When governments in Europe announced new shutdowns amid surging coronavirus cases last month, some world leaders floated a tantalizing light at the end of the tunnel.
“I have no doubt that people will be able to have as normal a Christmas as possible,” British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said during a news conference Nov. 5, as he announced a four-week lockdown.
The reassurance, after a tough year when many families had already spent special occasions in isolation, served as motivation to put up with short-term restrictions.
But with coronavirus cases surging again as the holiday season approaches, and vaccine rollouts in stages too early to make a dent, hope for a Christmas miracle has come to look like a mirage.
In Germany, where officials spent weeks deciding whether to offer a Christmas reprieve from restrictions, Chancellor Angela Merkel announced Sunday that the country would return to strict measures like those it had imposed at the start of the pandemic.
The Dutch government announced Monday that it would install its toughest restrictions yet over the holiday season, through Jan 19. “We realize just how far-reaching this decision is,” Prime Minister Mark Rutte said in an evening address to the nation. “This has been a year of sadness and mourning for many.”
The Italian media has speculated that a similar lockdown is impending, while other European countries, including Greece, have imposed measures ahead of Christmas.
Last week in the United States, California announced its restrictions would run through the holiday.
Many global health experts have welcomed the restrictions and shutdowns. “The festive season is a time to relax and celebrate,” World Health Organization head Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said Friday, but it “can very quickly turn to sadness.”
Putting a damper on Christmas can be a tough decision. In Canada, Manitoba Premier Brian Pallister grew emotional when he announced that strict rules for the province would continue over the holiday season. “I’m the guy who is stealing Christmas to keep you safe,” he said, his voice breaking.
Even restrictive measures might not be enough to keep the rate of transmission down over the holidays. On Tuesday, researchers from Imperial College London released a study suggesting that infections increased in London during the final weeks of the nationwide lockdown Johnson announced in November.
Johnson hasn’t entirely reversed his Christmas pledge, but his government on Monday announced large parts of the country, including most of London, would be placed under the highest level of virus restrictions this week.
Britain’s holiday plan – which calls for people to form a “Christmas bubble” of friends and family they wish to socialize with between Dec. 23 and 27 – will remain in place. But some politicians and experts argue it will come at a high cost.
“Letting down our guard for five days over Christmas could be very dangerous indeed,” Tobias Ellwood, a former British defense secretary, said in Parliament on Monday as he asked the government to review the Christmas bubble rules.
Health experts have been concerned for months about Christmas – especially extended, indoor, intergenerational celebrations that often involve travel. Christmas and Hanukkah are widely celebrated in Europe and the Americas, where the virus has hit hard.
Evidence from Thanksgiving celebrations in the United States and Canada show such gatherings can worsen the spread of the virus. Since the U.S. holiday, new daily confirmed cases have skyrocketed and the seven-day average is above 200,000.
Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said in a television interview last week that the Christmas season may be worse than Thanksgiving for the spread the virus, as it lasts longer, running through New Year’s.
The middle of January “could be a really dark time for us,” Fauci told CNN last Tuesday.
Germany announced 16,362 new cases on Monday, marking another substantial increase in an outbreak that has led to 21,975 deaths. In the Netherlands, coronavirus cases surged to 9,884 on Sunday – the highest figure seen since late October.
Although daily cases in Britain haven’t reached the level of their November peak, Health Secretary Matt Hancock said Monday that the government had identified a new variant of the virus and that it “may be associated with the faster spread in the south of England.”
Some governments have been able to flatten the curve, allowing a degree of normality over the Christmas period. France announced this weekend that it would relax rules for people in long-term care over the holidays.
But for many, this will be a Christmas like no other. In Belgium, where new cases declined steeply after a strict lockdown last month, residents are still advised to host their Christmas parties outside and allow only one guest to use the bathroom.
The restrictions are not limited to North America and Europe. In Brazil and Russia, two hotbeds of the pandemic with large Christian populations, some regional governments have banned Christmas festivities.
Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said in early November that Christmas festivities, which usually take place on New Year’s Eve in the Russian Orthodox Church, were canceled, as it was “obvious that mass events will not be held.”
WASHINGTON – The Food and Drug Administration on Tuesday authorized the first rapid coronavirus test that can be taken at home without prescription and that yields immediate results.
The test could be a vital tool in the country’s fight against the virus, especially in the months before most Americans are vaccinated. Unlike previous home tests, this version does not require samples to be sent to a lab and can be taken without doctors’ orders by anyone older than 2.
The test, developed by Australian company Ellume, is one of several developments for coronavirus testing.
After months of failures, long lines and continued shortages, the country’s testing capacity is expected to increase rapidly in the coming two to three months, reaching many times its current levels, experts said. That reflects new technologies coming online and long-standing investments to ramp up production that are coming to fruition.
The FDA allowed the test under an emergency use authorization. The newly approved home test will cost about $30, and the first batches will be shipped the first week of January, according to Ellume.
“It’s a big deal, and a huge step for efforts to take back control from the virus,” said Mara Aspinall, a biomedical diagnostics professor at Arizona State University.
But given the pent-up demand for such a test, she said, there remain questions about how much of a difference it would make unless available in large quantities and also how to prevent people and companies from hoarding such a test by buying in bulk.
In an interview, Ellume chief executive Sean Parsons said supply initially will be limited to 100,000, with plans to increase manufacturing to 1 million by mid-2021. Parsons said his company will be announcing a partnership with a major retailer – such as Walgreens, CVS or Walmart – to sell the test and create policies that would prevent hoarding by consumers. He said Ellume is in talks to supply the tests in the future directly to companies and universities.
The test uses a nasal swab to collect a sample and produces results within minutes of using a plastic device similar to a home pregnancy test.
One critical feature of the new home tests: the ability to capture and report test results.
For months, at least two dozen companies have been trying to develop home tests, most of them rapid antigen tests that detect proteins on the surface of the virus. Because labs are not involved in such tests, there was no clear way to report the results. Without that data, experts warned that the country would be flying blind as it navigates the later stages of the pandemic.
Ellume’s test requires users to download an app on their smartphone to see their test result. That app automatically sends data by Zip code to the cloud – ensuring that regional health officials can learn about positive results while keeping the data confidential, the company said.
“Today’s authorization is a major milestone in diagnostic testing for COVID-19,” FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn said in a statement. “As we continue to authorize additional tests for home use, we are helping expand Americans’ access to testing, reducing the burden on laboratories and test supplies.”
