its ambitions to dominate spheres of technology as a potential geopolitical threat. A blacklisting threatens to cripple its longer-term ambitions by depriving it of crucial gear.

In response to the widening U.S. crackdown, China is planning to provide broad support for so-called third-generation semiconductors in its next five-year plan to increase domestic self-sufficiency in chip manufacturing, people with knowledge of the matter have said. SMIC, backed by the China Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund as well as Singapore’s sovereign fund GIC Pte and the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, is expected to play a central role in that overall effort.

SMIC representatives didn’t respond to requests for comment. The company had already been laboring under similar, less severe curbs after the Commerce Department in September placed it on a separate export restrictions list, accusing SMIC of supplying the military. Those sanctions took a toll on shares of the company, whose co-CEO Liang Mong Song this week unexpectedly resigned, triggering another selloff.

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Relying on his gut, Biden shrugs off criticism to form a ‘Cabinet of firsts’ (nationthailand.com)

Relying on his gut, Biden shrugs off criticism to form a ‘Cabinet of firsts’

InternationalDec 18. 2020President- elect Joe Biden introduces his health team at the Queen in Wilmington, Del. on December 8, 2020. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Demetrius Freeman 

By The Washington Post · Matt Viser

Thick packets have been delivered regularly to President-elect Joe Biden’s Wilmington, Del., home, providing meticulous details on each potential Cabinet member’s strengths, weaknesses and possible areas of conflict. Biden has been conducting virtual interviews with final candidates, focusing on their values and life stories nearly as much as their approach to the departments they would lead.

He has made Vice President-elect Kamala Harris perhaps his closest partner in the Cabinet-selection effort; she has interviewed each candidate separately and traded notes with Biden afterward in what people close to the transition say has been an important step in deepening their working relationship.

Biden’s transition – which began months before the election results were known – is providing the first portrait, if one largely conducted behind the scenes, of his style as a manager and decision maker-in-chief.

From the outside, advocates, groups, and members of Congress can find his process cryptic and unpredictable as they attempt to discern which directions Biden and his small core of advisers are leaning, only to find out he’s abruptly switched course. Some nominations have been rushed much quicker than expected, while other decisions have lingered, creating some frustration even among allies. Proponents of demographic and ideological diversity have complained that he has rested too much power in more moderate White officials like himself.

But Biden, in what was a defining feature of his campaign, has largely shrugged off the criticism, confident in his own approach to what he sees as a gut-check decision-making process. Lately he has become more animated in defending some of the choices that his internal deliberations have yielded, urging those on the outside to take his full Cabinet into consideration.

“This Cabinet will be the most representative of any Cabinet in American history,” Biden said Wednesday while introducing Pete Buttigieg, who would be the first openly gay Cabinet secretary, as his nominee to run the Transportation Department. “We’ll have a Cabinet of barrier breakers, a Cabinet of firsts.”

The formation of the Biden Cabinet began much earlier and has been far more comprehensively planned than previously known, according to multiple people close to the effort who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.

Biden instructed transition officials months ago that he wanted a range of options for jobs available in his administration. By Election Day, the transition had built a database of 9,000 potential administration hires. Some 2,500 had already been vetted – half of whom were people of color and more than half of whom were women. That database now has more than 45,000 entries.

Inside the transition, officials say they have tried to exceed the Rooney Rule – the NFL requirement that teams interview at least one minority candidate for every head coaching and high-level job – so that more would have an opportunity to be considered, according to several people involved with the transition. That has not stopped criticism of his eventual selections, particularly for the highest-profile roles.

Biden prefers to work from paper: His transition team has so farsent him more than 130 detailed background memos on the candidates.

“The Biden transition team is the most organized, best resourced and most effective transition team ever,” said David Marchick, director of the nonpartisan Center for Presidential Transition, who has worked for months with Trump and Biden transition officials. “Future transition teams, Republican and Democratic will be studying their model. They’re just wickedly organized.”

Four years ago, President Donald Trump’s transition provided an early indication of how Trump would conduct his presidency. Potential nominees were paraded into Trump Tower or to his golf course in Bedminster to shake hands before television cameras. Trump and Mitt Romney, then a possible secretary of state, dined on frog legs at Jean-Georges in Manhattan.

Chris Christie, then governor of New Jersey, had set up a vetting process, a detailed schedule and 30 volumes of transition documents in the months before the election, only to get pushed out along with his plans just days after Trump’s victory. In many cases, Trump, a relative political newcomer, settled on nominees with whom he had little relationship but whom he thought looked the part.

In part because of health protocols, but also by design, Biden’s opening efforts to form his administration could not be more different.

During his interactions with potential Cabinet members, which have been mostly virtual until the formal announcements, he is rarely confrontational, and more often casually breaks the ice. During a video call with homeland security candidate Alejandro Mayorkas, the former Obama administration official stumbled over how to address the president-elect.

“Just call me Joe,” Biden eventually said, by Mayorkas’s account.

While Harris’s role is still undefined and the her imprint on the choices of the nominees is so far unapparent, she has been involved in almost every discussion as Biden makes decisions on his administration, according to people involved in the process.

