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      US ‘turning the corner’ on pandemic but pressure grows to help other nations

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      The US is approaching a turning point where Covid vaccinations are sharply reducing infection and hospitalization rates, key figures in the fight against the disease said on Sunday, though the Biden administration is facing mounting pressure to do more to help other nations still in the grip of the disease.“We are turning the corner,” said Jeffrey Zients, the White House Covid response coordinator. With about 58% of adult Americans having received at least one shot of vaccine, and with some 113 million people now fully vaccinated, the country was on track to meet Joe Biden’s goal of 70% of the population at least partially vaccinated by 4 July, he said.“I think everyone is tired, and wearing a mask can be a pain. But we are getting there, and the light at the end of the tunnel is brighter and brighter,” Zients said, speaking on CNN’s State of the Union show.Anthony Fauci struck a similar upbeat note on ABC News’s This Week. The nation’s top infectious diseases expert said it was time to start loosening guidelines and allowing Americans to start enjoying the benefits of vaccination.“Yes we do need to start being more liberal as we get more people vaccinated,” Fauci said. But he added that the battle was still on to get the overwhelming proportion of the population vaccinated, because when that happened “the virus has nowhere else to go”.The daily load of new Covid cases has plummeted with the advent of vaccines in the US, from a seven-day average of more than 250,000 per day in January to the current average of about 43,000. Hospitalisations and deaths are also dramatically down.But as the US begins to feel the benefits of widespread vaccination, other parts of the world are still mired in the depths of the pandemic. The World Health Organization (WHO) has called the inequity in access to vaccines “grotesque” and a “moral outrage”.The WHO has pointed out that across the globe the past two weeks have seen more cases recorded than in the entire first six months of the pandemic, with India bearing the brunt. Daily cases are rising at alarming rates across south Asia, and observers are especially worried about Nepal, Sri Lanka and the Maldives.India continues to smash global records for new cases – more than 400,000 – and deaths (3,915). The country is grappling with dire shortages of oxygen and other essential hospital supplies.Last month Biden promised that the US would send oxygen-related supplies and vaccine materials to India. The US has also indicated it will provide up to 60m doses of AstraZeneca vaccine to other countries struggling to protect their people from the virus, an act of altruism arguably diminished by the fact that the AstraZeneca vaccine is not approved for use in the US.In addition, the Biden administration has backed the campaign to waive patents on vaccines to allow low-income countries to make their own versions.Despite these recent concessions, Biden has come under intense pressure to do more to help ailing nations. In the early weeks of his presidency he refused to budge from the position that the US would only send vaccines abroad once all Americans had had the chance of being immunised.On Sunday, Fauci called on the manufacturers of vaccines in the US to scale up production “in a great way” to allow large quantities of supplies to reach India quickly. He said the ambition would be for “literally hundreds of millions of doses” destined for India and other needy countries.Asked whether waiving intellectual property rights on the patents would prevent the big US companies from making more vaccines for transport abroad, Fauci said “I don’t think that’s the case. They can scale up. I think the waiving of the patents is not going to necessarily interfere with that right now.”The contrast between countries in Africa where only 1% of the population is vaccinated and the US where almost 60% of adults have received at least one shot is all the more glaring given that at home in the US the emphasis now is not on accessing supplies of vaccines but on overcoming vaccine hesitancy. Several states are turning away allotted vaccines because demand is so low.Fauci said the group of those who were “recalcitrant” was relatively small. The Biden administration was seeking to overcome resistance among them by making vaccinations extremely easy to obtain, through walk-in pharmacies and mobile units, he said.The other method being pursued was to use “trusted messengers” – whether sports or entertainment stars, clergy or family doctors. They would spread the word that vaccines were a safe way of getting back to what Fauci described as “what we used to remember as ‘normal’ before all this happened”. More

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      A mother’s happy day: military spouse deported by Trump returns to family

