Monthly Archives: December 2020

There’s Time for One More Trump Screwup: Vaccine Distribution

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While the vaccine news is certainly welcome, let us not forget that for the next 45 days Trump and his appointees are still in charge. And this crew is known for making big promises and not delivering. We’re dealing with massive logistical challenges here that will take lots of knowledge and experience to sort out. Be afraid.

Heidi Przybyla, NBC News:

A panel of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention this week announced its guidelines for the first phase of the most ambitious national vaccination campaign in modern history.

Yet beyond the guidelines advising states about how to deploy their vaccines — and a large Defense Department operation to deliver them — the Trump administration hasn’t prepared for a major federal role, a lack of planning that is causing significant anxiety among state and local health officials.

The distribution details are being left to states, so availability will depend a lot on your state government. As I live in Missouri, I am screwed. It will be a mess here.

The significant checklist of unmet federal responsibilities underscores the challenges ahead for President-elect Joe Biden, who inherits most of the burden for executing a successful nationwide campaign to vaccinate all Americans, potentially without the billions of dollars in additional funding that will be needed.

That’s the other thing. The states are broke, thanks to the pandemic and Trump’s abdication of federal responsibility. Congress allocated money to Trump’s Operation Warp Speed, but it’s not clear how that money is being spent.  My impression is that the Trumpers have already gone over budget mostly on buying up vaccine doses and other supplies for the stockpile, but more money will be needed to pay for distribution. So we may be about to shift from Operation Warp Speed to Operation Where’s the Bleeping Vaccine?

Jessie Hellmann, The Hill:

Public health experts say state and local governments are underfunded and unprepared for what is expected to be the largest vaccination campaign in U.S. history.

While the Trump administration has spent more than $10 billion supporting the development of COVID-19 vaccines, just $340 million has been allocated to agencies below the federal level to help with distribution efforts that will cost anywhere from $6 billion to $13.3 billion, according to various estimates. …

…“We knew vaccines would be in development, so it’s not a surprise we would need to build up the deployment system. Now we could be weeks away from the first doses going out, and we really haven’t invested in any of that work,” said Adriane Casalotti, chief of government and public affairs at the National Association of County and City Health Officials (NACCHO).

“Things could have been done earlier without having to reach this level of emergency,” she added. “To not have put a single dime toward deployment of it is a real disservice.”

Congress could have allocated this money already, of course, but Mitch McConnell thinks states should just go bankrupt and everybody should just die already.

“I’m not getting a sense from Congress that there’s tremendous urgency on this,” said Topher Spiro, vice president for health policy at the left-leaning Center for American Progress (CAP).

“This effort is going to be on par, or should be on par, with landing a man on the moon. It should be one of the largest efforts ever undertaken by governments, and it’s really important to get it right to restore faith in the government, and I don’t understand why Congress would nickel and dime this funding. There’s a huge risk of underfunding vaccine distribution, which would be catastrophic,” he added.

I think it’s safe to say there will be some catastrophes.

Part of the problem is that the Trump Administration has totally screwed up data collection. They recommend giving the vaccine to health care workers first, which is sensible, but the only distribution plan at hand is based on the adult populations of states. Public health expert Sema K. Sgaier writes in U.S. News that this will create winners and losers among the states.

This is why we should be concerned about Operation Warp Speed’s recently announced plan to deliver the first 6.4 million vaccine doses to states within 24 hours of Food and Drug Administration approval – not based on prioritized risk groups but on population.

Distributing the very first, precious supply of available vaccines based only on each state’s adult population will lead to unequal distribution of the vaccine among health care workers – our highest-priority population – due to the simple fact that some states have a larger share of health care workers than others. Why should your chances of getting vaccinated depend on whether you happen to be a nurse in West Virginia or Wyoming? For this reason, Operation Warp Speed’s plan to ignore the data on where priority groups live and work is neither fair nor strategic.

While 6.4 million doses may sound like a lot, it’s meager when you think about how many health care workers we need to vaccinate as soon as possible: Using the free, open-access vaccine allocation planning tool for states that we at Surgo Foundation developed in partnership with Ariadne Labs, we find that with the initial batch of 6.4 million doses announced by Operation Warp Speed, only 17% of our highest-priority health care workers will be covered.