While experts hailed the new test as a long-awaited development, many also worried that people may view the use of such tests as tacit permission to disregard precautions such as wearing masks or maintaining distance. They note that some rapid tests have been 90% to 97% accurate in detecting the virus, and that detection often depends on when people take the test.
Experts also caution that while people can take the test one day and get a negative result, they can acquire the virus the next day.
Last month, the FDA approved another single-use home test kit, but it required a prescription from a doctor. That test, developed by California biotechnology company Lucira Health, was expected to sell for less than $50, company officials said.
In coming weeks, more new tests are expected to be approved. Experts said that with increasing capacity, a growing need exists for state and federal officials to come up with a national strategy for how to deploy the tests more effectively and to provide federal funding for regular, dedicated mass testing in schools, hard-hit nursing homes and among essential workers.
By The Washington Post · Mike DeBonis, Tony Romm, Seung Min Kim, Jeff Stein
WASHINGTON – Congressional negotiations on spending and economic relief picked up speed on Tuesday as top lawmakers met for an hour in the afternoon and then planned to reconvene in the evening, a sign that negotiations are reaching a critical stage.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., hosted the three other most senior congressional leaders – Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.; Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.; and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif. – in her office.
“We’re not leaving here without a covid package. It’s not going to happen,” McConnell said at his news conference Tuesday before the first gathering. “We’re going to stay here, no matter how long it takes.”
The first meeting adjourned about 5 p.m. Eastern time, and the second meeting was set to begin at 7:30 p.m. Lawmakers face a Friday night deadline to pass legislation before a government shutdown, and they are trying to assemble an economic relief package to provide jobless aid and small-business assistance.
The meetings represent the first time in months leaders have met in person to hash out a broad bipartisan deal that could include hundreds of billions in spending in coronavirus relief. Talks remained fluid, and it is unclear whether a second round of $1,200 stimulus checks would be included in the final agreement. Similarly, lawmakers continued to wrangle over whether to include aid for state and local governments in a stimulus deal.
Pelosi and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin also spoke for more than an hour about the spending legislation and a potential pandemic-relief package at about noon Tuesday, according to Drew Hammill, a Pelosi spokesman, illustrating how the Trump administration is involved in this stage of the negotiations.
Previous efforts to reach a compromise have failed since the spring. President-elect Joe Biden has urged lawmakers to reach a deal during the lame duck session of Congress, and Democrats have signaled in recent weeks that they are more open to a smaller-scale package than they were before the election.
Two main items were on the Tuesday afternoon agenda. First, lawmakers are trying to finalize a $1.3 trillion spending accord that will keep the government open past Friday through September 2021. Second, lawmakers are trying to pin down a coronavirus relief deal that would extend numerous expiring aid programs and provide new funding to accelerate and expand distribution of the new coronavirus vaccines.
The renewed momentum behind a deal comes as senior Democratic lawmakers indicate a greater willingness to compromise and a forceful push by a bipartisan group of lawmakers pass a relief bill before Christmas recess.
Lawmakers also face intense pressure to approve new relief with multiple critical emergency programs set to expire by the end of the year, including jobless benefits for 12 million Americans and rental protections for as many 30 million Americans.
On Monday, a bipartisan group spearheaded by Sens. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, and Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., released a $748 billion proposal that would devote hundreds of billions of dollars to unemployed Americans and small business relief, as well as tens of billions of dollars for transportation, education, vaccine distribution, and other needs. The group released a second bill consisting of a liability shield offering businesses immunity from lawsuits and about $160 billion in state and local aid – the two provisions that have most sharply divided lawmakers for months.
The bipartisan group’s proposal would extend the expiring unemployment benefits and eviction moratorium for one month. It would not extend a federal paid sick leave benefit currently being used by tens of millions of Americans.
The legislation also excludes another round of $1,200 stimulus checks although that measure is supported by the White House and numerous congressional Democrats. On an internal Republican call on Monday, Romney said the checks would cost $300 billion to include and that the additional borrowing had already made “people on both sides nervous,” according to two people familiar with the exchange.
Romney had pushed the stimulus checks and more money for vaccines in the bipartisan group’s negotiations in exchange for dropping state aid and the liability shield, but was rebuffed, two people familiar with the internal deliberations said.
White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said Tuesday that Trump would support direct payments as part of a package but would not say if they represented a red-line demand for the administration.
“We are hopeful there is a deal there that the president then can look at and support,” she said.
Pelosi and Schumer first backed a $908 billion bill released by the group earlier this month as the starting point for negotiations, although it was significantly smaller than what Democrats had pushed. In recent days, both House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., and Senate Whip Dick Durbin, D-Ill. – the second highest-ranking Democrats in the House and Senate – publicly suggested they would approve a relief package even without the state and local funding component Democrats have demanded for months.
Pelosi continued to advocate for state and local aid during a phone call with Mnuchin on Monday, Hammill said. The White House also included $160 billion in state and local aid in its latest relief proposal. But people close to negotiations believe state and local aid appears likely to fall by the wayside as lawmakers move closer to a final agreement. Although several Senate Republicans support providing state and local aid, McConnell has made clear that he would not back legislation that includes only state and local funding and not the liability shield.
Lawmakers have so far proven unable to reach a compromise on the liability shield, with Manchin representing the only Democrat to back sweeping legal protections from coronavirus-related lawsuits.
On Monday, Durbin backed a $748 billion bipartisan relief package spearheaded by a group of moderate lawmakers that excludes both the state and local aid funding and the liability shield. Hoyer on CNN on Sunday acknowledged Democrats would not “get everything we want” and suggested disbursing emergency aid was more important than holding firm on state and local funding.
“I want to be clear: I’m not giving up on funding for states and localities. This funding is essential in our fight against the pandemic and for our economic recovery,” Durbin said in a statement. “While the fight continues over these issues, we must provide some emergency relief for the American people before we go home for the holidays. I support the $748 billion bipartisan package.”
Lawmakers have little time to act. Trump on Friday signed into law a one-week spending measure that gave lawmakers until this Friday to reach a more comprehensive agreement in order to avoid a government shutdown. If lawmakers have not hammered out all of their issues, they could be forced to seek another short-term spending measure, which could push further negotiations into next week.
How an ‘atmospheric river’ spoiled Monday’s total solar eclipse in Chile
InternationalDec 16. 2020A shot of Monday’s solar eclipse during partiality, about 12 minutes before totality. Clouds and rain arrived during totality. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Matthew Cappucci.
By The Washington Post · Matthew Cappucci
TALCA, Chile – Astronomers and skywatchers alike had looked forward to Monday, Dec. 14, for years – a total solar eclipse would darken a swath of Chile and Argentina, the moon blotting out the sun for just over two minutes as the sun’s breathtaking atmosphere emerged to the naked eye.
