US Politics

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Stephanie Cho remembers a time when she could walk the halls of the Georgia state capitol and see just two Asian Americans: the Republican state representative Byung J Pak and a member of his staff.
She had recently moved to Atlanta from Los Angeles, in 2013, and was “shocked” by how few Asian Americans were involved in Georgia politics. Campaigns, Cho said, made little effort to engage Asian American voters, despite their growing presence in the state, and political leaders did not seem to grasp the potential voting power of this electorate.
“When you think about California, what it was like 30 or 40 years ago, that’s Georgia,” said Cho, who is now the executive director of the civil rights advocacy group Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Atlanta. “It’s on a trajectory of change.”
Though Asian Americans comprise only about 4% of Georgia’s population – a far smaller share than in places like California – they have emerged as an increasingly influential electoral force in this politically divided, southern swing state.
Historic turnout among Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) voters – who make up the fastest-growing segment of Georgia’s electorate – helped Joe Biden become the first Democratic presidential candidate to win the state since 1992. According to national exit polls, nearly two-thirds of Asian American and Pacific Islander voters cast their ballot for Biden.
By some estimates, voter participation among Asian Americans in Georgia nearly doubled from 2016 to 2020 – a testament, Cho said, to the years-long voter engagement and mobilization efforts led by a new generation of Asian American organizers and activists.
The next time she visits the state capitol, there will be six Asian Americans serving in the Georgia legislature, including five Democrats.
“When no one was looking, we really changed things in Georgia,” Cho said.
Now Democrats hope to replicate their success among Asian Americans in a pair of runoff elections on 5 January that will determine control of the US Senate. The campaigns for Democratic Senate candidates Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock say they view the AAPI community as critical to winning their races. Both teams have hired AAPI constituency directors to lead multilingual and multicultural outreach programs, that includes campaign visits to AAPI-owned small businesses and advertising in ethnic media.
“We are absolutely crucial in this race,” said Anjali Enjeti, the co-founder of the Georgia chapter of the group They See Blue, which mobilizes south Asian Democrats. “We turned out in 2020 at a rate higher – much higher – than we have historically turned out and we can absolutely help bring it home again.”
Though no single voting bloc can take credit for turning the state blue in November, as many as 30,000 Asian Americans voters in Georgia cast ballots for the first time in the November presidential election, nearly three times Biden’s 11,000-vote victory.
High turnout among Black, Latino and young voters, as well as a rejection of Trump by white, college-educated suburban voters who traditionally lean Republican, were also key. Many organizers, including Enjeti, credited the work of Stacey Abrams, the 2018 candidate for governor who founded a voter registration group called the New Georgia Project, and other Black women organizers in the state who helped mobilize and engage new and low-propensity voters in minority communities.
Four years ago, Sam Park defeated a three-term Republican incumbent to become the first Asian American Democrat elected to the Georgia general assembly.
The son of Korean immigrants, Park got his start in politics working for Abrams when she was minority leader of the Georgia House. When he decided to run for office himself, he said targeting Asian American voters was not a sophisticated campaign strategy but simply made “common sense”.
It worked – and since then Park has helped Georgia Democrats engage the state’s AAPI voters. In 2020, he was the Georgia chair of Young Asian Americans for Biden.
In recent weeks, Georgia has attracted some of the biggest names in American politics, including the president, the former president and the president-elect.
Kamala Harris, whose late mother immigrated to California from India, will campaign again in Georgia on Sunday and Andrew Yang, who is Taiwanese American and ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020, spent time in the state mobilizing Asian Americans ahead of the elections next month.
But Democrats aren’t the only ones courting Georgia’s Asian American voters.
Congresswomen-elect Young Kim and Michelle Steel of California visited Georgia this month to rally Asian American voters in support of the Republican senators David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler. Kim and Steel, who became two of the first three Korean Americans elected to Congress, both defeated incumbent Democrats to reclaim pieces of Orange county that Republicans lost in the “blue wave” of 2018.
Advocacy groups say they are redoubling their efforts in the final days before polls close, knocking on doors, circulating polling information and providing language assistance.
“It’s really important to make sure that people understand what’s at stake,” Aisha Yaqoob Mahmood, the executive director of the Asian American Advocacy Fund, which works to elect progressive candidates. “Not just in the political dynamics of flipping the US Senate, because I don’t necessarily think that resonates as a message – but what we could achieve if we help elect two Democratic senators from Georgia.”
