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The Food and Drug Administration has formally approved the Pfizer vaccine, which the company will now market with the made-up pharmaceutical name Comirnaty (koe-mir’-na-tee). Another great reason to flush all that Ivermectin you’ve been hoarding down the toilet.
- The announcement comes just as schools begin reopening across the country, amid a surge of new Delta-variant cases that appears to be nearing its peak. In Florida, one of the states hit hardest by the spread of the Delta variant, daily new confirmed coronavirus deaths now exceed the state's peaks from previous waves. Doctors in south Florida staged a walkout on Monday to draw attention to the large numbers of unvaccinated patients overwhelming their hospitals, and urge people to "ignore the nonsense and the absurdities that you're hearing people say at public meetings."
- President Biden marked the occasion by urging the millions of unvaccinated Americans who'd been awaiting formal FDA approval to take notice and get vaccinated. “The moment you have been waiting for is here,” he said. He also called on government and non-government entities who’d been hamstrung by lack of full FDA approval to expand vaccine requirements. “If you're a business leader, a nonprofit leader, a state or local leader, who has been waiting for full FDA approval to require vaccinations, I call on you now to do that, require it.” The Pentagon already got the message and will issue new guidance requiring all service members to be vaccinated.
- Pfizer’s shiny new status could also hamper ongoing Republican efforts to discourage vaccine uptake. The Texas order, signed by Gov. Greg Abbott (R-TX), which banned state- and local-government entities from imposing vaccine requirements, specifically cited vaccines administered under emergency use authorization. That’s the biggest setback to Abbott’s pro-COVID policies since the Texas Texas Department of Education announced it would not enforce his ban on mask mandates at least until litigation is resolved.
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Our thoughts and prayers are with other Republicans, too.
- America’s reigning worst senator, Ron Johnson, is mad at the FDA for approving
Comirnaty Pfizer, because he worries it’ll lead more people to get vaccinated. “Expediting the process appears to only serve the political purpose of imposing and enforcing vaccine mandates,” he wrote in a letter to the FDA, articulating a major tenet of GOP thinking, where bureaucratic red tape is good, but only when it leads to more people becoming infected with a deadly virus. Fox News—just asking questions of course!—picked up the ball and ran with it.
- The news also comes as a blow to a number of hardcore Trump supporters. Many of them booed the former one-term president when he (somewhat tepidly) encouraged them to get vaccinated at a MAGA rally in Alabama this weekend. Elsewhere in the Deep South, unvaccinated Americans are calling poison control in droves after ingesting a horse and cow dewormer called Ivermectin, an unproven therapy that right-wing media personalities have promoted while simultaneously feeding their viewers' suspicions of extremely effective vaccines that do not require poison control.
Between making some unvaccinated Americans feel safer and allowing government and private-sector entities to impose or strengthen vaccine requirements, we can hope that today’s news leads to an uptick in the vaccination rate, and a swifter end to the summer Delta-variant surge. But anti-vax forces are still hard at work, which means the public-health emergency will be with us longer than it needs to, and more Americans will die unnecessarily as a result.
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Don’t look now, but the Kabul airlift seems to be running pretty smoothly. The operation overseen by U.S. forces has facilitated the evacuation of 37,000 people since it began on August 14, including over 10,000 people in a 24 hour stretch from Sunday into Monday. That’s a bit above the pace President Biden said he hoped to reach to be able to complete the evacuation by the August 31 deadline, which a Taliban spokesman recently called a “red line.” It isn’t all good news, though. America’s G-7 allies will reportedly pressure Biden to extend that deadline, notwithstanding Taliban threats, when they meet virtually with him tomorrow. And though the pace of departures has increased considerably, the security situation in the city has deteriorated, driven by al Qaeda terrorist threats, forcing U.S. troops to establish “alternative routes” to the airport.
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- An informal coalition of progressive organizations, Democratic establishment entities, and even centrist advocacy groups has done what’s known as “lowering the boom on Josh Gottheimer’s big fat head” in anticipation of a key House vote that will test him and the eight other House centrists who have threatened to take Biden’s whole economic agenda hostage unless the House passes the Senate infrastructure bill right away. That vote, which will also advance the House budget resolution and the updated John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, is expected late tonight or tomorrow.
- The sham audit at the center of the Arizona GOP’s propaganda blitz is over, but findings have been delayed because the Cyber Ninjas CEO and two other members of the five-person “audit” team got COVID and are “quite sick.”
- Internal affairs for the Capitol Police has concluded the officer who shot Ashli Babbitt did so lawfully, “within Department policy,” and “potentially saved Members and staff from serious injury and possible death.”
- A judge has sentenced Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio to 155 days in jail—more than prosecutors recommended—for stealing a Black Lives Matter banner from a Washington, DC, church and burning it after a violent pro-Trump demonstration this past winter.
- Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D-NY)—or, former Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D-NY), depending what time you read this—insists he didn’t try to give his dog, Captain, away, but it kinda sounds like he did.
- The Democratic Party’s top elections litigator, Marc Elias, has left his corporate law firm, Perkins Coie and formed the more specialized Elias Law Group.
- Whatever was causing birds in the mid-Atlantic region to become sick and die has mysteriously stopped doing that, which may lend credence to the theory that the phenomenon was related to Hot Cicada Summer, or we may just be in the eye of a terrifying storm.
- President Biden has nominated Rahm Emanuel to be our ambassador to Japan. Our apologies to Japan.
- Don Everly, the older of the Everly Brothers, has died at 84.
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A new rule advanced by administrations of both parties, and promulgated under legal authorities in the Affordable Care Act, is likely to renew a debate over the cost of medical care, and who should pay for it. The rule, which requires hospitals to publish the prices they negotiate with insurance companies for health services, has revealed wide disparities in how much different private insurance plans agree to pay for the same basic services, according to data from dozens of major hospitals compiled and analyzed by the New York Times and researchers at University of Maryland, Baltimore County. In most cases, the carriers agree to pay far more than public payers like Medicare negotiate, and in many cases they pass along larger out-of-pocket costs to their customers than those customers would pay if they’d bypassed their insurance altogether and agreed to pay cash. That finding in particular is alarming, since the purpose of insurance is to pool risk and use the purchasing power of large groups of people to bargain for better prices than individuals negotiating for themselves would pay. The findings likely explain why hospital- and insurance-industry associations fought the rule so hard, and why many hospitals continue to ignore its requirements.
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The Biden administration has officially asked the Supreme Court to leave its modified eviction moratorium in place.
A lower court in North Carolina has thrown out a law stripping people with felony records of their voting rights in a ruling which, if upheld, will restore the franchise to about 55,000 citizens in the state.
House Democrats’ updated voting-rights bill would strip federal courts of certain powers that allow judges to suppress votes and replace them with requirements to uphold political equality.
Voters in the districts of the nine House Dems who’ve tried to endanger President Biden’s Build Back Better agenda support that agenda overwhelmingly.
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