“She is the first and last in the room. He is asking her input and her feedback,” said a person involved in the transition. “That’s the partnership Biden had with Obama, and as Harris wanted with Biden . . . He wants her feedback.”

The discussions about Cabinet picks and other high-profile posts are kept to a very small circle, with Harris and Biden joined by incoming chief of staff Ron Klain and just a handful of others. The mood veers from light banter – with joking laments from Biden about how he fractured his foot playing with one of his dogs – to the severity of the economic and health crises his administration will confront.

“He gave us all the following advice: These are tough jobs, make sure you take care of yourself and your family,” Mayorkas said.

Former senator Chris Dodd (D-Conn.), who helped lead Biden’s similar vice-presidential search process, said Biden’s management style is one of “a collaborator.”

“He likes to talk things out,” Dodd said. “He’s not averseat all to people expressing alternative views. It’s a very healthy approach. He’s not insular in any way.”

While Biden has a soft spot for hiring people he knows and has long worked with, he likes to have a wide range of options.

“With the vice-presidential selection process, I had assumed we’d narrow candidates down to two or three people,” Dodd said. “Joe wanted to see a lot. He really wanted more of an opportunity to meet with and talk to folks. It was like six, seven, eight people. I was sort of surprised.”

The transition team examined each agency and looked at how it had been run historically and which model of leadership was most successful – a chief executive, or a budget expert, or someone who looked through a regulatory lens. Candidates were judged by how best they fit the model the transition team decided on for each job, and those options were presented to the president-elect.

In most of his picks, Biden has valued expertise – not necessarily in particular subject areas but in crisis management. In his view, his administration is inheriting a multipronged crisis, and a government workforce that has spent four years being disparaged and downplayed. That is why many of his appointments have extensive government service, those close to the decision-making say.

That instinct, however, has led to some unusual picks that have baffled outside groups that closely follow each department. Xavier Becerra, the California attorney general, has little background running a health care agency but has been nominated as secretary of health and human services. Denis McDonough, a former chief of staff to President Obama, was chosen to lead the Department of Veterans Affairs despite never serving in uniform.

In both cases, the perception of their general abilities overrode outside concerns about their expertise in those specific areas.

Biden has always been one who stews over difficult decisions, letting them linger and growing agitated with those who try to rush him. Deciding whether to run for president, including the most recent of his three campaigns, was a process that stretched later than advisers wanted, as he ruminated over the possibilities in front of him before making a final decision.

His advisers describe a decision-making and hiring approach that resembles the playing of an accordion, starting wide and then narrowing – and then, sometimes suddenly, expanding once more.

Becerra was initially not a top candidate for HHS, but then suddenly was filling out paperwork to be vetted late in the process. Retired Army Gen. Lloyd Austin was not considered a top pick for secretary of defense until shortly before Biden announced his nomination, causing his team to scramble to line up support and catching key Democratic senators off guard.

The quest for an attorney general nominee appeared to have narrowed in recent days, but advisers then began floating the name of New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, according to two people close to the process, even though he has repeatedly denied interest in the job and Biden has been primarily focused on a trio of other candidates.

Biden views his decision-making as taking into account broad amounts of information and then relying on his gut – and what he considers to be his forte, homing in on what is politically possible.

“I measure what happens, how the leaders that I’ve served with based on . . . whether their judgment about what to do comes from their gut or their head,” he said earlier this year during a virtual roundtable to discuss on rural issues in Wisconsin.

“I trust people who start with their gut,” he added. “And they have had a head bright enough to know what to do about that gut feeling. People who arrive at it purely from intellectual standpoint, they’re not always ones that can be counted on to stay through at the very end when it gets really tough . . . It starts here in the gut, and it moves to the head.”

Those who have worked with Biden say that he trusts his instincts even when they run counter to the advice he is given.

“He’ll be the first to tell you, ‘I have better political instincts than all of you,’ ” said one adviser. “He wants the recommendations. He will hear varied perspectives, and he wants people to present their case. But at the end of the day he listens to his gut. If everybody is like, ‘Sir we have to go right,’ and he says, ‘My gut says we have to go left,’ he’s going to give his gut a lot of weight.”

Harris and Biden, who receive the same packets of information on potential appointees, ask numerous follow-up questions in their interviews, at times evaluating two candidates against one another or trying to determine whether a substantive difference between Biden’s position and those of the potential nominees is a disqualifier.

Becerra, for example, has long been a proponent of Medicare-for-all, the health care plan Biden campaigned against, favoring expansion of Obamacare. But those differences were not deemed not a big enough problem to thwart his nomination.

Most of Biden’s choices so far are aligned with his views – and, in many cases, have helped shape his views over the decades. His nominee for secretary of state, Tony Blinken, is one of Biden’s longest-serving foreign policy advisers, helping craft lines that Biden still quotes to this day. Klain, the chief of staff, was Biden’s chief of staff as vice president.

Biden’s virtual sessions have at times been folksy and conversational, much as he appears in public. If a dog barks during a presentation, he defuses the tension by laughing about it. If a staff member’s children walk into the screen, he’ll engage them in conversation.