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Few people have been as closely involved with family separation and reunification as attorney Erika Pinheiro, one of the leaders of the immigration advocacy group Al Otro Lado.And though Joe Biden’s win in the presidential election puts an end to Donald Trump’s laser focus on restricting all forms of immigration, Pinheiro wants people to understand that the fight for immigrant rights in the country is far from over.“There’s still a lot of work to do,” Pinheiro, Al Otro Lado’s litigation and policy director, said. “It’s not a given that everyone will be reunified, or families, babies are going to be let out of cages – family detention still exists.”Al Otro Lado has offices on both sides of the border, where it assists immigrants with family reunification, detention, access to healthcare, asylum, deportation and other issues.It was founded in 2011 and was volunteer run until Trump won the 2016 election on an anti-immigrant platform. The group’s leaders then committed to the work as a full-time, paying job.It has been a grueling four years. Pinheiro said the Trump administration caused her to question how she could be an attorney when laws were changing each week and the government did not seem interested in following the ones which remained. “Just the baseline of being able to do our jobs as attorneys was thrown into chaos,” Pinheiro said.There was the added factor of responding to atrocities a tired, exhausted world didn’t want to, or couldn’t, process.“It felt in many instances that it was screaming into the ether about people dying at the border, people suffering all these horrific human rights violations,” she said. “And some of it got through to the public, like family separation, but a lot of it didn’t.”With Covid, the group’s work has expanded even more.“We also have had to do emergency food assistance, quarantine housing for medically vulnerable families,” Pinheiro said. “We’ve supported a dozen shelters in getting clean water and food and PPE, we have helped raise the capacity of several medical organizations here on the border to make sure our clients would have access to any care.”The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) bars asylum seekers and refugees from the US under an order called Title 42. People who attempt to cross the border are returned, or expelled, back to Mexico, without an opportunity to test their asylum claims. More than 250,000 migrants processed at the US-Mexico border between March and October were expelled, according to US Customs and Border Protection data.The situation is dire. Thousands of asylum-seekers are stuck at the border, uncertain when they will be able to file their claims. The camps they wait in are an even greater public health risk that before.Outside the border, Al Otro Lado has fought for detained migrants to get PPE and medical releases. Prisons are one of the worst possible places to be when there is a contagious disease and deaths in the custody of US immigration authorities have increased dramatically this year. They have also provided supplies to homeless migrants in southern California who have been shut out of public hygiene facilities.Pinheiro said there will be improvements with Trump out of office, but some of the Biden campaign promises to address asylum issues at the border will be toothless until the CDC order is revoked. It’s a point she plans to make in conversations with the transition team.A prime concern for advocates about the Biden administration is that it will include some of the same people from Barack Obama’s administration, which had more deportations than any other president and laid the groundwork for some controversial Trump policies.While it is a worry for Pinheiro, she has hope that the new administration will build something better. “I would hope a lot of those people, and I know for some of them, have been able to reflect on how the systems they built were weaponized by Trump to do things like family separation or detaining children,” she said.Family separation, which has left 545 children still waiting to be reunited with their parents, was a crucial issue for many voters and Pinheiro hopes that energy translates to other immigration policies.“How did you feel when your government committed the atrocity of family separation in your name?” Pinheiro said. “The next step is really understanding that similar and sometimes worse atrocities are still being committed in the name of border security and limiting migration.” More

It is not so much a flyover state as a does-the-train-have-to-stop-here? state. Most travellers between New York and Washington do not disembark at the Joseph R Biden Jr Railroad Station in Wilmington, Delaware. Perhaps they will now take a second look.The station is where Biden launched his first, ill-fated campaign for US president in June 1987 and where, standing on a deserted platform 33 years later, proud local Democrats cast the votes that clinched his nomination at a virtual convention. Now, with Biden as president-elect, this unglamorous station, city and state are enjoying a rare moment in the sun.