Basically, the Trumpers are just dumping the mess on the incoming administration.

President-elect Joe Biden said Friday that the Trump administration had shared information with his transition team about distributing a vaccine to various states, but Biden said his team had not seen a “detailed plan.”

“There is no detailed plan that we’ve seen, anyway, as to how you get the vaccine out of a container, into an injection syringe, into somebody’s arm,” Biden said at an event in Wilmington, Delaware.
“It’s going to be very difficult for that to be done and it’s a very expensive proposition,” Biden said. He noted, “There’s a lot more that has to be done.”

Yes, there’s a lot more that needs to be done, and Trump’s incompetence will no doubt make vaccine distribution to take longer and be much more haghazard than it might have been. See also What We Know About the U.S. COVID-19 Vaccine Distribution Plan.

Close-up medical syringe with a vaccine.

Welcome to Another Episode of WTF?!

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Today’s WTF? involves the Pentagon. Yesterday Politico reported this:

The White House removed nine members of the Pentagon’s Defense Business Board on Friday and installed people loyal to President Donald Trump in their place, including presidential allies Corey Lewandowski and David Bossie.

MSNB, also yesterday:

Acting Secretary of Defense Chris Miller installed two close allies of President Trump, Corey Lewandowski and David Bossie, to the Pentagon’s Defense Business Board Friday in an abrupt shake-up of the historically non-partisan advisory group.

Lewandowski, Trump’s former campaign manager, was fired from the 2016 campaign but remained close to the president. Both he and Bossie, the former deputy campaign manager, have been involved in the president’s efforts to discredit the results of the 2020 election.

Miller removed nine members of the board and replaced them with a total of 11 others, including Lewandowski and Bossie.

And the advisory board is what?

The board advises the defense secretary and deputy secretary on business management issues and is historically non-partisan. Members are not paid for their participation and serve no less than one year and no more than four years, according to the Pentagon’s website.

The SecDef, Chris Miller, replaced the previous SecDef in August. Miller is a former Green Beret and defense contractor who somehow got pulled into the Trump Administration. More than that I do not know.

This morning there were reports in several news sources that Miller was blocking the Biden transition team from defense intelligence agencies, but Miller has since strongly denied these reports. There was just some procedural issue that has since been cleared up, he says. Or else the Biden team was being blocked until the blocking got in the news.

But it does make me wonder why Trump is so keen to pack the Pentagon with a bunch of his loyalists, now that we’re near the end of his tenure. Is something being hidden? Have the loyalists been charged with destroying records?

And then there’s this — yesterday Trump ordered nearly all U.S. troops to be pulled from Somalia. Every time he issues sudden withdrawal orders the Pentagon argues with him about it. Maybe he wants people who won’t disagree with him.

Also today: Trump calls Georgia governor to pressure him for help overturning Biden’s win in the state. Kemp said no. Seriously, what else could he say?

Update: This explains some of it. Trump loyalist Kash Patel is blocking some Pentagon officials from cooperating with the transition.

It’s Awful and Getting Worse

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Last night someone on MSNB observed that we’re suddenly hearing more from Dr. Anthony Fauci these days. Trump is too busy throwing his temper tantrum over the election to care what the task force is doing, I take it. Mike Pence is still the nominal head of the task force, but he appears to be more focused on the runoff elections in Georgia than in public health.

Dr. Fauci said today that we haven’t hit the Thanksgiving peak yet. And it’s bad enough already.

At least 2,857 new coronavirus deaths and 216,548 new cases were reported in the United States on Dec. 3. Over the past week, there has been an average of 180,327 cases per day, an increase of 8 percent from the average two weeks earlier. …

…As of Friday afternoon, more than 14,331,200 people in the United States have been infected with the coronavirus and at least 277,600 have died, according to a New York Times database.

Case numbers are spiking across most of the United States, leading to dire warnings about full hospitals, exhausted health care workers and expanding lockdowns.