Unfortunately for many, myself included, the long-awaited celestial spectacle largely flopped. Chile, one of two countries fortunate enough to be crossed by the narrow swath of totality, was socked in beneath cloud cover thanks to a soggy “atmospheric river.”
While some in Argentina were treated to the indescribable elegance and beauty of the solar corona promenading outward from behind the moon, the only thing visible in Chile was a brief night-like darkening of the ambient overcast.
For those of us who had spent months of planning, forked out thousands of dollars and devised a detailed itinerary in accordance with the latest evolving health guidance from the U.S. and Chilean governments, it marked a hefty letdown that seemed consistent with the running theme of 2020.
Total solar eclipses are arguably the most serene, otherworldly and scientifically spiritual scenes visible on our planet. They happen once every year and a half or so, but the thin sliver of real estate they visit often carves out a track in remote or inaccessible areas. Umbraphiles, or those infatuated with basking in the moon’s shadow, go to great lengths to put themselves in position for each solar eclipse they can.
I caught the eclipse bug in 2017, when my friend and meteorologist colleague, Dan Satterfield, and I drove to the vast emptiness of the Nebraska Sandhills and set up shop, not knowing what to expect. When the sky faded to twilight and the delicate, luminous solar corona, or atmosphere, appeared, we vowed to never miss another one.
On July 2 last year, we traveled to La Serena, Chile, where we rendezvoused with the sun’s corona one again, perched atop a mountain for the 2 minutes 32 seconds of splendor.
Dan and I knew we’d be back in South America for Monday’s total solar eclipse, and we had tossed around the idea of flying to Chile and crossing into Argentina, where the weather prospects were historically favored to be better. Our tickets were booked in early 2020. Then a global pandemic ensued, and we were forced to cancel.
But in late November, the Chilean government announced it would reopen to international travelers, allowing tourists to enter without quarantine after Dec. 7 as long as they presented proof of a negative coronavirus test. Dan and I rebooked our tickets and scrambled to plot an itinerary. Unfortunately, Dan later learned he wouldn’t be able to make the trip, but I decided to still give it a go. I spent weeks crafting a plan and four backup plans, meticulously studying all government health protocols.
Things were looking good until 48 hours before my trip. That’s when evolving health guidance meant that, one by one, the dominoes of my itinerary toppled. After making 19 adjustments and hastily rebooking and revising, I hopped on the one American Airlines flight to Chile and crossed my fingers.
The continued closure of Argentina meant that I would be at the mercy of the weather in Chile. I’d only have 92 miles west to east to position myself, and any errant weather systems could easily sock in that entire region beneath a veil of clouds. By late last week, I was in the path of totality – but Monday’s weather wasn’t looking promising.
Models simulated an atmospheric river – a slender, juicy conveyor belt of deep atmospheric moisture – aimed at the coast. It became apparent that the feature would target the 56-mile-wide path of totality on Monday, aligning perfectly to ruin the show for most. My only hope was that drying in its wake would overspread the extreme southwest extremity of the path of totality in time for the show.
In the end, I awoke at 4:30 a.m., drove an extra four hours and agonized futilely over the forecast – only for sunshine to emerge 10 minutes after totality. The same fate was shared by hundreds of thousands of Chileans who were unable to see beyond thick low clouds that blotted out the show.
During past eclipses, I had spent my time frantically taking photos of the dynamic solar corona. But this time, I knew any efforts would be in vain. Five minutes before totality, I accepted that the weather was hopeless. I tossed aside my camera, stood there with my eyes open, and waited.
Two minutes before totality, animals went silent. I was situated next to a farm, and I watched sheep return from feeding to settle in for the night. The birds, previously chatty, quieted. The brisk wind went nearly calm.
That’s when night descended. At first, it was like a giant thunderstorm had crossed in front of the sun, but the light kept fading. Within 30 seconds, the landscape was thrust into a dusky slumber, the sky overhead transforming beneath an overcast azure. Along the southern horizon, daylight was visible to my south outside the zone of totality.
In the end, the sullied show paled in comparison to what I had witnessed in years prior. As meteorologists, we forecast the weather, but that doesn’t make us immune to its caprice. In this case, the deck was stacked against skywatchers, and those of us in Chile took an inevitable loss.
Across the border in Argentina, most of the path was equally cloudy. A few lucky gaps in the overcast did appear, however, and Argentines in the right place at the right time were treated to the sight of a lifetime.
E.U. proposes sweeping new rules for online business that could force fundamental changes for digital giants
InternationalDec 16. 2020European Commission Vice President Margrethe Vestager
By The Washington Post · Michael Birnbaum
The European Union on Tuesday unveiled sweeping new rules for online businesses that could potentially force fundamental changes in the business practices of digital giants such as Google, Facebook, Apple and Amazon.
The new rules would overhaul the basic legal framework through which companies conduct their digital business in the vast, wealthy E.U. market, requiring platforms to police content far more aggressively and banning them from using their vast stores of data to unfairly overtake their competitors.
If enacted – a process that could take years – the rules would touch every company that conducts business on the internet within the 27-nation European Union, from the smallest to the gargantuan. But the very biggest companies, almost all of them American, would be subject to particularly aggressive rules.
Violations could be punished with fines of up to 10% of their global business turnover – in the case of Amazon, that would mean up to $28 billion. And repeated violations could be punished with an order to break up businesses.
The E.U.’s Digital Services Act and the Digital Markets Act together construct a European vision for rules of acceptable business behavior in the digital world that is far different from those in place today.
The proposals can be compared to the “first-ever traffic light that brought order in the streets,” said European Commission Vice President Margrethe Vestager, a Danish politician who has pursued aggressive regulation during her six years as the E.U.’s digital enforcer.
“We have such an increase in online traffic that we need to create rules to bring order into chaos,” she said as she announced the draft legislation.
Tuesday’s proposals are part of a trifecta of European initiatives that take aim at digital giants and could pose challenges for President-elect Joe Biden, who has promised a fresh U.S. effort to regulate the digital world but may want to move in a different direction than Europe.
Already, policymakers are trying to sort out the implications of a July ruling by Europe’s highest court that may force U.S. companies to overhaul how they handle the data of E.U. customers. And the E.U. is seeking to impose a new tax on digital businesses that could unsettle Washington, though E.U. policymakers say they hope to do so in cooperation with the White House and not in opposition to it.