“If there’s anything that people know about Wilmington it’s that there’s an Amtrak station,” said Xavier Teixido, a local restaurateur who has served Biden often. “We don’t really have an airport of any note but the Amtrak station is like our airport. Every Acela [train] that comes up and down the east coast stops in Wilmington, Delaware, and I think there’s a reason for that. It’s probably Joe and our other senators that commute to work.”Delaware is the second smallest state in the union after Rhode Island. It does not have a professional sports team, signature cuisine or claim to fame except as a corporate tax haven. Wilmington, founded by Swedes in 1638, was long dominated by credit card companies and the chemical giant DuPont. Biden does not have much competition as Delaware’s most famous man.Caesar Rodney, who signed the declaration of independence, is described by the History Channel’s website as “the founding father you’ve probably never heard of”. A slave owner, his statue was removed from Wilmington’s Rodney Square this summer amid the uprising over racial injustice.John Eleuthère du Pont built Delaware’s natural history museum to display his collections of 66,000 birds and 2m seashells. He was also a wrestling enthusiast who shot dead an Olympic champion in 1996 and spent the rest of his life in prison (the story was given a chilly retelling in the film Foxcatcher starring Steve Carell).A recent New York Times article argued that Wilmington, which has a population of just 72,000, has spent centuries in obscurity and long struggled to define its identity, with officials devising earnest slogans such as “A Place to Be Somebody”, then “Wilmington, in the middle of it all” and most recently. “It’s Time”.But with Biden, it can finally call one of its own “Mr President”. His victory speech at the Chase Center on the Riverfront, and his transition events unveiling cabinet picks at the Queen theatre, have drawn thousands of supporters and journalists. Suddenly thrust centre stage, the city and state are emerging – at least momentarily – from the daunting shadow of New York, Washington and neighbouring Philadelphia.Teixido, owner of Harry’s Savoy Grill and Kid Shelleen’s Charcoal House & Saloon, said: “I really do think it’s put Delaware on the map.”Teixido, 67, was born in Paraguay but grew up in Wilmington and after, a few years in Philadelphia and New Orleans, came back for good. “It’s going to be ‘reporting from Wilmington, Delaware’ or ‘Joe Biden did this’ or ‘These people came to Wilmington’,” he predicted. “I’m sure he’s proud of this state and he’s going to show it off the best he can. At a time that things seem so dark and so bleak, it’s nice to have a little light shone on the place that you live and work. Not everyone has that.”The aura of the presidency can lift small-town America out of obscurity. Dwight Eisenhower, from Abilene, Kansas, once remarked: “The proudest thing I can claim is that I am from Abilene.” Jimmy Carter still lives in Plains, the small Georgia farm town where he was born, and Bill Clinton, from Hope, Arkansas, accepted the 1992 Democratic nomination by declaring: “I still believe in a place called Hope.”Now it is the turn of Biden’s modest home to get name-checked on the nightly news. Michael Purzycki, the Democratic mayor of Wilmington, said: “Joe’s being elected has created this curiosity about Wilmington that people just never had before. All of a sudden, there’s mystique about Wilmington. Here he is broadcasting from the Queen – where’s the Queen? What’s on Market Street? What are the restaurants down there? What’s special about this place? Where does Joe live? Where did he grow up?”It might be said to be fitting that Donald Trump – whose brash personality is reflected by garish Trump Tower in New York and opulent Mar-a-Lago in Florida – is about to be supplanted by a man who honed his common touch in Delaware, a low-key state whose riches are less instantly obvious. The place is a measure of a man.Purzycki, 75, who shared a dormitory with Biden at the University of Delaware and was a classmate of his sister, added: “Joe can expound on subjects but he’s a modest person, he’s not a person with this massive ego that needs to be stroked all the time and I think if you could take a look at our state, we’re an understated place.“Our train station is small, our convention space is much smaller than you find in the big cities. We have an intimate scale to the city, which I think is a pretty accurate reflection of Joe Biden.”In fact Biden was born in Scranton, a hardscrabble city in neighbouring Pennsylvania, but when he was 10, his father moved the family to Delaware to work as a car salesman. Biden went on to represent the state for 36 years in the US Senate, famously commuting by train, before becoming Barack Obama’s vice-president.The size of the state was ideal for Biden to hone his style of retail politics; it does not take long to find someone whom he has looked in the eye or whose hand he has shaken. Local activist Coby Owens noted that his uncle, Herman Holloway Sr, Delaware’s first Black legislator, was a close acquaintance of the future president.Owens said: “Because we’re a small city, I feel as though we’re connected. We have a very strong sense of self and unity. Everyone knows each other. In some neighbourhoods in the big cities you grew up on your block so you know people on your block. In the city of Wilmington, you know people throughout the city and that’s one of the unique things.”Although Biden’s vice-presidency was something of a dress