Derek Thompson, The Atlantic:

The safe assumption is that cases, hospitalizations, and deaths will all reach new highs before Christmas. The virus is simply everywhere. While the spring wave slammed into the Northeast and the summer surge swept over the South, the latest surge, while concentrated in the Midwest, is truly national. Almost every state has seen an increase in cases since September, and nearly 40 states saw COVID-19 hospitalizations reach record highs in the past three weeks. Right when Americans should have separated themselves from new exposures, millions of them shuffled and reshuffled themselves into new combinations of people. This epidemiological experiment seems destined to produce more deaths, more grieving, more illness, and more exhausted health-care workers, who were already on a “catastrophic path” before 9 million people filed through TSA checkpoints in the past week.

Robinson Meyer and Alexis C. Madrigal, The Atlantic:

The pandemic nightmare scenario—the buckling of hospital and health-care systems nationwide—has arrived. Several lines of evidence are now sending us the same message: Hospitals are becoming overwhelmed, causing them to restrict whom they admit and leading more Americans to needlessly die.

It’s not just covid patients; it’s anyone with a serious medical condition now who can’t get the treatments that usually would be available. Try real hard not to have a heart attack anytime soon.

This is what we were warned about last spring when they talked about bending the curve. The idea was not to keep the virus from spreading as much as it was to slow down the spread so that everyone didn’t get sick at once. But that’s out the window now. Meyer and Madrigal also write that hospitals have had to revise their standards of which covid patients are admitted, so that they take only the most acutely ill. A patient who might have been admitted a few weeks ago is now sent home.

I’m living in a state with a Republican governor who refuses to impose mask mandates. I’m back to sheltering in place. I can’t say I ever stopped sheltering in place, actually. All because of nitwits who refuse to take precautions because freedom.

Speaking of Republican governors, see Iowa Is What Happens When Government Does Nothing by Elaine Godfrey at The Atlantic. And then go see Charles Pierce’s commentary on Godfrey’s article, We’ve Been Headed Here Since Ronald Reagan Made His First Joke About ‘The Government’.

The piece, which is written just as well as it is reported, illustrates a complete abandonment of the public health by the state government of Iowa. It arraigns Republican Governor Kim Reynolds, whom it reports, “followed President Trump’s lead.” (Among other delights, Reynolds actively opposed efforts by some of the state’s mayors to take precautions, undermining local mask mandates as soon as they were imposed.) This, of course, left hospital workers hung out to dry. …

… This is beyond neglect. It is negligent homicide by ideology. Everybody in Iowa saw what was coming. The meat-packing plants have been hot zones for months. And everybody can see worse coming in the next several months.

So there we are. It didn’t have to be this bad, but it is this bad. Everybody be careful. We’re in for a rough few months.

Looking Forward to the New Team

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Let’s talk about something positive. I don’t know much about economics, and what I do know I got from reading Paul Krugman’s column. So it’s very reassuring to me that Krugman says good things about the people Joe Biden has chosen for his economic team.

See also Krugman’s recent column, In Praise of Janet Yellen the Economist.

And then there’s Paul Waldman, Joe Biden Finds a Goldilocks Economic Team.

Consider the economic team that Biden has been rolling out, and that he formally introduced on Tuesday. This promised to be an area of significant risk, because progressives worried he would do what President Barack Obama did and hire a group of people who were either from Wall Street or sympathetic to its desires. They were preparing to bring all kinds of heat down on Biden if he went that route.

But, for the most part, that hasn’t happened. Biden has found people such as Janet L. Yellen, who is to be nominated for treasury secretary, who can satisfy nearly everyone in the party. Each slightly more centrist adviser seems counterweighted by a more liberal one. …

… As The Post’s David J. Lynch reports, Biden has “filled out his economic team with experts who have called for rebuilding the economy first and dealing with deficit concerns later.” Everyone seems to have learned from Obama’s experience, in which Republicans forced him to accept austerity policies that hampered the recovery from the Great Recession.

Waldman acknowledges that some team members might have called for deficit reduction in the past, but not now, not in our current circumstance. Again, this is all very reassuring to me.

Of course, there are some people on the left already screaming about too much corporate power in this group — David Sirota, for example, whom I have pretty much tuned out. Let’s give the new team a chance. Let’s not start bashing the Biden administration for selling out until it actually sells out, okay? Thanks much.

