Josh Marshall
One of the oddities or ironies – I’m not sure quite what it is – of the COVID Pandemic is that the US and UK, which did so poorly managing the disease vs much of Europe, have done so much better vaccinating their populations. This shows up particularly for the UK which is mostly relying on the same AstraZeneca as the the EU. Now comes word that the EU may block exports of the vaccine and its constituent ingredients to the UK until the manufacturer meets its delivery obligations to the European Union. (Needless to say, some of the knock on consequences of Brexit.)
Yesterday Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-NM) announced his support for abolishing or dramatically reforming the Senate filibuster. This comes after comments earlier this week from Joe Manchin in which he said he won’t budge from the Senate’s current 60 vote threshold for advancing legislation. That comes less than two weeks after Manchin expressed support for moving toward a so-called ‘talking filibuster’ and only a few more weeks after Manchin insisted he would support the filibuster no matter what and forever. Put this all together and at least on the surface you have a confusing mix of signals – often entirely contradictory – that makes it very hard to make sense of what is happening with the filibuster and thus whether there is any real chance of more legislation this year while Democrats have the slenderest hold on both the executive and the legislative branches of government.
You’ve probably seen news about the halt in vaccinations across much of Europe in the wake of questions about whether the AstraZeneca vaccine, which is the main one in Europe, might be associated with a rare clotting syndrome as a side effect. Here’s the most detailed account of the situation I’ve read, a piece by two top flight science/epidemiology journalists writing in Science.
What Happened to Trump?
The future is hard to predict because all of our perceptions are all shaped by the present that is always passing. But it’s not too soon to note that some of our assumptions about ex-President Trump’s post-presidency missed the mark. With the exception of his CPAC speech which was generally regarded as a flat, low-energy affair Trump has been almost entirely out of the spotlight. He did pick this fight over whether money should go to GOP party committees or only to him directly. But the follow through has been scattered and Sen. Rick Scott’s visit to Mar a Lago suggests it was mainly a push for attention.
Why Did Trump Decide Not to Have a Plan to Vaccinate the Country?
As we noted in various articles over the last two days the Trump administration (albeit mainly career civil servants) deserve some credit for Operation Warp Speed, which backstopped the risk in private pharmaceutical companies of going all out in vaccine creation and production. But on the distribution front, their record was close to catastrophic. As Josh Kovensky and Kate Riga explain here, they literally had no plan to do anything. The “plan” was not to have a plan. The military would airlift the supplies to designated airports in each state and then it was up to the states.
So why did the administration at least do the basic blocking and tackling of federal support for vaccine development and drop the ball entirely on a plan to get the country vaccinated?
From TPM Reader JM (this one got to me perhaps more than any other we’ve published so far) …
My COVID moment was the culmination of a year of thinking we were going to be OK, and then realizing we weren’t.
In 2019, months before the COVID crisis struck, my elderly but still brilliant mother moved from Florida to the NY exurbs to live with my family. Like anyone in their late 80s, my mother had her share of age related health issues but overall was in remarkable shape. When the crisis struck last year, we seemed to be doing all the right things: working and attending school from home, wiping down our groceries, wearing masks, etc.
However, I have teenagers, one of whom has been slowly radicalized by sociopaths on YouTube (Ben Shapiro is a favorite.). At some point, my teen decided that COVID was overblown, masks were stupid, and it would all be over on election day. (I might be a recovering conservative, but I believe in math and science like some people believe in Q or flying saucers.)
Below I publish TPM Reader WH‘s note. He’s also pretty high on President Biden’s speech. But he asks whether there’s any good rundown about what’s true and not true about vaccine preparation under Biden and Trump. Is it really true, as a number of publications like the Times have reported in recent days that the Biden administration is taking credit for a lot of great stuff Trump had underway? Or resorting to the devious trick of underpromising and overdelivering? (Yes, really.) Our team was actually pretty deep into the reporting on this story last year. So we are going to put that piece together. Look out for it. But I think I can preview that briefly.
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In our email correspondence over many years, TPM Reader AB has often been highly – to my mind often reflexively – critical of Democrats, even to the degree that it’s led to some exasperating clashes of opinion between the two of us. With that background I was very struck by his reaction to President Biden’s speech.
I thought it was the best presidential speech I have ever heard in my lifetime.
The President’s Address
I thought the President’s speech was very good. It was also very much Joe Biden. Obviously one couldn’t remotely imagine Donald Trump giving this speech. But I would have a hard time imagining Barack Obama giving it either. Obama’s would have been good too. But it would have been very different.
A few quick observations.
Could Georgia Be Trump’s Biggest Legal Threat?
It’s too early to know for sure. But I’ve begun to wonder whether ex-President Trump’s greatest legal jeopardy may not be in Georgia, where there is what seems to be a pretty active investigation into his efforts to bully Republican officials into falsifying the 2020 election results and making him President. (We now have the actual recording of another of those bullying calls, the existence of which was reported back in January.) Trump ended his presidency in such a burst of criminality that it’s easy to lose sight of the egregiousness of so many of the individual acts. But the Georgia effort makes a good claim to be the most egregious.