rehearsal, Owens, 25, has already noticed an increase in TV crews, Secret Service agents and the Biden motorcade, as well as supporters eager to pay homage. “It’s cool to see that we are literally the centre of democracy right now and, each time he rolls out a new cabinet member, having them come to Wilmington and speak here just brings joy to my heart.”For the out-of-towners, what else is there do to? Owens suggests attractions including beaches in Sussex county, picturesque churches and parks and the Christiana shopping mall, which includes a popular Apple store. “But we don’t have an Empire State building, we don’t have a Rockefeller. In Washington you have the monuments; we don’t have that here. So I think it’s less of a draw towards that and more a draw towards the shopping and the vacation areas.”Delaware does boast DuPont family mansions, museums and gardens that are open to visitors. Local tourism officials are also hoping for a post-pandemic boom courtesy of their local hero. Liz Keller, director of the Delaware Tourism Office, which has one of the smallest budgets of any such office in the country, admitted that “we can’t buy the type of media exposure” that comes from Biden’s election.“It 100% has benefited our state tourism industry and we’re definitely looking forward to welcoming people and also sharing with them some of the Biden favourite spots: some of the dining locations that we know the family likes to visit to get a taste of Delaware.”It is surely only a matter of time before a Biden statue is erected, perhaps at the railway station he made famous. But some residents are still rather skeptical about the state’s tourism charms.Cris Barrish, 62, a veteran newspaper journalist now based in PBS affiliate WHYY’s Wilmington office, said: “I’ve travelled to Europe, I’ve been up the east coast a lot, I’ve been north-west, I’ve been to Canada, I’ve been to New England and I can’t imagine wanting to be a tourist and like, ‘Let’s go to Delaware for a trip’ – unless you were going to the beach for a week. l’d put those beach towns up against almost anywhere but the Caribbean or the Mediterranean.” More

At the beginning of 2021, millions of Americans appear to disagree about one of the most basic facts of their democracy: that Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election.The consequences of Donald Trump’s repeated, baseless claims of voter fraud will come in several waves, researchers who study disinformation say, even if Trump ultimately hands over power and leaves the White House. And there is no quick or easy way to fix this crisis, they warn. Because when it comes to dealing with disinformation, simply repeating the facts doesn’t do much to change anyone’s mind.In the short term, Trump’s false claims about election fraud have weakened Biden’s ability to address the coronavirus pandemic. “If only 20% of the population is like, ‘You’re not my president, I’m going to double down on my mask resistance,’ or ‘I’m going to continue to have parties over the holidays,’ that means we are going to be even less likely to bring this thing under control,” said Whitney Phillips, a professor of communications at Syracuse University.Over the longer term, the president’s falsehoods may also undermine Biden’s overall governing capability, just as the racist “birther” conspiracy theory, another false claim spread by Trump, helped fuel political resistance to Barack Obama’s presidency. And the damage to Americans’ basic trust in their democracy may have effects far beyond electoral politics.“What does it look like if we don’t have a shared sense of reality?” said Claire Wardle, the executive director of First Draft, a group that researches and combats disinformation. “We’ve seen more conspiracy theories moving mainstream. There’s an increasing number of people who do not believe in the critical infrastructure of a society. Where does that end?”How we got hereAmerica’s current disinformation crisis is the culmination of more than two decades of pollution of the country’s information ecosystem, Wardle said. The spread of disinformation on social media is one part of that story, but so is the rise of alternative rightwing media outlets, the lack of investment in public media, the demise of local news outlets, and the replacement of shuttered local newspapers with hyper-partisan online outlets.This “serious fragmentation” of the American media ecosystem presents a stark contrast with, say, the UK, where during some weeks of the pandemic, 94% of the UK adult population, including 86% of younger people, tuned into the BBC, a taxpayer-funded broadcaster, according to official statistics.And the left and right in the US don’t merely have different sets of media outlets for their different audiences: they have also developed distinct models of information-sharing, Wardle said. Mainstream media outlets still follow a traditional top-down broadcast model: an authoritative source produces the news and sends it out to consumers. The rightwing media ecosystem, which developed through talk radio, on the other hand, operates as a network of media personalities interacting with each other, “a community telling stories to their own community”, Wardle said.Trump has built on that, embracing what Kate Starbird, a University of Washington professor who studies disinformation, on Twitter called a model of “participatory disinformation”.