Possibly the most controversial member of the team is Neera Tanden, nominated to head the Office of Management and Budget. To her credit, Lindsey Graham called Tanden a “nut job.” On the other hand, she’s been known to butt heads with Bernie Sanders supporters.  Brian Beutler, Crooked:

Prior to her nomination, Tanden had mostly been a lightning rod within Democratic politics. She’s a protege of Hillary Clinton, and, as president of the Center for American Progress, closely associated with the party establishment. Among Bernie Sanders’s online fans, she’s arguably drawn more ire than any party figure other than Clinton herself, and has tussled publicly with party critics, including, on more than one occasion, me.

Her nomination came as a surprise to most political dweebs (including me again) but also, in most cases, as a relief. Even many of Tanden’s detractors were glad Biden nominated someone opposed to austerity, and attuned to the GOP’s feigned, situational fearmongering over deficits, rather than one of the deficit hawks reported to have been in the running.

Gregory Krieg and Ryan Nobles, CNN:

By the time she was introduced by Biden on Tuesday, alongside other senior members of his economic team, Tanden’s path to Senate confirmation already seemed in some peril — but not because of dissent from the left. The pugilistic president of the Center for American Progress and longtime aide to Hillary Clinton has punched both ways during her long political career. Some Senate Republicans were quick to highlight her past attacks on the right as a reason they might oppose her confirmation.

But among progressive leaders, her nomination set off more confusion than anger. It also complicated their efforts to balance grassroots work with efforts to engage and influence Biden’s team. Once the initial shock subsided, though, sighs of relief were the more prominent sounds — the left’s concerns that Biden might select a committed deficit hawk as his budget director had overwhelmed its widespread personal distaste for Tanden.

I’m inclined to cut her some slack and see what she does. The Republican case against Tanden is, basically, that she’s too political. Yeah, IOKIYAR.  See Steve Benen, The Republican case against Neera Tanden crumbles under scrutiny.

There’s more about the team, so far, here.

Update: Here’s another choice facing some pushback. See Martin Longman, Washington Monthly, The Overwrought Opposition to Brian Deese. Deese has been tapped to direct the National Economic Council, and some progressive groups object. Longman explains why:

It’s mainly because he was hired by the gigantic investment firm Blackrock to serve as their Global Head of Sustainable Investing, a job “focused on identifying drivers of long-term return associated with environmental, social and governance issues.”

In that position, he’s been under pressure to divest from industries that contribute to climate change. And, while he’s been responsive to these concerns, ruling out investments in mining companies that generate 25% or more of their revenues from coal, Blackrock remains heavily invested in fossil fuels.

Longman explains why he thinks the objections are overwrought.

See also Alex Thompson and Theodoric Meyer, Politico,  Biden top economic adviser facing accusations of mismanagement, verbal abuse. Heather Boushey, who has been appointed to the Council of Economic Advisers, has been accused of being a toxic manager.

How Insurrection Begins

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Today a group called The We the People Convention ran a full-page ad in the Washington Times (Sun Myung Moon, founder) calling for Trump to declare martial law and overturn the election. Here’s more from Gateway Pundit. This effort appears to be led by a Georgia attorney named Lin Wood.

Wood also tweeted today that Dominion Voting Systems is owned by “Communist China” through a Chinese affiliate of the Swiss firm UBS Securities. Here in Real World Land, Dominion was founded by a bunch of Canadians and has headquarters in Toronto and Denver. From what I could find out in a quick web search, Dominion is owned by its management and by Staple Street Capital, a private equity firm headquartered in midtown Manhattan. Apparently there are vast conspiracy theories connecting Dominion to all sorts of nefarious elements, including (as you’ve heard) the ghost of Hugo Chavez. Dominion should sue the socks off a few people, starting with Lin Wood. But let’s go on.

Speaking of lawsuits, former cyber security chief Christopher Krebs is considering legal action against Trump campaign attorney Joseph diGenova, who called for Krebs to be “taken out at dawn and shot.” You may remember diGenova as part of the legal team Toensing and DiGenova, which has been involved in right-wing plots going back years.

On the other hand, Bill Barr just released a statement saying the Justice Department has not uncovered evidence of widespread voter fraud that would change the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. Even Barr has decided enough is enough. But Trump has a zombie army that will not be deterred, I fear. Barr may need a bigger security detail.