Digital issues have “an opportunity to be an irritant. I’ve suggested that we should start off with a truce to give peace a chance,” said Anthony Gardner, a former U.S. ambassador to the European Union who advised the Biden campaign. He said that both taxation and the data privacy issues had the potential to be a “grenade.”
All three E.U. initiatives are the subject of a furious transatlantic lobbying effort, as companies and advocates seek to shape the digital world for years to come.
The proposals unveiled Tuesday would make major online platforms legally responsible for the content users post on their services, requiring companies to police abuse, misinformation and other legal violations far more actively than they do now. The goal is to empower E.U. countries to counter illegal content online. Vestager mentioned “terrorist propaganda” as one example.
Companies that allow other businesses to sell services through their platforms would have to allow equal access to their rivals rather than prioritize their own products. Apple could need to allow other companies to use the payment technology built into its iPhones, instead of locking it to Apple Pay. Amazon would need to give equal treatment to third-party sellers, for example by not defaulting on its product pages to items that it sells itself. Nor would it be allowed to use the data it gathers about popular third-party products to make decisions about which items it sells under its own AmazonBasics label. (Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos also owns The Washington Post.)
And digital giants would have to make more of their algorithms transparent, to allow independent scrutiny of their business practices.
In all, it’s more proactive than the E.U.’s previous tech regulation, which tended to punish anti-competitive behavior that has already taken place, too late to help smaller companies that have been locked out of markets.
U.S. tech companies had mixed reactions on Tuesday.
“We are concerned that they appear to specifically target a handful of companies and make it harder to develop new products to support small businesses in Europe,” said Karan Bhatia, Google’s vice president of government affairs and public policy, in a statement. “We will continue to advocate for new rules that support innovation, increase responsibility and promote economic recovery to the benefit of European consumers and businesses.”
The proposals are “on the right track to help preserve what is good about the internet,” tweeted Facebook’s head of E.U. affairs, Aura Salla. “We welcome harmonised EU rules on harmful and illegal content online.”
Apple declined to comment. An Amazon spokesman pointed to a recent statement that it was concerned about “ensuring the same rules apply to all companies.”
Although the rules as drafted would have particular impact on the U.S. tech giants, other companies that operate solely within Europe would have to revisit their business practices. Policymakers are also hoping to regulate Chinese businesses as they expand their presence within the E.U.
Vestager said U.S. skepticism toward tech giants had grown in recent years to the point where she no longer worried about a transatlantic clash over regulation.
When she visited Washington not long after she took office six years ago, it was “a completely different world. They were kind of, ‘What are you doing in Europe?” she said.
Now, she said, “the debate will be very different than if we had tabled this five years ago.”
In one sign of that shifting sentiment, the U.S. government and 48 attorneys general filed a landmark antitrust lawsuit against Facebook last week, setting the stage for its possible breakup. Also on Tuesday, Britain unveiled its own proposal for digital regulations, the Online Harms bill.
But conflicts could arise on a range of issues. U.S. companies could be roped into enforcing European laws on free speech that tend to be far narrower than in the United States, for instance. American lawmakers who think digital giants should pay far more taxes still sometimes bristle when other countries try to tax U.S. companies. And the data privacy issues may force costly changes on U.S. companies to overhaul how they handle their European customers’ information.
The confluence of thorny topics could force Biden into a confrontation with Europe, even though both he and European leaders have said they want to reconcile after four years of President Donald Trump.
“Let’s face it. The biggest five companies in the world of tech are American, so if Europe steps in, even with many reasons to do so, that could lead to a deterioration of relations and a tax and trade war,” said Paul Tang, a Dutch member of the European Parliament who works on digital regulation issues and favors tighter rules.
The European Commission this month proposed a transatlantic council to discuss digital trade issues with the new administration.
Because they are moving faster than the United States, some European policymakers hope their standards will become the world’s.
“Since the global market is adopting our standards, if we push forward, we’ll be the first ones crafting the rules,” said Eline Chivot, a senior policy analyst at the Center for Data Innovation, a Brussels think tank, describing some of the European thinking on the area. “Everyone will follow our lead.”
Already, the E.U. has forced significant changes in behavior with a 2018 legal measure on data privacy that gives European users much more control over how their data is used, stored and sold by companies.
“The E.U. at some point has woken up to the fact that all of this digital stuff is of great strategic importance,” said Christopher Kuner, a law professor and director of the Brussels Privacy Hub, a research center at the Free University of Brussels. “The E.U. has no military clout, but where it does have a lot of clout is regulatory areas.”
But skeptics of Europe’s digital efforts say ambitious regulation is sometimes not backed by aggressive enforcement.
Vestager has sought huge fines against some of the biggest tech companies. But her efforts at times have been batted down by courts.
And Tuesday’s proposals were punctuated by an announcement that the very first fine for a violation of the data privacy rules was issued, more than two years after they went into effect. Ireland’s data regulator issued a $550,000 fine against Twitter for breaking data privacy rules – a drop in the bucket for a company that reported $936 million in revenue in the third quarter of 2020 alone.
The new rules “won’t curb the market power of big tech companies,” Tang said. He said he wished the proposals were more stringent.
“It’s absolutely going to be a change in the way we deal with data and in how we find an architecture for the Internet,” he said. “And it’s not going to be the end of the discussion.”
By Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg · Swetha Gopinath
The European market for initial public offerings raised more money than in 2019, defying the coronavirus crisis and nail-biting Brexit negotiations this year, led by companies that benefited from pandemic-induced lockdowns.
European exchanges hosted 161 IPOs and counting, worth a combined $28.3 billion, surpassing the $26.7 billion raised over 136 listings in 2019, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. This remains only a fraction of global issuance, blown out of the water by the 893 deals worth $134.3 billion in the Asia Pacific region and the record-busting $174.1 billion raised in 483 U.S. deals.
While Norway saw the most deals, London accounted for more than a third of Europe’s proceeds, with 33 deals worth $11.3 billion, up a fifth from last year’s poor showing. This includes international issuers, like Kazakhstan’s digital retail bank Kaspi.kz and two billion-dollar listings by Chinese companies, though the biggest debut came from online shopping emporium THG Holdings Ltd., a rare sizable domestic float.
Next year may bring more home turf listings, as even the possibility of a rocky exit from the European Union isn’t curtailing excitement. “What we are starting to see in 2021 is that the U.K. proportion of the pipeline is looking stronger than usual,” said Charlie Walker, head of equity and fixed income primary markets at the London Stock Exchange.
