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The U.S. has dispatched the first fleet of trucks carrying Pfizer’s newly-authorized coronavirus vaccine (we’re saved!), while ignoring the road signs warning of an unfinished bridge up ahead (save us, Sandra Bullock).
- The first vaccine doses in the U.S. were administered on Monday, starting with Sandra Lindsay, a critical care nurse at New York’s Long Island Jewish Medical Center whose face will forever prompt a generation of Americans to reflexively burst into tears. (Weird life ahead for Sandra.) Nearly three-million Pfizer doses will arrive at 636 locations over the next several days, and assuming everything went as planned, 145 sites in all 50 states—mostly health-care facilities—received doses on Monday. The beginning of the end has begun.
- All states are expected to follow the CDC’s recommendations to prioritize health-care workers and nursing-home residents for the first vaccine doses, before turning to their own creative interpretations of what constitutes essential workers. Trump has (at least publicly) reversed course on a plan to prioritize vaccine access for White House staff, after the New York Times reported on Sunday that the very people who catastrophically mismanaged the pandemic and personally seeded deadly coronavirus outbreaks would be among the first to receive protection in short supply. For some reason, people got mad at that.
- The euphoria of watching vaccines arrive is diluted somewhat by the unnecessary uncertainty around the next stages of distribution. Former FDA chief Dr. Scott Gottlieb, who’s now on the board of Pfizer, confirmed that the Trump administration repeatedly turned down offers to reserve additional vaccine doses, including as recently as November. Here we all thought the president was ignoring a terrifying coronavirus surge in favor of filing frivolous lawsuits in an attempt to overturn the election, when in fact he was also hard at work turning down life-saving vaccines. We feel pretty silly now.
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Even as the first vaccines are loaded onto trucks, states have no idea how they’ll pay for the distribution of shipments to follow.
- The Trump administration has only arranged funding for the vaccination of frontline medical workers and long-term care facility residents, and cash-strapped states must spend anything they can scrape together from the CARES Act by December 31, leaving no funding whatsoever to vaccinate the vast majority of the population. By not planning past the first phase and blocking further aid for state and local governments, Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell have effectively left Joe Biden a time bomb, sabotaging his administration’s pandemic cleanup at the expense of yet more American lives.
- Trump’s reckless politicization of scientific measures through the pandemic will also leave behind widespread distrust of the vaccines themselves. The administration is only now scrambling to roll out a $250 million public-education campaign to encourage people to get vaccinated, after initially trying to use that money for campaign ads starring Dennis Quaid. A recent Pew Research Center survey found that 60 percent of Americans now say they’ll take the vaccine (up from 51 percent in September), but a disconcertingly chunky 21 percent of the adults who plan to skip it are “pretty certain” more information won’t change their minds.
The U.S. coronavirus vaccine rollout began on the same day the official coronavirus death toll surpassed 300,000—a poignant reminder that a vaccine is no substitute for leadership with basic regard for human life. Trump has only a few more weeks in the White House, but by his own design, the worst of the damage he’s caused may outlast him.
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We want to give a shoutout to Rachel and Rachna and the entire Hall of Shame team for a fantastic season. Hall of Shame is a terrific pod filled with fascinating and hilarious scandals in sports—from Metta World Peace to Spygate to Caster Semenya—it’s a great binge-listen for the holiday season. Catch up wherever you get your podcasts →
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The Electoral College voted to make Joe Biden the 46th president, as electors in battleground states where Trump had begged for last-minute switcheroos made Biden’s victory official. That’s not to say the day proceeded normally (first of all, the electoral vote counted as news, which was weird). Michigan’s state legislature closed its offices at the urging of law-enforcement officials due to “credible threats of violence,” and a GOP Michigan state representative was stripped of his committee assignments for the rest of the year after he hinted at a potential disruption of the Electoral College vote, and said he couldn’t rule out that there would be violence, without condemning that possibility. One Michigan elector even felt it necessary to wear a bulletproof vest to cast her vote. Neat! The ceremonies themselves proceeded without incident, though—here’s Stacey Abrams presiding over Joe Biden winning Georgia for the 958275th time.