Ron Brownstein has a piece at CNN that compares Trump to Joe McCarthy. I have been thinking the same thing. Trump really is more like McCarthy than like Hitler, IMO. I realize that may be a subtle distinction. But like McCarthy, Trump is a, shall we say, unexceptional man who stumbled into genuine power. And it revealed him to be a monster, but not before doing a lot of damage to a lot of people. But the interesting part here is the relationship between the Republican Party and McCarthy and how much it resembles the relationship between the Republican Party and Trump.

In McCarthy’s era, most of the GOP’s leaders found excuses to avoid challenging conspiracy theories that they knew to be implausible, even as evidence of their costs to the nation steadily mounted. For years, despite their private doubts about his charges and methods alike, the top GOP leadership — particularly Senate Republican leader Robert A. Taft, the Mitch McConnell of his day — either passively abetted or actively supported McCarthy’s scattershot claims of treason and Communist infiltration.

McCarthy in his heyday was very, very powerful. A word from him could ruin somebody. At first McCarthy went after Democrats and career diplomats in the State Department, so he was useful to Republicans. But then he started on President Dwight Eisenhower and other figures in his administration. Still Republicans stayed silent. Then in March 1954 Edward R. Murrow at CBS had the guts to rip McCarthy apart in a See It Now episode. And later that year McCarthy imploded on national television during the Army McCarthy hearings. Support for McCarthy plummeted, and only then did Senate Republicans move to censure McCarthy. McCarthy did the Republican Party a huge favor when he died of liver damage caused by heavy drinking in 1957.

Trump hasn’t yet reacted to Bill Barr’s statement, but he’s been eviscerating Georgia’s Gov. Kemp so ruthlessly I almost feel sorry for Kemp. Any Republican official involved in certifying a contested state for Biden has been subjected to Trump’s wrath. Several have reported receiving death threats. Republicans are worried that Trump is going to cost them the Georgia Senate runoffs (please), but still they are afraid to correct him.

Greg Sargent:

By now, it’s been widely established that President Trump’s nonstop lies about the election being stolen from him have created a potential problem for Republicans. If GOP voters believe the system is rigged, why would they turn out to vote in the two runoffs in Georgia that will decide control of the Senate?

In a new turn in this ugly saga, Georgia Republicans are now actively pleading with Trump to put an end to this problem for them. But what’s even more darkly absurd is how they’re going about doing this: They apparently do not believe that they themselves can explain to voters that the voting was actually legitimate in their own state — until Trump gives them permission to do so.

Back to Brownstein at CNN:

“For me it’s the dog that hasn’t barked,” conservative strategist and Trump critic Bill Kristol says of the party’s silence about the President’s unfounded fraud claims. “This is as if we’ve had the Army-McCarthy hearings and everyone is just quiet. No one is rethinking anything.”

It took years for the GOP to unshackle itself from McCarthy, and even then the separation came only after a figure as formidable as Eisenhower, a sitting President and national hero, privately encouraged it.

As Kristol notes, with McConnell and other GOP leaders deferring to Trump so completely — and many in the GOP breathing a sigh of relief over the party’s surprisingly competitive performance in the House and Senate elections — it’s not clear where a critical mass of resistance to him might develop, despite his increasingly open attacks on basic pillars of American democracy.

“It was easier to get beyond McCarthy than it will be to get beyond Trump,” Kristol predicts.

I haven’t looked at it, but apparently there is some kind of “hearing” being shown on One America News in which people are testifying to seeing all kinds of fraudulent voting things going on in the contested states. Joe McCarthy didn’t have the advantage of “alternative” news. In 1954 there were four networks (ABC, CBS, NBC, and DuMont). The Army-McCarthy hearings were broadcast gavel to gavel by ABC and DuMont. There were no other outlets, no social media, no filter bubbles, to present an alternative hearing or another version of what happened.

Meanwhile, the Washington Examiner is running a news scoop claiming that the USPS was delivering Biden campaign material but not Trump material. The story also claims all manner of mail-in ballots were lost, without noting that, if true, that probably hurt Biden more than Trump.

As it says here, beware the beginnings.

Viral photo by Joshua A. Bickel, Columbus Dispatch, of Ohio anti-restriction protesters.