“Trump didn’t just prime his audience to be receptive to false narratives of voter fraud, he inspired them to create them … and then echoed those false claims back at them,” she wrote.Participatory disinformation might actually be “stickier” and more effective than “top-down propaganda”, Starbird argued, in part because of the “positive reinforcement” of Trump supporters seeing their “‘discoveries’ repeated by their media & political celebrities”.When their platforms turned out to be ideal environments for making and monetizing participatory disinformation, social media companies were slow to curb its spread.Companies like Twitter and Facebook did not begin putting warning labels on Trump’s false voting fraud claims until very close to the election. Even then, only a handful of his tweets were flagged, Wardle noted, while Trump sent dozens of other tweets pushing the same story and media outlets continued to report on his statements, creating a powerful national narrative about fraud despite the attempts at factchecking.The social media platforms’ decision to finally flag some of Trump’s disinformation right before a consequential election also may have had its own damaging political consequences. “They spent so much time refusing to moderate content that what they’re doing now feels like the worst kind of censorship,” Joan Donovan, the research director at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, said. “If they had been doing that for years, it wouldn’t be so shocking.”A new approach?The rapid spread of Trump’s election lies should be a “wake-up call” for the “well-intentioned people” who think that disinformation can be cured by providing “more quality information”, such as encouraging people to eat “more spinach instead of chocolate”, Wardle, who has conducted training sessions for journalists on how to understand and deal with disinformation, said.“We have an emotional relationship to information. It is not rational,” Wardle said. But people who work in the “quality information space”, Wardle’s term for journalists, scientists, researchers and factcheckers, still often act as if information-processing were fundamentally rational, rather than deeply tied to feelings and the way a person expresses their identity.It’s crucial to understand that the way people process information is through entire narratives, not individual facts, Wardle said. Trying to combat disinformation through factchecking or debunking individual false claims just turns into an endless, fruitless game of “whack-a-mole”.Take the New York Times’ banner headline a week after the election: “Election Officials Nationwide Find No Fraud”. The story cited election officials from both political parties in dozens of states.But that reporting, though valuable, wasn’t likely to change many minds, Phillips, the communications professor, said.“There is an enormous percentage of the population who sees the word ‘election official’ and actually, in their brains, decodes that as liberal, anti-Trump,” she said. “If you’re disinclined to trust institutions, who cares what election officials are saying, because they’re corrupt, they’re in bed with Biden and the fake news media.“The impulse to throw facts at these problems is really strong, and it’s understandable,” she said “But simply saying what the facts are is not going to convince minds that aren’t already open.”Conspiracy theorists, in particular, tend not to be very open to falsification of their claims, added Deen Freelon, an associate professor at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill who studies social media and politics. “Almost any new piece of evidence or fact can be converted to the conspiracy theory perspective.”Research has also shown that disinformation and conspiracy theories are often deeply intertwined with racial prejudice and hatred, he added. Some of this year’s most dangerous disinformation, about the seriousness of coronavirus pandemic, which disproportionately killed black Americans, and about Trump supposedly winning the election, based on the argument that votes in majority-black cities were fraudulent and should not be counted, were clearly influenced by white Americans’ racial views, he noted.It’s no accident, Freelon said, that some of the same people suggesting Covid is a myth are also arguing that black votes are illegitimate.‘A lot of the country’s been taken’While it is possible to engage with people who believe deeply in false narratives, and sometimes change their minds, that work is most successful on an individual basis, with people who know each other well, experts said.It’s helpful to understand someone’s fundamental framework for viewing the world, including whom they view as the “good guys” and the “bad guys”, in order to understand what kind of additional information might sway them, Phillips said.“The other thing that makes people move on this – it’s corny – is love,” Freelon added. “People who love you, your family, people who are willing to engage.”But disinformation is also sustained by personal relationships.“Nearly all conspiracy theories are supported by social connections and ties. It’s not just one person subscribing to this in isolation, but a network of people who support each other in their beliefs,” Freelon said. “Leaving the group means at a minimum betraying those friends and cutting those social ties.”There are other emotional barriers to people changing their minds.