“Biden understands it’s so much bigger than him,” said Rep. Cedric L. Richmond, D-La., whom Biden has named as senior adviser and director of the White House Office of Public Engagement. “He’s not caught up on title and he’s not caught up on what people call him in the interview. . . . Trump is erratic and it’s all about Trump. If you do anything to take attention away from him, he acts like a child. Biden does not seek or crave attention.”

But, publicly and privately, he does like to talk.

“When I first sat down with Joe Biden, it was like I had known this man for 10 years. I didn’t know him at all,” said one person who has interviewed with Biden in the past. “But by the end, he’s offering his cellphone number and making jokes and talking about family. That’s just who Joe Biden is.”

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Biden and lawmakers raise alarms over cyber-breach amid Trump silence (nationthailand.com)

Biden and lawmakers raise alarms over cyber-breach amid Trump silence

InternationalDec 18. 2020A Marine stands guard outside the West Wing as snow begins to fall at the White House on Wednesday, Dec 16, 2020 in Washington, D.C. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Jabin Botsford 

By The Washington Post · Anne Gearan, Karoun Demirjian, Mike DeBonis, Annie Linskey

WASHINGTON – Democrats and some Republicans raised the alarm Thursday about a massive and growing cybersecurity breach that many experts blame on Russia, with President-elect Joe Biden implicitly criticizing the Trump administration for allowing the hacking attack to occur.

“We need to disrupt and deter our adversaries from undertaking significant cyber attacks in the first place,” Biden said in a statement. “Our adversaries should know that, as president, I will not stand idly by in the face of cyber assaults on our nation.”

President Donald Trump, by contrast, has said nothing about the hack affecting numerous federal agencies as well as U.S. companies. U.S. national security agencies are still assessing the scope and severity of the breach, which was discovered by a commercial firm.

The president’s silence about an organized attack on the U.S. government marks the latest example of his persistent reluctance to criticize Russia, which U.S. intelligence agencies have accused of interfering in the 2016 election to help Trump. Throughout his presidency, Trump has contradicted his own government’s findings about 2016 election hacking and disinformation efforts, and he has publicly accepted Russian President Vladimir Putin’s word that Moscow was blameless.

Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, the GOP’s 2012 presidential nominee and a frequent Trump critic, assailed the administration’s handling of the attack.

“What I find most astonishing is that a cyber-hack of this nature is really the modern equivalent of almost Russian bombers reportedly flying undetected over the entire country,” Romney said in an interview with SiriusXM Chief Washington Correspondent Olivier Knox. “So our national security is extraordinarily vulnerable. And in this setting, not to have the White House aggressively speaking out and protesting and taking punitive action is really, really quite extraordinary.”

In his statement Thursday afternoon, Biden said he has instructed his team to learn as much about as possible about the breach and indicated the team is being briefed on the attack. He received a presidential daily briefing Thursday afternoon, according to his transition office.

Biden pledged that he will make cybersecurity more of a priority in his administration and declared that foes should know they will incur “substantial costs” for penetrating U.S. systems.

The president-elect did not pin blame on Russia, but his phrase “stand idly by” appeared to be a reference to Trump’s response to Russia’s sophisticated cyberspying.

The breach affected the Department of Homeland Security, the State, Treasury and Commerce departments and the National Institutes of Health, officials have said.

Ned Price, a Biden transition spokesman on national security issues, declined to answer more specific questions about Biden’s response to the hack. “We respect the principle of ‘one president at a time,’ ” he said.

In late July, Biden put out a statement on election security and specifically called out the Kremlin for its effort to interfere with democracy. The statement laid out potential responses, including “financial-sector sanctions, asset freezes, cyber responses, and the exposure of corruption” along with “other actions could also be taken, depending on the nature of the attack.”

Biden, who was then the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, added: “I will direct our response at a time and in a manner of our choosing.”

On Capitol Hill, the House and Senate Intelligence committees on Wednesday received the first of what are expected to be several briefings from intelligence officials, including representatives from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the National Security Agency, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.

Senior Democrats emerged from the briefings sounding a note of alarm.

“The seriousness and duration of this attack demonstrate that we still have enormous and urgent work to do to defend our critical information and networks,” Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said in a statement Wednesday night. “We must move quicker than our adversaries do to adapt.”

Most Republicans have been more cautious about expressing their concern.

“They’re still assessing this one,” Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told reporters, explaining that officials had not yet determined whether this hack rose to the level of a series of earlier attacks on the Office of Personnel Management database, which Cornyn called “the mother of all hacks.”

When asked whether Trump should be responding more forcefully, Cornyn said: “I don’t really care what he says, but I do care what he does.”

Cornyn added that “to get the Russians to stop,” the government would need to employ “equal and opposite reactions that cause them to pay a price.”

“Old fashioned deterrence,” Cornyn said. “Words mean nothing.”

“There is still much we don’t know about the massive cyber-hack that breached U.S. cyber-defenses, including federal agencies and major private-sector companies.”

Sens. James Inhofe, R-Okla., and Jack Reed, D-R.I., chairman and senior Democrat of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said in a statement that “the cyber intrusion appears to be ongoing and has the hallmarks of a Russian intelligence operation. The U.S. government must do everything possible to counter it.”

Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., said the U.S. investigation is only beginning and suggested patience in waiting for Trump to respond.

“It’s early. It’s early for this kind of thing. Attribution is hard,” he said in an interview. “You’ve got to have it rock-solid before you respond.”