This, despite the poor relative performance of U.K. stock markets. The FTSE 100 index is down 13% in 2020, more than double the 5.6% dip in the Stoxx Europe 600, while the more domestically oriented FTSE 250 benchmark has slumped 9.8%. And the British economy is facing its worst recession in centuries.
Still, with the Brexit roller-coaster ride started in 2016 getting close to an end, London’s prospects seem brighter. “For next year, there is the expectation that there won’t be those sorts of markers in the calendar that create volatility,” Walker said.
And some big names are already waiting in the wings. U.K. food-delivery startup Deliveroo is said to be exploring a listing in London next year, after stuck-at-home customers turned to its app to order takeout meals, while cybersecurity company Darktrace Ltd. is said to have hired banks for an IPO in the City.
There is no doubt the U.K. could do with more new stocks to beef up its fast-shrinking market. Even the government has taken note, launching a review of listing rules in November, looking for ways to boost London’s appeal to tech and innovative firms and strengthen its standing as a global financial center.
While London has attracted most of the money, it is not the busiest venue, with Oslo clinching that title this year. Norway’s IPO market thundered out of relative obscurity, snagging a record 34 deals, nearly six times as many as in 2019, the data show. And at least three more are set to add to the tally before the year is up.
The surging activity on Oslo’s growth market, digitization of the IPO process during the pandemic and the prevalence of cornerstone investors, previously more common in Swedish deals, all came together to lead to the boom in listings, said Magnus Kvinge, head of equity capital markets for Norway at ABG Sundal Collier.
Sweden came in third after London, winning 29 IPOs worth $2.6 billion. “Since our markets are primarily driven by growth companies and tech, many have benefited from a high interest in investing in these sectors at this stage” given the acceleration of digitization during the pandemic, said Adam Kostyal, head of European listings at Nasdaq Inc.
Other fringe markets stormed up the regional league table, with Warsaw bagging a top five finish thanks to its largest listing on record: Allegro.eu’s October float. Poland’s IPO market has burst to life, with everything from gaming companies, boosted by lockdown-fueled frenzy for digital distraction, to online retailers selling bikes and clothes lining up to list.
Not every country was able to outshine last year’s performance, however. Italy’s fall from grace is particularly acute. Only last year, it was Europe’s most active venue with 35 IPOs worth $2.9 billion. That has since whittled down to a $745 million market.
Traditional behemoth Germany only scraped together $1.3 billion, less than a third of 2019’s proceeds, while France recorded even bigger losses. After previously bringing in deals worth $3.2 billion, Paris has hosted less than $600 million of new floats this year. Half of that came from a blank-check firm listed by French billionaire Xavier Niel and two other partners last week.
Yet, next year is looking better, with some substantial deals in the works. French cloud-computing provider OVH Groupe is said to be preparing a potential IPO for early 2021, while pharmaceuticals giant Sanofi and utility Engie are said to be exploring options for some units, which could result in listings. Meanwhile, private equity backers are said to mull listings for German cybersecurity firm Utimaco and enterprise software developer SUSE.
“We have a really healthy IPO pipeline, probably stronger than we have seen since the disruption caused by Brexit issues several years ago,” said Rob Leach, European head of equity capital markets at Jefferies.
By Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg · Brian Swint, David Goodman
U.K. job cuts jumped to the highest on record in the three months through October, raising more questions over Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak’s refusal to extend job support programs until hours before they expired.
Redundancies increased by a record 217,000 in the period, the Office for National Statistics said Tuesday. The number of people on payrolls was 819,000 below pre-pandemic levels in November, with over a third of the fall coming from the hospitality sector.
The figures will amplify criticism that Sunak acted too late when he expanded programs to protect jobs and businesses hit by the worst downturn in 300 years. After insisting for months the payouts would be scaled back, the chancellor eventually extended furlough on Oct. 31 — the day the program had been due to expire — as the government announced a second lockdown.
The aid was eventually extended until March, but many firms had already taken the decision to ax jobs. U.K. unemployment increased by 241,000 in the three months through October, taking the jobless rate to 4.9%, the highest since 2016.
It followed an increase of 243,000 in the third quarter, a rise last seen in the financial crisis of 2009.
While the jobless rate in the latest three months was lower than economists predicted, for most of October it was above 5%, the ONS said. The government expects the rate to rise to 7.5%, or around 2.6 million people, and a potential no-deal exit from the European Union’s single market will make it even harder for the economy to bounce back.
A breakdown of payrolls lost during the pandemic shows that hospitality and retail accounted for more than half. Job losses probably continued during the second lockdown in November and restrictions in place across the country in December.
Rolls-Royce Holdings Plc is cutting more than 5,000 jobs this year as reduced air travel hammers its aerospace engine business. Heathrow Airport, Britain’s busiest, says it’s trying to avoid reducing staff by implementing wage cuts, prompting more than 1,000 employees to go on strike earlier this month.
The Bank of England also added stimulus in November, increasing its bond-buying program by $198 billion (150 billion pounds) and predicting contraction in the fourth quarter. Its next policy announcement is due Thursday.
Since October, the emergence of vaccines for the virus have raised hopes that the U.K. economy can start getting back to normal in 2021, albeit with new barriers to trade from Brexit.
Bloomberg Economics now sees unemployment peaking at 7% next year, instead of 7.3%. Nevertheless, the Confederation of British Industry doesn’t see output returning to pre-pandemic levels until the following year.
Russia’s Putin, Mexico’s López Obrador recognize Biden’s win, more than a month after the election
InternationalDec 16. 2020Russia’s President Vladimir Putin and Mexico’s President Andrés Manuel López
By The Washington Post · Isabelle Khurshudyan, Kevin Sieff
MOSCOW – More than a month later than most world leaders, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin and Mexico’s President Andrés Manuel López Obrador on Tuesday congratulated President-elect Joe Biden on his victory, a delayed recognition that could affect future relations.
“In his message Vladimir Putin wished the president-elect every success and expressed confidence that Russia and the United States, which bear special responsibility for global security and stability, can, despite their differences, effectively contribute to solving many problems and meeting challenges that the world is facing today,” the Kremlin said in a statement.
It went on to say that Putin relayed to Biden that he is “ready for interaction and contact” and suggested cooperation between the two countries based on “equality and mutual respect.”
López Obrador, in a letter to Biden, said he appreciated Biden’s position of “supporting Mexico’s and the world’s migrants” and urged him to “maintain good bilateral relations based on collaboration, friendship and respect for the sovereignty of our respective countries.”
The Russian and Mexican leaders were among the last heads of state to acknowledge Biden’s win; Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro and North Korea’s Kim Jung Un have yet to extend congratulations to Biden. Biden’s victory advanced another step Monday when 306 electors voted for him.
