Crooked Media - What A Day: Johnny on the stop

Federal health agencies have cautiously tapped the brakes on the Johnson & Johnson coronavirus vaccine, which will only be cause for alarm if Americans skim the headline and think it’s cause for alarm, so right up top: There is no cause for alarm. 
 

• The CDC and FDA recommended (but did not mandate) that the U.S. pause the use of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine over six reported U.S. cases of a rare blood clot disorder in J&J recipients. All six cases occurred among women between the ages of 18 and 48, and their symptoms all turned up one to three weeks after vaccination. The Biden administration temporarily halted those shots at federally run sites, and more than 40 states quickly followed suit. 
   
• The pause is only expected to last for a matter of days, and as the FDA noted, it was recommended “out of an abundance of caution.” The risk to past-and-future recipients looks to be extremely low: Nearly seven million people in the U.S. have received the J&J jab with no other serious reported side effects, compared to six (6) people who got sick for reasons we don’t yet know. There have been nearly as many seasons of The Masked Singer as concerning J&J-related cases, and that show’s still completely unregulated.
   
• No similar problems have been reported among recipients of the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines. White House coronavirus czar Jeff Zients said that the Biden administration was working with states to get anyone with a standing J&J appointment quickly rescheduled for another vaccine, and that the U.S. has enough Pfizer and Moderna doses to keep the rollout on schedule. Pfizer has also announced that it’ll be able to deliver 10 percent more doses by the end of May than it had previously promised. 

The effect of the pause on vaccine hesitancy could be a different story. 
 

• Some Americans already saw the Johnson & Johnson vaccine as an inferior option, and its distribution in hard-to-reach areas (where a single-dose, easy-to-store vaccine is particularly useful) as yet another example of minority communities getting shafted in the vaccine rollout. The temporary withdrawal of those shots—while intended to maintain public trust—could fuel that skepticism, and give vaccine-hesitant Americans another very bad reason to forego vaccination altogether.
   
• It’s already been a particularly rough week for misleadingly scary-sounding news. A new Israeli study (which hasn’t yet been peer reviewed) found that the variant first identified in South Africa, B.1.351, was better able to evade the protection conferred by the Pfizer vaccine than the original coronavirus strain. On Monday, Anthony Fauci criticized that study for confusingly making it sound like people who had received both Pfizer doses were more likely to catch the B.1.351 variant than people who weren’t vaccinated at all, and reiterated that a small number of “breakthrough” infections are inevitable, no matter how effective the vaccine.
   

The possibility of rare, serious side effects deserves investigation, but the far greater danger would be a failure to reach herd immunity: The more Americans who refuse to get vaccinated, the more chances the virus has to mutate—perhaps eventually into a variant that renders the existing vaccines ineffective. The Biden administration may now have to work a little harder to make that message heard.

It’s been over two months since the military first seized control of Myanmar. This week on What A Day (the pod), Akilah Hughes and Gideon Resnick spoke to Aye Min Thant, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who has been reporting on the coup since February about the country’s past, present, and future.Watch the full interview on our YouTube channel → crookedmedia.com/youtube

President Biden is expected to announce on Wednesday that he will withdraw all U.S. troops from Afghanistan by or before September 11, the 20th anniversary of the 2001 terrorist attacks. That’s a few months later than the May 1 deadline that the Trump administration negotiated with the Taliban, which hasn’t yet responded to the announcement. There are officially about 2,500 U.S. troops in Afghanistan, but the actual number fluctuates—at the moment, it’s closer to 3,500. The withdrawal won’t be conditions-based. If Biden meets the deadline, he’ll be upholding his campaign promise to end a forever war that’s killed at least 100,000 Afghan civilians, but it’s unclear what will come next: A new intelligence report said the prospect for a peace deal between the Afghan government and the Taliban remains low.

• Kim Potter, the Minnesota police officer who fatally shot Daunte Wright, has resigned, along with the Brooklyn Center, MN, police chief. Protesters gathered outside the police headquarters for a second night on Monday, in spite of a 7 p.m. curfew, and Daunte Wright's family has rejected the police's "accidental discharge" explanation.
   
• Meanwhile, the Kenosha, WI, cop who shot Jacob Blake in the back last year and left him paralyzed from the waist down, has returned from administrative leave and won’t face any discipline.
   
• Rep. Matt Gaetz's (R-FL) indicted friend Joel Greenberg has been cooperating with federal investigators since last year, lol. 
   
• The G7 nations have issued a statement calling on Russia to “cease its provocations and to immediately de-escalate tensions” near the Ukrainian border and Crimea. In a Tuesday phone call, Biden directly urged Vladimir Putin to stop Russia’s military buildup on the border, and proposed setting up a meeting in the coming months. 
   
• Japan will start releasing treated radioactive water from the Fukushima nuclear plant into the Pacific Ocean in two years, to the great dismay of fishermen, environmental groups, and more or less everyone else in the region. 
   
• Five of the Democratic Party’s biggest polling firms have acknowledged that their 2020 polling was something of a whoopsy daisy, but said they still don’t have a definitive explanation of what went wrong. 
   
• Fox News refused to fire Tucker Carlson, who immediately doubled down on the Great Replacement theory remarks that prompted the ADL to call for his firing. 
   
• Pro-Trump attorney Lin Wood has continued pushing election lies in his campaign for South Carolina GOP chair, which has revolved completely around his feverish loyalty to Donald Trump.
   
• Former CDC Director Robert Redfield has embarked on an exciting new journey at Big Ass Fans, a company that manufactures big ass fans. Welcome, Robert, to the Big Ass Family. 
   
• The world's longest rabbit has been kidnapped in central England. A clear instance of criminals (sorry) playing the long game (we're trying to delete it).

Tribes across the country are racing to preserve more than 150 indigenous languages that became even more endangered when the pandemic hit, and are counting on funding in the latest coronavirus relief package to do it. Coronavirus has killed Native Americans at more than twice the rate of white Americans, and the loss of elders means the loss of first-language speakers with irreplaceable stores of cultural knowledge. Tribes and nonprofits that support language-preservation efforts now need to accelerate what was already a race against time. The American Rescue Plan includes resources to make that possible (over vehement GOP objections), with $20 million in federal grants to fund projects like creating dictionaries, digitizing language resources, training teachers, and developing online courses. Earlier relief programs for tribes were plagued with delays, but the new grants are structured in a way that'll hopefully get money out the door faster.

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Moderna has announced that its vaccine is 90 percent effective six months after the second dose.

Maryland has become the 25th state to ban life sentences without parole for children, in a bill that will give hundreds of people a chance for earlier release. 

The Biden administration will reverse a Trump-era policy that required abortion pills to be dispensed in person, even during a pandemic.

President Biden has named Robert Santos as his nominee to lead the Census Bureau. If confirmed, Santos will be the first person of color to hold the position.