Outside the intelligence panels, the reaction to the hack has been relatively muted, as a last push to finalize legislation to address the pandemic consumed the attention of most lawmakers this week.

But other committees in both the House and Senate have announced they will be launching investigations.

In the GOP-led Senate, Finance Committee leaders Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, and Ron Wyden, D-Ore., asked the commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service for an immediate briefing into whether taxpayer data had been caught up in the hack, noting that “the IRS appears to have been a customer of SolarWinds as recently as 2017.” SolarWinds is the Texas-based firm whose software was exploited in the hacking.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., said information U.S. investigators have amassed so far points squarely at Cozy Bear, a group considered part of Russian foreign intelligence.

“This massive cyberattack demands a massive response. Assess the damage, clean it up, secure systems, make the attacker pay a price, & more. So far, not a word from any responsible official. Right now come clean with the American people,” Blumenthal tweeted Thursday.

In the Democratic-led House, the chairs of the Homeland Security and Oversight committees jointly announced Thursday that they would be launching a general investigation into the scope and targets of the hack, requesting a briefing from the FBI, the Homeland Security Department and the Office of the Director of Intelligence on Friday.

“It is imperative that our Committees receive the latest information on the number of federal departments, agencies, and other entities affected by the breach, the extent to which sensitive information and data – including classified information – may have been compromised or exposed, the threat actor or actors responsible, and the Administration’s ongoing efforts to prevent further damage,” they wrote in letters asking for the briefing.

Spokesmen for the White House and National Security Council did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

On Dec. 8, the cybersecurity firm FireEye announced that hackers had broken into its servers and stolen sensitive security-testing tools as part of a breach it had discovered in recent weeks. FireEye later determined that software updates from SolarWinds had been corrupted and contacted the company shortly after, The Washington Post reported Tuesday, citing people familiar with the matter.

Putin deflected questions about Russian hacking during his annual news conference Thursday. He claimed the United States was waging similar efforts into Moscow’s affairs but did not expand on Kremlin denials that Russian government hackers were behind the recent digital spying operation.

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Biden picks Rep. Deb Haaland of New Mexico to be first Native American interior secretary (nationthailand.com)

Biden picks Rep. Deb Haaland of New Mexico to be first Native American interior secretary

InternationalDec 18. 2020Rep. Deb Haaland, D-N.M., has been nominated to become the first Native American to serve as interior secretary. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Bonnie Jo Mount 

By The Washington Post · Juliet Eilperin, Dino Grandoni, Brady Dennis

WASHINGTON – President-elect Joe Biden chose Rep. Deb Haaland, D-N.M., Thursday to serve as the first Native American Cabinet secretary and head the Interior Department, a historic pick that marks a turning point for the U.S. government’s relationship with the nation’s Indigenous peoples.

With that selection and others this week, Biden sent a clear message that top officials charged with confronting the nation’s environmental problems will have a shared experience with the Americans who have disproportionately been affected by toxic air and polluted land.

“A voice like mine has never been a Cabinet secretary or at the head of the Department of Interior,” Haaland tweeted Thursday night. ” … I’ll be fierce for all of us, our planet, and all of our protected land.”

In addition to Haaland, Biden has turned to North Carolina environmental regulator Michael Regan to become the first Black man to head the Environmental Protection Agency, as well as Obama administration veteran Brenda Mallory to serve as the first Black chair of the White House Council on Environmental Quality.

While the picks represent a concession to progressives in Biden’s party, who publicly campaigned for an American Indian at the helm of Interior, they were also chosen to personify Biden’s plans to address the long-standing burdens low-income and minority communities have shouldered when it comes to dirty air and water. All three nominees will play a central role in realizing his promises to combat climate change, embrace green energy and address environmental racism.

“We have individuals coming to these positions who have seen what it’s like on the other side, in terms of communities that have suffered,” environmental justice pioneer Bob Bullard said in an interview Thursday. “They have been fighting for justice. Now they are in a position to make change and make policy. That, to me, has the potential to be transformative.”

Earlier this week, Biden chose former Michigan governor Jennifer Granholm, a Democrat, a proponent of zero-emission vehicles, as his Energy Secretary nominee. He also established the first White House Office of Domestic Climate Policy and designated former EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy to head it. Former Obama budget official Ali Zaidi will serve as her deputy.

“This brilliant, tested, trailblazing team will be ready on day one to confront the existential threat of climate change with a unified national response rooted in science and equity,” Biden said in a statement Thursday. “They share my belief that we have no time to waste to confront the climate crisis, protect our air and drinking water, and deliver justice to communities that have long shouldered the burdens of environmental harms.”

If confirmed, Regan, 44, who heads the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality, would be responsible for crafting fuel-efficiency standards for the nation’s cars and trucks, overseeing emissions from power plants and oil and gas facilities and cleaning up the country’s most polluted sites.

Regan has served as the state’s top environmental official since early 2017, when Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, named him to his current role. While union leaders have criticized his approach at times, he has shown a capacity to work with community activists and the corporate world.