“Nobody anywhere likes to feel like they’ve been duped,” said Shafiqah Hudson, an author and researcher who has studied online disinformation campaigns. “We will fight tooth and nail as humans to avoid feeling foolish. That’s why you see people double down. Nobody wants to feel like they’ve been taken, but a lot of the country’s really been taken.”While personal relationships can help to combat disinformation, many Americans have simply given up trying to fight relatives’ false beliefs.During the holidays in the US, “people are muting their uncles [on social media] or refusing to talk to their mom,” Wardle said.“I am worried,” she said. “If you have two different senses of reality, with two different sets of actors who don’t trust the other side, who are not open to listening to the other side, that’s not how democracy functions.” More

Jonathan Freedland, Kenya Evelyn, Lauren Gambino and Richard Wolffe look ahead to what we can expect from the first year of Joe Biden’s presidency

How to listen to podcasts: everything you need to know

Jonathan Freedland, Kenya Evelyn, Lauren Gambino and Richard Wolffe say goodbye to 2020 and tee up what is likely to be an incredibly interesting 12 months ahead. What will Joe Biden be able to do in his first year? Who will control the Senate? Who will enter the race to take over from Nancy Pelosi? And what will Donald Trump and his family do when they leave the White House on 20 January? Send us your questions and feedback to [email protected] Help support the Guardian by going to gu.com/supportpodcasts More

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The Republican senator David Perdue of Georgia will quarantine after being exposed to someone infected with Covid-19, taking him off the campaign trail just days before a fiercely-contested runoff election to keep his seat.
The senator was notified on Thursday that he had come into “close contact with someone on the campaign who tested positive for Covid-19”, according to a statement released by his campaign.
“Both Senator Perdue and his wife tested negative today, but following his doctor’s recommendations and in accordance with CDC guidelines, they will quarantine,” the statement said.

David Perdue
(@Perduesenate)
Statement from our campaign: pic.twitter.com/3U3TJ9Va9l

December 31, 2020

The campaign did not specify how long the senator planned to quarantine. Donald Trump is expected to hold a rally in support of the Republican candidates in Georgia on Monday, the eve of the runoff elections that will determine control of the Senate.
Perdue is being challenged by Jon Ossoff while the senator Kelly Loeffler, who was appointed to her seat last December, faces Raphael Warnock. Neither Perdue or Loeffler cleared the 50% threshold required to win their seats outright, triggering the runoffs on 5 January.
If Perdue and Loeffler lose their races, the Senate chamber would be evenly divided between the parties, with Kamala Harris serving as the tie-breaking vote when she takes up her office of vice-president. Polling suggests the contests are close and that the candidates’ fates are likely bound up together.
The twin elections have drawn a surge of national attention after Joe Biden became the first Democratic presidential candidate since 1992 to carry the state. In a sign of that enthusiasm, more than 2.8 million voters in Georgia have already cast their ballots – record participation for a runoff election.
Harris will visit Georgia to campaign for the Democrats on Sunday, while Biden will hold an event on Monday. More

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The top infectious disease expert in the US, Anthony Fauci, called on the federal government on Thursday to deploy more resources to vaccinate Americans after the country missed its goal to get 20 million people inoculated by the end of the year.
As overworked, underfunded state public health departments scrambled to administer the vaccines, some senior citizens waited overnight to receive their first dose in Florida.
“We would have liked to see it run smoothly and have 20m doses into people today, by the end of 2020, which was the projection,” Fauci said.
“Obviously it didn’t happen, and that’s disappointing,” he told NBC in an interview.
The US failure to meets its end-of-year vaccine distribution goal comes as concerns grow about the newly identified variant of Covid-19 circulating in the UK, which was reported to have reached the US this week, with cases in Colorado and California.
More than 14m vaccine doses had been distributed in the US, but only 2.1 million people have been vaccinated, said leaders of the federal vaccine program, Operation Warp Speed, at a Wednesday news conference.
The chief adviser to Operation Warp Speed, Moncef Slaoui, said: “We know it should be better and we are working hard to make it better.”
Terry Beth Hadler was so eager to get vaccinated that the 69-year-old piano teacher stood in line overnight in a parking lot in Florida with hundreds of other senior citizens.
She waited 14 hours and a brawl nearly erupted before dawn on Tuesday when people cut in line outside the library in Bonita Springs where officials were offering shots on a first-come, first-served basis to those 65 or older.