Other leaders didn’t wait for the electoral college; they reached out to Biden after U.S. television networks called the race for him, as is customary. In 2016, Putin congratulated Donald Trump within hours of his acceptance speech. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said this year differed because Trump hasn’t conceded and threatened legal action to contest the count in several swing states. Peskov said the Kremlin would wait until the result became “official,” without specifying what that meant.
In an interview with Russian state television on Nov. 22, more than two weeks after the networks called the race for Biden, Putin referred to him as “the presidential candidate” and said the delay was due to the “internal political standoff” in the United States and “not that we like or dislike someone.”
But analysts viewed Putin’s silence as an attempt to grant legitimacy to Trump’s baseless claims that the election was marred by fraud.
Even before Election Day, officials in Moscow expressed pessimism that either result would improve the countries’ strained relationship. But Biden is expected to take a harder line on Russia, particularly now that Russian government hackers are believed to be behind the recent digital spying operation that hit the Department of Homeland Security, the State, Treasury and Commerce departments and the National Institutes of Health.
In an interview with “60 Minutes” before the election, Biden called Russia “the biggest threat to America right now in terms of breaking up our security and our alliances.”
During the Trump administration, U.S.-Mexico relations were tumultuous, with the White House threatening tariffs on Mexican goods if Mexico didn’t crack down on migration, a protracted renegotiation of NAFTA and, most recently, the U.S. Justice Department’s arrest of a former Mexican defense secretary. Still, relations between Trump and López Obrador were mostly warm – both men fashioning themselves as populists, lambasting the news media and their political predecessors.
López Obrador explained his reluctance to congratulate Biden as an effort to promote a noninterventionist foreign policy while the United States sorted out its domestic political issues. But many Mexican analysts saw an attempt to avoid offending Trump, and upsetting the fragile bilateral relationship.
In doing so, López Obrador appeared willing to risk offending the incoming Biden Administration, which will work closely with Mexico on a range of issues, from migration to trade to security. On migration in particular, the two leaders will consider how to unwind some of the Trump administration’s most controversial policies, including one that has sent tens of thousands of non-Mexican asylum applicants back to Mexico to wait for their U.S. court dates.
InternationalDec 16. 2020When William Barr steps down, Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen becomes the nation’s top law enforcement officer for Donald Trump’s final month in office. Rosen is shown on March 29, 2017, as Trump’s deputy transportation secretary nominee during a Senate Transportation, Science and Transportation Committee confirmation hearing in Washington, D.C. MUST CREDIT: Bloomberg photo by Andrew Harrer
By Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg · Chris Strohm
Attorney General William Barr’s imminent departure will leave the Justice Department in the hands of his handpicked deputy, who could quickly find himself under pressure from Donald Trump to sustain his false claims of election fraud and pursue his political enemies.
When Barr steps down on Dec. 23 after increasingly sharp criticism by the president, Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen becomes the nation’s top law enforcement officer for Trump’s final month in office. He’s seen in legal circles as a institutionalist, someone who’s managed the department’s internal operations while Barr focused on high-profile issues like the law-and-order response to racial justice protests and a review into the origins of the 2016 Russia probe.
Senate Judiciary Chairman Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., a leading supporter of Trump and Barr, said Monday in a statement that Rosen is “a good man and will be an ethical leader and a steady hand at the Department of Justice.”
That doesn’t mean Rosen will be able to avoid the president’s frustration over losing the 2020 election.
Trump’s closest allies have vowed to press for any possible means to pursue his claims of widespread voter fraud even after the electoral college confirmed Biden’s victory on Monday. In addition, some Republicans have called for a special counsel to be named to ensure a continuing investigation of Hunter Biden, the president-elect’s son, who’s been the subject of federal probes, at least one of which is ongoing.
Barr said in his departure letter on Monday — posted by Trump on Twitter – – that allegations of election fraud “will continue to be pursued.” That could make the next few weeks fraught for Rosen.
Trump praised his new acting attorney general as “an outstanding person” and called the incoming deputy attorney general, Richard Donoghue, “highly respected.” The coming weeks will test Trump’s enthusiasm for the two men, given his long history of demanding “loyalty” from the Justice Department, even when that bucks the institution’s attempts to keep politics at arm’s length.
As acting attorney general, Rosen could appoint a special counsel to investigate Hunter Biden before the Jan. 20 inauguration, although some legal experts have questioned whether an appointment under that circumstance would be legal.
Alternatively, Rosen could simply put a senior Justice Department official in charge of overseeing the Hunter Biden matter, a move that wouldn’t provide as much protection to the official but may be more legally sound.
Trump has largely ignored advice from the Justice Department in making decisions on pardoning or commuting sentences, including for former advisers Roger Stone and Michael Flynn. But Trump may push Rosen to voice support for pardons he may issue in his final days in office — and perhaps press for a finding by the department’s Office of Legal Counsel backing him up if he claims the power to pardon himself.
Before serving as Barr’s deputy, Rosen, 62, held government posts including general counsel and later deputy secretary of the Transportation Department and general counsel of the White House Office of Management and Budget.
From 2009 to 2017, Rosen was a senior partner at Kirkland & Ellis LLP, where Barr also has held a senior position. After Barr became attorney general in February 2019, he successfully lobbied Trump to pick Rosen as his deputy even though he had never been a prosecutor, a more typical background for the post.
To overcome concerns during Rosen’s May 2019 confirmation hearing, Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, cited a letter supporting the nominee from 49 former senior department officials. They said Rosen’s experience made him “highly qualified” for the position.
Trump’s tweets about Barr on Monday — “Our relationship has been a very good one, he has done an outstanding job!” — and the letter he posted from the departing attorney general showed little hint of the breach between them in recent weeks.
The departure of Barr, 70, follows a Dec. 1 interview with the Associated Press in which the attorney general said the Justice Department hadn’t seen “fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.”
A day later, Trump posted a 46-minute taped speech in which he repeated unfounded claims that Democrats had somehow fraudulently engineered his defeat. Then on Dec. 3, the president balked at voicing support for his attorney general.
“Ask me that in a number of weeks from now,” Trump said in response to a question about whether he retained confidence in Barr. “They should be looking at all of this fraud.”
A second blow came when Biden’s transition team announced last week that Hunter Biden was advised that he was under federal criminal investigation. Barr kept information about the probe, which has been going on since 2018, from being announced publicly, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Trump criticized Barr in an interview Saturday with Fox News, saying the attorney general should have disclosed the tax probe into Hunter Biden before the election.