Regan forged a multibillion-dollar settlement over cleanups of coal waste with Duke Energy, established an environmental justice advisory board, and reached across the political divide to work with the state’s Republican legislature. In another high-profile case, the state ordered the chemical company Chemours to virtually eliminate a group of man-made chemicals from seeping into the Cape Fear River.

Before entering state government, Regan worked on climate change and pollution issues as southeast regional director for the Environmental Defense Fund, an advocacy group. “Michael knows how to make progress even when that isn’t easy – that’s a necessary skill in North Carolina,” the group’s president, Fred Krupp, said in an email.

In selecting 60-year-old Haaland, a member of Pueblo of Laguna, Biden has placed the descendant of the original people to populate North America atop a 171-year-old institution that has often had a fraught relationship with the nation’s 574 federally recognized tribes.

Three divisions of Interior have a tremendous impact on Indian Country, including the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Bureau of Indian Education and the Bureau of Trust Funds Administration, which manages billions held in trust by the U.S. government.

“It’s called plenary power,” said University of Colorado Boulder law professor Charles Wilkinson. “Native people jokingly call it, ‘plenty power.’ “

Born in Arizona to a Native American mother who served in the Navy and a Norwegian American father who was an active-duty Marine, Haaland bounced between 13 public schools as the family changed military bases. At 15, she worked at a bakery, and later attended law school with the help of student loans and food stamps, occasionally experiencing homelessness as a single mother.

Now, after serving a single term in Congress, she will oversee a department that manages roughly one-fifth of land in the U.S. While she hails from a top oil-and gas-producing state, Haaland has pledged to transform the department from a champion of fossil fuel development into a promoter of renewable energy and policies to mitigate climate change.

“I come from New Mexico. It’s a big gas and oil state. And I care about every single job,” Haaland said in a recent interview with The Washington Post. But she added: “We don’t want to go back to normal, right? We don’t want to go back to where we were because that economy wasn’t working for a lot of people.”

Biden, meanwhile, has pledged to halt all new oil and gas drilling on public lands and waters, a daunting task that faces both legal and political obstacles. The extraction of oil, gas and coal in these areas accounts for nearly a quarter of the nation’s annual carbon output.

In a sign of the opposition the administration will soon face, the New Mexico Oil and Gas Association issued a statement noting drilling on federal land generates $800 million annually for the state’s government. “We hope Rep. Haaland will employ a balanced approach that considers the needs of all who depend on public lands, including the thousands of men and women and families whose livelihoods depend on access to public lands for resource development,” the group said.

Interior oversees vast protected areas – including 75 million acres of wilderness and 422 national park sites, as well as national monuments and wildlife refuges. It safeguards more than 1,000 endangered species, and manages massive water projects in the West that help sustain farmland and provide drinking water for major cities including Las Vegas and Los Angeles.

Haaland just won reelection from a north central New Mexico district that leans Democratic. If confirmed by the Senate, her party will have a razor-thin margin over Republicans in the House until her seat is filled. Right now Democrats hold 222 seats, pending a re-canvassing in a New York race and challenges in Iowa, and Biden has already tapped two other House Democrats to serve in his administration, Reps. Cedric Richmond of Louisiana and Marcia Fudge of Ohio.

But House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said Wednesday that she would not stand in the way of Haaland leaving the House, calling her “one of the most respected and one of the best members of Congress I have served with.”

As a child, Haaland spent summers with her grandparents in a house without running water in Mesita, one of Laguna Pueblo’s small villages in New Mexico.

“As kids we moved a lot because my dad was in the service, but no matter where we were he would take us outside,” she recalled. “In New Mexico we would hike in Jemez during a rainstorm, or at other military bases we would visit the ocean.”

Rep. Raúl Grijalva., D-Ariz., who chairs the House Natural Resources Committee and helped lead the campaign for Haaland to be interior secretary, said a diverse Cabinet will pursue environmental policies that are “inclusive and involving the breadth of who the American people are.”

“That’s important, that nobody be left behind as we go forward,” he added.

Biden’s decision to appoint Haaland to head Interior will hold profound meaning for the 1.9 million Native Americans whose education and health care are often influenced by the department’s decisions.

Jim Enote, a Zuni tribal member and chief executive of the Native-led Colorado Plateau Foundation, said in an interview that the move signals how much has changed over the past half-century. Native Americans “do not participate in the same channels of influence as other Americans,” he said, and some previous Interior secretaries have held a dismissive attitude toward the country’s first inhabitants.

The legacy of Interior is blemished by instances of federal officials removing Native Americans from their ancestral lands – including from Yellowstone, the first and perhaps most iconic national park.

Years later, in 1972, several hundred tribal activists took over the Interior Department headquarters in Washington to draw attention to their plight. In 1983, then-Interior Secretary James Watt blamed the problems on U.S. reservations on Indigenous culture.

“If you want an example of the failure of socialism,” Watt said in an interview on a satellite radio show based in Tulsa, “don’t go to Russia. Come to America and go to the Indian reservations.”

Biden’s choice comes as the federal government’s relationship with tribes has eroded under the Trump administration, which has removed protections from sacred tribal sites in Utah’s Bears Ears National Monument and allowed oil drillers into Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuges, home to the caribou that Native Alaskans hunt for food.

“The Trump administration has not been kind to Indian country,” Haaland said. “He has thrown tribal consultation essentially out the window.”