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- The threats of violence to stop the Electoral College vote didn’t arise in a vacuum: Four people were stabbed in Washington, DC, and one person was shot in Olympia, WA, on Saturday night, as thousands of Trump supporters (including hundreds of Proud Boys) protested the failure of his attempted coup, and tore down Black Lives Matter signs from Black churches.
- The Trump campaign plans to run ads claiming the election was stolen, which ought to calm things down.
- Attorney General Bill Barr will step down before Christmas, Trump announced in a goofily positive tweet: “Our relationship has been a very good one, he has done an outstanding job!”
- DNI John Ratcliffe has asked the White House to rescind a ten-year old executive order requiring a uniform policy for marking and handling “controlled unclassified information” (CUI). The country’s spy chief wakes up each morning and chooses chaos.
- Here’s a fun deep dive into Trump’s bitter feud with Gov. Brian Kemp (R-GA), which has been simmering since Kemp failed to humbly consult with Trump before appointing Kelly Loeffler to the Senate.
- Speaking of whom, Loeffler had no idea she was posing for a photo with a former KKK leader on Saturday, and would only ever knowingly pose with unaffiliated white supremacists.
- Crede Bailey, the director of the White House security office, is recovering after three months in the hospital with coronavirus. Bailey lost his right foot and lower leg as a result of his illness, the most severe coronavirus case known to be connected to Trump-White House superspreading.
- Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) participated in a smear campaign against a veteran who said she was sexually assaulted at a VA hospital, according to the Veterans Affairs inspector general.
- A former adviser to Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D-NY) has alleged that he sexually harassed her for years, making frequent comments about her appearance. Cuomo has denied the allegations.
- A man named J. Epstein had the audacity to write that Dr. Jill Biden should rethink her name, in a Wall Street Journal op-ed that blended academic elitism with rank misogyny, and ruined the word “kiddo” in all contexts for years to come. (We tried to find an essay where Epstein calls "Dr." Sebastian Gorka “champ,” and weirdly came up empty?)
- Legendary spy novel author John le Carré died on Saturday. He was 89.
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Russian government hackers broke into several key government networks, compromising at least the Homeland Security, Treasury, and Commerce departments, and probably more. Is it ideal that the department tasked with protecting the country from cyber attacks has itself fallen prey to a cyber attack? Some would say no! The full extent of the breach isn’t yet clear, but it appears to be part of a months-long, extensive spying operation. All of the systems were compromised by the update server of a network management system made by the firm SolarWinds, a breach that seems to be connected to a Russian attack on the cybersecurity firm FireEye that the company announced last week. SolarWinds has hundreds of thousands of clients (which include many government agencies, defense contractors, and Fortune 500 companies), and said on Monday that 18,000 of them were potentially vulnerable to the attack.
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Lyft has joined forces with 11 leading organizations, including NAACP, The National Urban League and Black Women’s Roundtable, to help eliminate transportation as a barrier to upward mobility for under-resourced Black communities.
There is an urgent need to support the individuals and communities who have been disproportionately impacted by COVID-19. Through the LyftUp Access Alliance, Lyft will provide access to 1.5 million donated/discounted rides over the next 5 years to help communities of color reach a powerful network of essential resources and services.
As part of our commitment, all LyftUp Community Grants will go toward local organizations directly supporting communities of color. These rides will help address the challenges faced in this moment of crisis, and ensure that we all emerge stronger and more empowered on the other side.
This is a LyftUp initiative, the company’s comprehensive effort to expand transportation access to those who need it most. Through LyftUp, Lyft partners with leading nonprofits to help provide access to free and discounted rides to individuals and families who lack affordable, reliable transportation.
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A new study found that adding the arthritis drug baricitinib to coronavirus treatment regimens that include remdesivir may help seriously sick patients recover.
A Stanford University study found that The Poynter Institute’s media literacy program can significantly help older adults detect online disinformation.
The U.K. has announced changes that will make it easier for gay and bisexual men to donate blood.
Cleveland’s baseball team will, at long last, drop its offensive team name.
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