“I’m afraid that the event was a super-spreader,” she said. “I was petrified.”
Overworked, underfunded state public health departments are scrambling to patch together plans for administering vaccines. Counties and hospitals have taken different approaches, leading to long lines, confusion, frustration and jammed phone lines.
A multitude of logistical concerns have complicated the process of trying to beat back the scourge that has killed over 340,000 Americans. More

Donald Trump returned to Washington on Thursday, abruptly cutting short a holiday retreat to his private south Florida resort as the president’s allies on Capitol Hill prepare to mount a last-ditch challenge to Joe Biden’s election victory.The president had reportedly been in a stormy mood since his arrival at Mar-a-Lago, where he decamped days before Christmas and was originally expected to remain through the New Year’s Eve celebrations.It was not clear what triggered the president’s change of plans. He declined to answer questions upon boarding for his flight back to the White House on Thursday morning.But hours before the White House announced that Trump would spend New Year’s Eve in Washington, the Republican senator Josh Hawley of Missouri announced that he would object to the electoral college result when Congress meets on 6 January to affirm Biden as the winner of November’s presidential election.Trump had been goading his most loyal backers in Congress to stage a final intervention on the floor of the House to try to overturn the results of the election.The effort to keep Trump in power is all but destined to fail, but it will test Republicans’ loyalty to the president, who maintains a vice-like grip on their party, even after Americans voted to remove him from office after a single term.Many Senate Republicans had hoped to avoid such a showdown over the certification process, typically a formality. The move by Hawley, a conservative freshman believed to have presidential ambitions, will force his colleagues to publicly affirm or oppose the election results.Trump lost several battleground states by clear margins. His volley of lawsuits alleging widespread voter fraud in six states he lost have been almost uniformly dismissed, including by the supreme court.Officials at local and national level declared it the most secure election in American history, and the electoral college voted earlier this month to certify Biden’s 306-232 win.And yet Trump has refused to concede, spending his last holiday season as president fuming over his loss.On Twitter, the president continued to amplify conspiracy theories about voter fraud and lashed out at Republican officials who have refused his demands to overturn his loss in their states.On Wednesday, he called on the Republican governor of Georgia, Brian Kemp, to resign even though multiple recounts affirmed Biden’s narrow, historic victory in the state.Trump’s premature departure from Mar-a-Lago came amid growing concern in Washington that Iran may be planning further military retaliation ahead of the first anniversary of the US killing of the top Iranian military commander Qassem Suleimani on 3 January.His return also comes a day after the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, effectively denied Trump’s demand that Congress increase the size of coronavirus relief checks to Americans from $600 to $2,000.Trump for days delayed signing the massive stimulus package – threatening a government shutdown – over his insistence that the legislation include the $2,000 checks. Trump ultimately relented, but continued to press Republican leaders, calling their inaction “pathetic” and a political “death wish”.On Wednesday, McConnell said there was “no realistic path” for the Senate to pass a House bill that would raise the amount of money disbursed to American families grappling with the public health and economic toll of the virus. The Senate is also preparing to override Trump’s veto of a military defense bill that was passed with overwhelming bipartisan support.As the pandemic rages, officials in Colorado and California announced the discovery of a new and possibly more contagious variant of the coronavirus, while the vaccine rollout fell behind its goals amid complaints of chaos and underfunding for states, Trump maintained a relatively low public profile during the holiday break, remaining mostly out of view.He made no public comment about the Christmas Day bombing in Nashville, nor the death of a newly elected Republican congressman, Luke Letlow, from complications related to Covid-19.Instead, Trump has remained fixated on undermining the results of the November election since he arrived at Mar-a-Lago on 23 December, accompanied by the first lady, Melania Trump.Already sour, his mood was darkened further when he saw the renovations to his private quarters at the club, which had been overseen by his wife in an effort to prepare their family for life after the White House, according to CNN.Trump’s earlier than expected departure means the president will not attend the resort’s annual New Year’s Eve party, a lavish, black tie affair he and his family traditionally attend.According to CNN, as many as 500 reservations had already been confirmed for the event.The network reported that the party is expected to go ahead without the guest of honor, despite a sharp rise in coronavirus cases and pleas from public health officials to stay home and limit the size of holiday gatherings. 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