She argued that Trump’s interior secretaries, Ryan Zinke and David Bernhardt, reorganized the Bureau of Indian Affairs and other agencies in ways that hampered the ability of Native Americans to confer with federal officials.

Chase Iron Eyes, a Native American activist and attorney with the Lakota People’s Law Project, said that while Indigenous people have several champions in Congress, he is elated the department will be run by a tribal member.

“It could not have been in our forefathers’ dreams to have an actual Indian be appointed at the Cabinet level in the agency that is meant to oversee their absorption,” he said.

Charles Curtis, a Republican and member of the Kaw nation who was vice president from 1929 to 1933 under President Herbert Hoover, was the first person of Native American ancestry to serve at the highest levels of the federal government.

Haaland bolstered her national profile in 2016 by going to the Standing Rock Sioux’s reservation in North and South Dakota to join tribal leaders in opposition to the construction of the Dakota Access pipeline. “She asked what I needed and what the tribe needed,” said Jodi Archambault, a former special assistant to Barack Obama for Native American affairs and a member of the tribe. Haaland, she said, was able to provide support from some New Mexico labor unions – and tortillas and green chili stew.

“She brought her own cooking things and opened her trunk up, and said, ‘This is the best I can do,’ ” Archambault said, adding, “The stew was really good; the tortillas were excellent.”

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States report confusion as feds slash vaccine shipments, and Pfizer says it has ‘millions’ of unclaimed doses (nationthailand.com)

States report confusion as feds slash vaccine shipments, and Pfizer says it has ‘millions’ of unclaimed doses

InternationalDec 18. 2020

By The Washington Post · Isaac Stanley-Becker, Yasmeen Abutaleb, Lena H. Sun, Josh Dawsey

WASHINGTON – State officials said they were alerted late Wednesday that their second shipments of Pfizer-BioNTech’s vaccine had been drastically cut for next week, sparking widespread confusion and conflicting statements from Pfizer and federal officials about who was to blame.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/c/embed/90c241ec-6c2d-4184-8ddb-9423317da25e?ptvads=block&playthrough=false

The reduction prompted concern in health departments across the country about whether Operation Warp Speed, the Trump administration’s vaccine accelerator, was capable of distributing doses quickly enough to meet the target of delivering first shots to 20 million people by year’s end. A senior administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal plans, said the revised estimates were the result of states requesting an expedited timeline for locking in their allocations for the following week – moving the notification of how many doses they could order from Friday to Tuesday. Because Pfizer is producing doses daily, the official said, there are fewer doses available on Tuesday than there would be on Friday.

But Pfizer released a statement on Thursday that seemed to contradictthat explanation, saying the company faced no production problems and had many more doses available right now than were being distributed.

“We have millions more doses sitting in our warehouse but, as of now, we have not received any shipment instructions for additional doses,” the statement read.

The clashing accounts came as Pfizer and the Trump administration negotiate additional vaccine doses for the United States. Pfizer, which has already committed to providing the government with 100 million doses, said that as recently as October, federal officials had turned down its entreaties to lock in another 100 million doses. When those officials sought to buy those doses later, the company said its supplies were already committed to other countries. Now the pharmaceutical giant and the administration are nearing an agreement that would give the United States between 50 million and 100 million doses, probably spread over the second and third quarters of 2021, according to people knowledgeable about the negotiations who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to the news media.

Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, in a CNBC appearance on Thursday, noted that Pfizer had reduced its manufacturing projection for this year from 100 million doses to 50 million doses, and said he would “like to have more visibility” into the company’s manufacturing capacity.

“I do wish we would stop just talking about this Pfizer thing,” Azar said, noting that other vaccines were in the pipeline.

The company said the change, announced in November, had to do with difficulties procuring sufficient raw ingredients and noted in its statement Thursday that it had shared “every aspect of our production and distribution capabilities” in weekly meetings with federal officials.

Earlier this week, 2.9 million doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine were cleared for shipment, while 5.9 million doses of Moderna’s regimen are poised to go out next week if the vaccine is authorized, as expected. That will be on top of additional supply from Pfizer, which Azar said Wednesday would amount to 2 million doses next week.

That represents a sharp drop-off from what states were expecting, according to state health officials. At least six states – from Washington to Florida – were informed by federal health authorities of the shortfall, forcing last-minute changes to vaccine distribution plans for next week. Some were intending to use the second shipment to begin vaccinating residents of long-term care facilities, creating dilemmas about whether to go ahead with those plans or to finish inoculating health-care providers, officials said.

Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, a Democrat, said anticipated shipments to the state in the next two weeks had been cut roughly in half. The uncertainty was even more pronounced in Florida, where Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, said new shipments from Pfizer were “on hold” as officials in his administration reported their expected allocation disappearing entirely in Tiberius, the online tracking system the administration uses to coordinate with the states. Fred Piccolo, a spokesman for DeSantis, said the numbers had come back online by Thursday but had been reduced significantly.

“It’s forty percent less than we were originally thinking,” Washington Health Secretary John Wiesman said. “We thought we were getting 74,100 and now we are planning for 44,850 doses.”

