Crooked Media - What A Day: Ain't vaccine nothin' yet

The White House spent the weekend frantically contact tracing its own officials and implementing new safety measures, after an aide to Vice President Mike Pence tested positive for coronavirus on Friday. The White House still thinks you should get a haircut and roll around in a ball pit, though. 
 

• The Trump administration has not yet identified who transmitted the virus to Katie Miller, Pence’s spokesperson and Stephen Miller’s apparently voluntary wife, and some senior officials are worried that an outbreak is already spreading through the West Wing. The three top-ranking health officials are now in some form of quarantine: CDC Director Robert Redfield and FDA Commissioner Steven Hahn will isolate themselves for two weeks, and Dr. Anthony Fauci has begun a “modified quarantine” involving some work from home. 
   
• Pence steered clear of the White House and in-person meetings over the weekend, but a spokesperson denied that he was in quarantine, and he returned to work today amid newly heightened safety measures. The White House has directed staffers to wear masks at all times unless at their desks, and drawn up an internal list of over a dozen people who will be tested daily. (The mask rule, like all rules, does not apply to Trump.) Joe Biden penned a Washington Post op-ed calling out the absurd contradiction between Trump providing frequent tests within the White House and telling Americans that testing isn’t important, because sometimes a person will test negative for a while and then all of a sudden test positive, “for some reason.”
   
• Indeed, Trump’s main concern about a White House outbreak (apart from any fear of contracting the virus himself) is that it will undermine his message that the coronavirus epidemic is under control, and states should hurry up and reopen their economies. To compensate, he’s ramping up partisan incitement. Today he lashed out at Gov. Tom Wolf (D-PA) on Twitter, accusing Democratic governors of keeping states under stay-at-home orders in an effort to hurt his reelection campaign, and effectively throwing his weight behind a handful of Republican-led Pennsylvania counties that announced they would defy Wolf’s order. Wolf warned that counties that reopen early will be blocked from receiving discretionary federal stimulus funds, and businesses could be sued or lose their liquor licenses. 

Trump might be urging people back to work without scaling up the resources to do so safely, but at least he’s also ignoring a supply chain shortage that could slow vaccine distribution. 
 

• The country’s supply chain is nowhere close to ready for an enormous, coordinated effort to develop and distribute a vaccine, with the specialized glass needed for vaccine vials already in short supply. In his whistleblower complaint, Dr. Rick Bright alleged that he warned the Trump administration of a looming global shortage of glass vials, but was ignored. The fact that the U.S. has snubbed an international collaboration led by the WHO to strike out on its own will make scaling up a vaccine that much harder. 
   
• Bright described another supply failure in his complaint—in the early days of the crisis, a domestic medical-supply company stepped forward with a proposal to manufacture millions of N95 masks for the federal government. The administration wasn’t interested, and production lines in the U.S. that could be churning out seven million masks a month are still sitting unused. 
   

While enhancing his own protections, Trump lied today in saying that coronavirus numbers are “going down almost everywhere.” They are not. The U.S. now has a confirmed death toll of over 80,000, more than 1.34 million confirmed cases, outbreaks that are continuing to spike in some states, and a lack of testing that leaves the status of other outbreaks unknown. If any of it was happening within six feet of Trump, he might be compelled to care. 

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President Trump spent Mother’s Day in a Twitter meltdown about “OBAMAGATE,” after audio leaked of a call in which Obama criticized Trump’s coronavirus response as “an absolute chaotic disaster,” and accurately warned that Attorney General Bill Barr dropping charges against Michael Flynn reflected a dire threat to the rule of a law. (More than 1,900 former Justice Department employees have renewed their call for Barr to resign.) Trump spent the last week desperately trying to change the topic from his atrocious coronavirus response through an increasingly unhinged campaign to blame Obama for the 2016 Russia investigation. Asked about the tweets at a press conference today, Trump was unable to name any of the crimes he’s accusing Obama of having committed (spoiler: there are none) so it definitely seems like this has legs.

• The Justice Department is considering federal hate-crime charges against Gregory and Travis McMichael, the two white men who stalked and killed Ahmaud Arbery. Additionally, Georgia’s attorney general has asked DOJ to conduct a probe into the initial handling of the case, and the man who filmed the fatal shooting is now under investigation as well. 
   
• The Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe in South Dakota has rejected a demand from Gov. Kristi Noem’s (R-SC) to remove coronavirus checkpoints along highways on tribal land. The tribe set up checkpoints to try to prevent the spread of the virus onto their reservation, which has only an eight-bed facility and no ICU for 12,000 people.
   
• The Navajo Nation now has more confirmed coronavirus cases per capita than any U.S. state. One-third of homes across the reservation don’t have running water, and many in the close-knit community live in crowded homes that make self-isolation impossible.
   
• Three New York children have died of a mysterious inflammatory syndrome that may be linked to COVID-19. The state now knows of 73 children with the syndrome. 
   
• A CDC study found that thousands of probable coronavirus deaths in New York City went unaccounted for in the official death toll. 
   
• Elon Musk announced that Tesla would restart production at its California factory, in violation of a local public health order. Also, it appears the “X Æ A-12 Musk” baby name was not a bit! This has been another exhausting edition of On-Brand Elon Musk News.  
   
• Shelley Luther, the Texas salon owner who got national attention for defying orders to keep her shop closed, admitted she received $18,000 in stimulus funds days before her court appearance. A GoFundMe campaign on her behalf was also created a day before she reopened the salon. As befitting a hair stylist, a beautifully layered grift.
   
• Little Richard, one of the pioneers of rock and roll, died Saturday. He was 87.
   
• Jerry Stiller, the veteran actor and comic who played Frank Costanza on Seinfeld, died this morning. He was 92.
   
• Take heart, Mandy Patinkin is very much alive and just now learning what GIFs are.

New clusters of infections have emerged in South Korea, China, and Germany after those countries began relaxing social-distancing restrictions. More than 50 cases in Seoul, South Korea have been linked to one infected man who visited five nightlife spots in a single night, and the government has ordered the city’s bars and clubs to close. China has reintroduced restrictions after two cities reported new coronavirus cases: Shulan, in a province that borders both Russia and North Korea, and Wuhan, which is a place you may have heard of. After Germany began a slow reopening, its reproduction number has creeped above one (meaning that one infected person infects more than one other person, on average). All of this should serve as a warning to certain countries that are rushing to reopen before infection rates have been brought down in the first place.

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Seattle announced it will permanently close 20 miles of streets to traffic, to give residents more space for biking and exercise.

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey pledged $10 million to help prisons battle the coronavirus pandemic.

Lin Manuel-Miranda and his family have launched a fundraising campaign for immigrant communities impacted by the virus.

Princeton University has announced its first black valedictorian in its 247-year history.