“All he had to do is say an investigation is going on,” Trump said.
Despite those tensions, Barr offered praise for Trump and his accomplishments in his resignation letter.
“Your record is all the more historic because you accomplished it in the face of relentless, implacable resistance,” Barr wrote to the president. “The nadir of this campaign was the effort to cripple, if not oust, your Administration with frenzied and baseless claims of collusion with Russia.”
When Barr took office in February 2019, he moved aggressively, seeking to restore the department’s stance as strong in support of law enforcement and to pursue his longtime belief that the Constitution justifies a dominant role for the executive branch.
But he was criticized for bending to Trump’s political demands, including becoming personally involved in criminal cases against some of the president’s allies, to the point that some career prosecutors resigned in protest.
Trump and his supporters in Congress also wanted Barr to reveal information from an investigation into whether FBI or intelligence officials committed any wrongdoing in the early stages of their probe into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election and whether anyone associated with Trump conspired in the operation. Barr even echoed Trump’s claim that his campaign had been the victim of “spying.”
But weeks before the election, Barr signaled that the FBI-Russia probe, led by U.S. Attorney John Durham of Connecticut, wouldn’t release preliminary findings ahead of the vote.
“To be honest, Bill Barr is going to go down as either the greatest attorney general in the history of the country or he’s going to go down as a very sad situation,” Trump said in an interview in October on Fox Business Network.
Yet in what many Republicans will see as a parting gift, Barr revealed that he’s named Durham to serve as special counsel in the continuing FBI-Russia probe, meaning his work is likely to continue into the Biden administration.
Starting next week, Rosen will have oversight of that probe, and the responsibility for dealing with Trump if he demands more.
Biden will arrive in office amid a pandemic. It will be his biggest challenge – but also an opportunity.
InternationalDec 16. 2020Jamie Roderick, 35, a volunteer for MoveOn, helps place 1,000 signs featuring the faces of nurses and other front-line health-care workers, as well as signs calling for more personal protective equipment (PPE), on the lawn in front of the Capitol on April, 17. MUST CREDIT: photo for The Washington Post by Evelyn Hockstein.
By The Washington Post · Amy Goldstein
As President-elect Joe Biden and his team devise a governing strategy to defeat the coronavirus pandemic – the incoming administration’s most urgent priority – they have become centrally focused on instilling broad, bipartisan faith in vaccines.
With the first vaccine against the virus, developed by Pfizer and a German biotech firm, now allowed for public use, the president-elect regards it as imperative to “deweaponize” attitudes toward immunization among his political adversaries, as one member of his coronavirus advisory board put it, speaking on the condition of anonymity about internal matters without permission to discuss them openly.
“We can’t have a repeat of masks,” the member said, referring to the intense partisan polarization over wearing face coverings that President Donald Trump fostered and that public health experts bemoan as one reason the United States leads the world in coronavirus cases and deaths.
Biden has not spoken publicly about behind-the-scenes concern that leading Republicans might foment opposition to the shots, which are expected to slow the virus’s spread significantly if enough people receive them.
Yet he has talked with increasing frequency about vaccines’ capacity to tamp down the virus’s transmission only “if they’re injected into an arm of people, especially those most at risk,” as he said last week at an event in his hometown of Wilmington, Del. And the idea of conquering Republicans’ reluctance about vaccination is one way to understand his oft-stated desire to be “a president for all the people.”
Health-care workers administer coronavirus tests outside a high school in Eau Claire, Wis., on Nov. 21, 2020. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Michael S. Williamson.
Health policy experts say Biden’s capacity to mold bipartisan receptivity to being vaccinated has implications for his broader agenda to expand health coverage and access to affordable care. “If you can’t do this one, you are not going to be able to get buy-in on universal coverage,” said Robert J. Blendon, a professor of health policy and political analysis at Harvard University who studies public opinion about health care.
Blendon said GOP candidates this year and officeholders have not indicated they will take a wholesale stand against coronavirus vaccines – but will emulate Trump in rejecting a strong federal role in setting pandemic policy in favor of state and local decisions. Republicans “are going to fight [the government deciding] who gets the vaccine, who distributes it and if there’s any need for [vaccination] requirements before you can go to work, school, get on a plane,” Blendon said.
The political stakes and the consequences for public health are considerable, said Larry Levitt, executive vice president of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a health policy group.
“The success of Biden’s presidency likely rests in large part on tamping down the pandemic and having a successful vaccine rollout,” Levitt said. “The Biden administration is going to need to bring red America and blue America together. If the vaccine is a repeat of masks, our efforts to end the pandemic will be stymied.”
The transition’s unspoken concern about which Americans will be willing to get vaccinated – and the dangerously uneven embrace of masks – runs through the three parts of a plan Biden introduced this month for starting to control the pandemic during his first 100 days in office.
Biden has said that on the day he is sworn in, Jan. 20, he intends to sign an executive order requiring masks to be worn everywhere the federal government has jurisdiction, including on buses and trains that cross state lines. He also has promised to enable “the majority of our schools” to reopen and stay open, and to distribute “at least 100 million covid vaccine shots” during the 100 days.
Already, the president-elect and his top pandemic advisers are showing wariness about the adequacy of distribution procedures. David Kessler, a co-chairman of the advisory board and a former Food and Drug Administration commissioner, said that, based on reviews underway of what the Trump administration has set up, “there are elements of a plan that exist to get it shipped to certain locations.”
“But there is a world of difference between a vaccine and a vaccination,” Kessler said in an interview. “Once a vaccine arrives in a state or a city, what happens?”
Paige Thompson, a nurse, checks in on patient Rodney Hopp in the covid-19 ward at Tampa General Hospital in Tampa, Fla., on Aug. 19., 2020. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Michael S. Williamson.
Biden has indicated that he thinks the government is not fully prepared. He said last week that “without urgent action by this Congress this month to put sufficient resources into vaccine distribution and manufacturing . . . there’s a real chance that, after an early round of vaccination, the effort will slow and stall.”
His emphasis on bipartisanship and on enhancing equity – he is forming a coronavirus equity task force – is a departure from the Trump administration’s approach to contending with covid-19, the disease caused by the virus that has infected more than 16.5 million people in the United States and killed more than 300,000. It comes on top of his basic view that the federal role should be more assertive. The extent to which these values will infuse his broader health-care agenda remains to be seen, with many policies being discussed within the transition but not yet decided.
Still, much of Biden’s broader goal of expanding health coverage will depend on his ability to persuade congressional Republicans to go along, especially if the Senate remains in GOP control after a pair of runoff elections in Georgia next month.