Maine said it is receiving about 40% less than expected – 8,775 doses rather than 13,650 doses. The state will not be able to fully launch its program next week to vaccinate residents and staffs of all long-term care facilities, said Robert Long, a spokesman for the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention.

Michael Pratt, an HHS spokesperson, denied any changes to “numbers locked in with states” and said the government was on track to allocate enough vaccine for about 20 million people to receive their first doses by year’s end.

“Each week, OWS will let states know how many doses are available to order against for the coming week,” he said.

The senior administration official said moving up the notice to Tuesday was the reason for the one-week shortfall, as “we are sending doses that have been produced, verified and released.”

Wiesman, of Washington state, said he could appreciate Warp Speed’s decision to provide numbers of verified doses only, as opposed to an estimate of what might be available by week’s end. But he said states cannot plan without a longer-term sense of what they will receive, which has been impossible because of changing estimates from the pharmaceutical companies and from Operation Warp Speed.

“We need to have some sense of what regular production is going to be, what the throughput of the manufacturer is so we can look more than a week ahead,” he said.

Some of these concerns were communicated on a call last week with governors and administration officials, including Vice President Mike Pence, Azar and Gen. Gustave Perna, chief operating officer of Operation Warp Speed. There was only preliminary guidance on shipments for this week, said a state official who participated in the call. Administration officials, peppered with questions about the initial supply of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, emphasized the Moderna vaccine, which they said would be available soon.

FedEx and UPS are distributing the Pfizer vaccine; Moderna’s product will be moved by McKesson, a major medical distributor. Both vaccines are two-dose regimens, and the Trump administration has elected to hold back shipments of the second dose in an effort to ensure that everyone gets their second shot.

Another person involved in the planning, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the person was not authorized to discuss the situation, said Pfizer executives were baffled that the administration was not immediately distributing all of its vaccine, instead leaving much of it on the shelves.

In one bright spot for hospitals receiving the initial shipments of the Pfizer vaccine this week, some health-care providers discovered that they could get as many as seven doses out of vials they were told contained five allotments of the precious vaccine.

The Food and Drug Administration advised hospitals to use the additional supply, while Pfizer said the amount of vaccine remaining in the vial after five doses may vary, instructing health-care providers to consult their own immunization policies.

One complicating factor was that companion kits shipped to vaccination sites by the federal government did not contain many spare syringes needed to give the excess doses. The administration official said additional materials will be included in the future kits to accommodate additional doses that can be drawn from the vials of Pfizer vaccine.

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Over 38 million people in England face highest virus curbs (nationthailand.com)

Over 38 million people in England face highest virus curbs

InternationalDec 18. 2020A covid-19 public health information board in London’s Covent Garden, after the capital was placed into tier 3 coronavirus restrictions on Dec. 16, 2020. MUST CREDIT: Bloomberg photo by Betty Laura Zapata. 

By Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg · Emily Ashton

More than 38 million people in England will be ordered to comply with the toughest level of coronavirus restrictions from Saturday after ministers acted to slow a surge in infections.

Health Secretary Matt Hancock said more parts of the east and southeast of England will face the toughest rules — meaning 68% of England’s population will be under tier 3, 30% in tier 2, and just 2% in the lowest tier 1.

The move is another huge blow to the hospitality industry ahead of Christmas, as tier 3 means pubs, restaurants, bars and indoor entertainment venues must close.

“Businesses will have bought stock which will now go to waste and more people will lose work at a stressful time,” said Kate Nicholls, chief executive officer of the UKHospitality industry group. “Hotels are now facing a deluge of short-notice cancellations because of the tightening of restrictions. What was already looking like a bleak Christmas is now looking like a total write-off.”

Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak said the government’s job support program, which pays 80% of furloughed workers wages, will be extended by a month to the end of April. The government’s state-backed loan programs for struggling businesses will also now be open until the end of March, rather than January.

London was moved to the highest tier on Wednesday after a rapid spread of infections across the capital in recent days. It will now be joined by the nearby counties of Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Berkshire, Hertfordshire, most of Surrey, and parts of Cambridgeshire, East Sussex and Hampshire, Hancock told the House of Commons on Thursday.

Cases increased by 46% in southeast England in the last week.

The vast majority of regions already in tier 3, including Greater Manchester in northwest England, will stay in that bracket — prompting anger from local lawmakers including senior Conservative Graham Brady, who said the region has already been in “severe restrictions” for nine months.

The southwest city of Bristol and nearby north Somerset will move down to tier 2, and the West Midlands county of Herefordshire will drop to the lowest tier 1.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson is going ahead with plans to let people celebrate with two other households over five days at Christmas, despite doctors warning the relaxation will lead to a spike in cases, hospitalizations and deaths.

The public must “exercise a high degree of personal responsibility” and “avoid contact with elderly people wherever possible,” Johnson said on Wednesday.

Hancock said people must continue to “be cautious” as the U.K. rolls out a coronavirus vaccine.

“We’ve come so far, we mustn’t blow it now,” he told Parliament. “I regret having to take the action that we have to take. I deem it necessary and there is a strong view right across government that these actions are necessary.”

Johnson faces a looming battle with his own lawmakers when the restrictions are put to a vote at the end of January, with increasing numbers opposed to his coronavirus strategy.

Conservative MP Stephen McPartland said on Twitter it is “ridiculous” that his Hertfordshire district had been moved into tier 3. “Totally unacceptable and clearly shows I was right to vote against a second lockdown and tier system,” he wrote.

Steve Baker, a former minister and deputy chair of the Covid Recovery Group of skeptical rank-and-file lawmakers, said the government “must now show how they will lift restrictions as the vaccine rolls out.”

Teaching unions hit out at the government for announcing Thursday that high schools in England will have a staggered return in January, with some pupils learning online during the first week. Ministers said this will allow schools to set up a new mass testing program.

The National Education Union said making the announcement at the end of term demonstrated “ministerial panic rather than rational and responsible action,” and the government has failed to understand the “fundamental issues” involved in testing secondary school pupils.

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Mexico City resists lockdown with hospital occupancy at 75% (nationthailand.com)

Mexico City resists lockdown with hospital occupancy at 75%

InternationalDec 18. 2020Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador speaks during a news conference at the National Palace in Mexico City on Nov. 25, 2020, with mayor Claudia Sheinbaum seated on the right. MUST CREDIT: Bloomberg photo by Alejandro Cegarra. 

By Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg · Andrea Navarro

Every day this week Mexico City has set a record for hospital beds occupied by covid patients, driving numbers above those last spring. The mayor is urging people to stay inside. For many being cared for at home, lines to refill oxygen tanks at local outlets stretch around the block. The death toll has risen above 19,000.

Everything about the situation screams emergency. And Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum has said that’s what it is. What she hasn’t done is what many health experts consider vital: move the city’s status on the national covid scale from orange to red and trigger a full shutdown at the height of holiday shopping.

“Her message is confusing — Is it orange? Is it red? You can go outside but it’s better to stay home — this is leading people to make bad decisions,” said former health minister Salomon Chertorivski in a radio interview this week.

Jokes are making the rounds about how dark a shade of orange you can have as long as it’s not red. Orange, many here now say, is not the new black. It’s the new red.

The mayor is in a delicate spot. President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, known as AMLO, has always viewed the virus with the suspicion of a populist and has pressed hard to keep the economy open for business.

“There’s fear of contradicting the federal government and the president, which makes it hard to enforce the required measures,” Chertorivski, who is from an opposition party, said. “The city is being submissive.”

Eurasia Group analyst Carlos Petersen agreed that the mayor doesn’t find it easy to act on her own. “There seems to be an inclination from the city government to implement more restrictions but there’s an aversion at the federal level to shut down the economy,” he said in an interview.

Sheinbaum may also have presidential aspirations, Petersen said, adding to pressures to stay within party lines. “She knows the main elector for the 2024 election is AMLO,” he said.

Only two states in Mexico — Baja California and Zacatecas — are currently in red, with most of the rest in orange. Overall cases stand at nearly 1.3 million and deaths close to 116,000. Mexico is among the world’s worst-hit countries by the pandemic.

The epicenter remains the capital, where 20% of all Mexican cases are concentrated.

“We’re doing all we can to avoid returning to the painful situation of shutting down,” Sheinbaum said at a press conference Tuesday. Asked whether she was acting on Lopez Obrador’s orders, she said, “The city makes its own decisions. This time of the year is very important in economic terms for the wellbeing of many families.”

Every day this week Mexico City has set a record for hospital beds occupied by covid patients, driving numbers above those last spring. The mayor is urging people to stay inside. For many being cared for at home, lines to refill oxygen tanks at local outlets stretch around the block. The death toll has risen above 19,000.

The criteria for moving from orange to red include percentage of hospital beds occupied, and Mexico City just added 260 beds, giving it more time. It is also now carrying out 20,000 rapid tests daily to find cases more quickly and stop them from spreading, Sheinbaum said. On Tuesday, 4,834 hospital beds were in use. A May 22 record of 4,553 hospitalizations was broken Dec. 12 and has continued to increase.

Overall hospital capacity is at around 75%, Sheinbaum said, calling on people to stay home to help reduce infections.

Billionaire Carlos Slim, Walmart de Mexico and other companies announced on Wednesday a joint donation of 495 million pesos ($25 million) to add beds at the Citibanamex Center that’s been reconfigured for Covid patients.”It’s one thing to have beds, but it’s another thing to have the personnel and the equipment to take care of those extra beds,” said Alejandro Macias, Mexico’s czar during the H1N1 epidemic in 2009. “Health workers are tired.”

But city center streets have been packed with pedestrians, most in masks but not all. Signs inside stores read, “Hurry, we close at 5pm today.” Adding to the infections are underground parties and holiday dinners, one of which was hosted by billionaire Ricardo Salinas.

“Life is only lived once and it’s a risk living it, a risk that’s worth it,” he tweeted alongside a picture of at least 40 guests in a holiday dinner with executives from one of his companies.

In the meantime, Guillermina Diaz waited an hour to refill an oxygen tank for her 67-year-old father who’s recovering from the coronavirus at home, after spending 24 days in the hospital. Finding him a hospital bed was a feat on its own, she said, and now family members take turns finding places to fill the tanks.

“At least I found some,” she said. “The worst part is calling place after place and hearing there’s none left.”