The pandemic’s primacy among the issues Biden is inheriting was evident in his decision to create the 13-member coronavirus advisory board less than 48 hours after he clinched the election, his first act as president-elect.
According to people familiar with the board’s activities who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal workings, its three co-chairs have informally divided responsibilities, with small working groups under them. Surgeon General-designee Vivek Murthy is focusing mainly on improving coronavirus testing and the supplies of personal protective equipment. Marcella Nunez-Smith, named to lead the new equity task force, has been focused on global equity issues. And Kessler, one of the people under consideration to lead the FDA again, is working primarily on vaccines.
In tandem with that board, the transition has a health-care policy team, which has been combing through Biden’s campaign promises on the pandemic and other health-care goals, figuring out how to adapt them into policies for governing – which ones still are pertinent, what the sequence should be and whether ideas should be added.
The coronavirus-fighting ideas being evaluated are drawn largely from plans that Biden began to issue in late winter, not long after the crisis started and five months before he became the Democratic presidential nominee.
A March 12 document listed actions Biden vowed to take “on Day One as president,” if Trump hadn’t done them first. The list included restoring a unit within the White House’s National Security Council for global health security and biodefense, an office that President Barack Obama created and that Trump dismantled two years ago.
Mayo Clinic paramedic Adam Glass, a paramedic with the Mayo Clinic, helps load covid-19 patient Rita Huebner into an ambulance in Eau Claire, Wis., on Nov. 18, 2020. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Michael S. Williamson.
On the list, too, is a commitment to “ensure that every person who needs a test can get one” free, including by establishing at least 10 mobile testing sites and drive-through facilities in each state. Biden promised to issue a daily White House report about the number of tests performed and to provide enough protective gear for health-care workers, emergency personnel and others at heightened risk of infection because of their jobs.
And he called for 14 days of paid leave for workers who are sick with the coronavirus or who are caring for ill relatives or other loved ones.
In an update of his plan in late June, Biden said he would form a Pandemic Testing Board, double the number of drive-through testing sites and “increase the numbers until there are no more lines.” He pledged to hire at least 100,000 people nationwide to help build a “contact-tracing workforce.” And he said he would invoke the full powers of the Defense Production Act, a law that gives a president authority to take steps to increase manufacturing for national defense purposes.
According to people inside and outside the incoming administration who are familiar with this process, most of these and other ideas remain works in progress, in part because transition members have gotten a late start in delving into the inner workings of what the Trump administration has and has not accomplished. The president delayed allowing Biden representatives inside federal agencies, as Trump attempts to cling to the presidency for another term despite the election results.
“We need to know more about the Trump plan to get Americans vaccinated,” Kessler said in the interview. “I am in dozens of meetings on vaccine distribution issues” to learn from the current administration exactly what has been set up.
Kessler reflected the concern about whether Republicans will buy into the mass vaccination campaign. “We need everyone across the political spectrum pulling together to get the job done and Americans safely vaccinated,” he said.
Although there is no precise goal for the vaccination effort, Anthony Fauci, the longtime director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, whom Biden has appointed his chief medical adviser on the coronavirus, recently estimated that vaccinating 75% to 85% of the population would “crush” the outbreak by the end of next year. The White House coronavirus task force said recently that 100 million well-targeted vaccinations could slow the virus’s spread by late spring.
Evidence exists of a partisan divide in attitudes toward getting the Pfizer vaccine or others that could be coming soon, according to public opinion surveys. A Quinnipiac University poll, conducted last week among registered voters just before federal regulators authorized the Pfizer vaccine, found that, overall, about 6 in 10 of those surveyed said they would be willing to receive a coronavirus vaccine if government health officials approved it.
Half of the Republicans surveyed said they would be willing, compared with 8 in 10 Democrats and nearly 6 in 10 independents.
An ABC News/Ipsis poll, conducted after the first coronavirus vaccine was allowed, found a sharper split, with 26% of Republicans surveyed saying they will never receive a vaccine, compared with 6% of Democrats.
In general, polls in past weeks have shown that Americans’ willingness to receive a coronavirus vaccine has risen since early fall but is lower than it was over the summer. And recent surveys by both the Pew Research Center and the Kaiser Family Foundation have found considerable division on how soon people want to get vaccinated, with more preferring to wait than wanting to receive a shot as soon as possible.
“It is absolutely critical for the transition and the new administration to be reaching out to Republicans on this issue of vaccine,” said Dan Mendelson, a Clinton administration budget official who founded Avalere, a health-care consulting firm.
Attitudes about important public health issues, research has shown, can be influenced by high-profile messengers with credibility among groups that identify with them. For that reason, Mendelson said, “you want prominent Republicans endorsing the vaccine and the president-elect’s plans.”
“The complication is Trump is preventing this by continuing this charade that he is going to overturn the election,” Mendelson said. “So you have Republicans from [Senate Majority Leader Mitch] McConnell on down [who] you can’t put on a covid transition assignment, because they haven’t even acknowledged that the new government is forming.”
Kessler said: “We understand there are people who have concerns about the vaccine. We will address those concerns in a scientific, evidence-driven manner.” To start, he said, the public must be allowed to see all the effectiveness and safety data that federal regulators and advisers review for each vaccine candidate they are asked to allow.
The Biden coronavirus advisory board member who spoke on the condition of anonymity said the country lost the battle over wearing masks because Trump and other senior Republicans have displayed skepticism about their value.
If that partisan schism can be closed for the herculean effort of immunizing a nation against a lethal virus, the member said, “everything else is logistics and tactics.”
A shot of Monday’s solar eclipse during partiality, about 12 minutes before totality. Clouds and rain arrived during totality. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Matthew Cappucci. 
European Commission Vice President Margrethe Vestager 
Russia’s President Vladimir Putin and Mexico’s President Andrés Manuel López 
When William Barr steps down, Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen becomes the nation’s top law enforcement officer for Donald Trump’s final month in office. Rosen is shown on March 29, 2017, as Trump’s deputy transportation secretary nominee during a Senate Transportation, Science and Transportation Committee confirmation hearing in Washington, D.C. MUST CREDIT: Bloomberg photo by Andrew Harrer 
Jamie Roderick, 35, a volunteer for MoveOn, helps place 1,000 signs featuring the faces of nurses and other front-line health-care workers, as well as signs calling for more personal protective equipment (PPE), on the lawn in front of the Capitol on April, 17. MUST CREDIT: photo for The Washington Post by Evelyn Hockstein. 