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      Three years ago Alejandra Juarez fell victim to Donald Trump’s cruelty as the wife of a decorated US Marine Corps veteran and mother of two young US citizen daughters was deported to Mexico under the former president’s zero-tolerance immigration policies.On Saturday Juarez will rejoin her family in Florida as one of the first beneficiaries of a humanitarian program set up by Joe Biden’s administration to reunify parents Trump separated from their children.But while Juarez’s Mother’s Day weekend reunion with daughters Pamela, 19, Estela, 11, and husband Temo will close a lengthy, painful journey of isolation and depression, she sees it as a door opening for other families torn apart by deportation.“I’m happy this is behind me and my family, and hoping this will lead to a permanent solution not only for military spouses like myself, but for everyone,” she told the Guardian from Mérida, Mexico, where she has been living since being forced from her home in Davenport, Florida, in 2018.“I hope it will have a domino effect and bring many more people back.”The Biden administration’s family reunification taskforce was set up by the new president’s executive order in February and began returning some of those “unjustly separated at the US-Mexico border” during the Trump era this week by granting them “humanitarian parole”.The numbers, however, are uncertain. The homeland security department (DHS) taskforce has been working to identify cases, but admits finding them all will be a lengthy process. It is scheduled to deliver its first report on 2 June.Also unclear is how many military families were affected by what Biden has called the “human tragedy” of separations during the four years Trump was in office. Federal agencies do not record military service in immigration cases, but a 2018 report by the advocacy group American Families United estimated that up to 11,800 active service men and women, all US citizens or permanent residents, had a spouse vulnerable to deportation.Alejandro Mayorkas, the homeland security secretary who is also the taskforce’s chair, said this week’s first wave of reunifications was “just the beginning”.“Many more will follow, and we recognize the importance of providing these families with the stability and resources they need to heal,” he said, noting the taskforce was “exploring options” for long-term legal stability for reunified families.Juarez, 41, and her 43-year-old husband Cuauhtemoc, known as Temo, were both born in Mexico. But while he came to the US legally as a child and was naturalized in 2002, shortly before a 16-month deployment in Iraq, she spent the 18 years of their marriage until her deportation undocumented.As a teenager she was caught crossing the border illegally and chose to sign a document in English she said she didn’t understand and return to Mexico voluntarily instead of being placed in detention. The document permanently forfeited her right to legal status, which she did not discover until after her marriage.She returned to the US and lived anonymously in Florida with her husband until a traffic stop in 2013 exposed her undocumented status. Even then, under the more relaxed policies of Barack Obama’s administration, she was allowed to stay with twice-yearly check-ins with immigration authorities.Juarez self-deported in 2018 after Trump implemented his no-tolerance approach, and before authorities could enforce a removal order issued against her. She rented an apartment in Mexico with Estela while her husband remained in Florida to run his roofing business and allow Pamela to finish high school, but with money running out and two households to run, visits to Mexico became less frequent.When the coronavirus pandemic struck, Juarez said, her jobs teaching English slowed up and Estela returned to Florida. The knowledge her daughters were growing up without their mother, she said, caused her depression for which she needed therapy.Darren Soto, a Florida Democratic US congressman, lobbied the White House for Juarez to be allowed to return, and has introduced the Protect Patriot Spouses Act to Congress to protect military families from deportations.“President Trump’s administration was an aberration in American history with regard to immigration. Now we have humanitarian considerations, which are American values, reincorporated into our federal government,” said Soto, who also backs the American Families United Act that would allow some undocumented immigrants with US citizen family members to stay.“It’s been a long time coming, but Alejandra never gave up on us and we never gave up on her. They’ve missed almost three years of cherished memories together and it’s been traumatic for all of them.”Juarez said she was grateful for the efforts of Soto, her immigration lawyers and daughter Estela, who was one of her mother’s biggest cheerleaders. The 11-year-old excoriated Trump at last year’s Democratic national convention, reading a letter in which she told him: “You tore our world apart.”In January, she appealed for Biden’s help in an emotional video in which she likened her father’s military service to that of the new president’s late son Beau. Estela, Juarez said, is documenting the family’s story in a forthcoming book titled Until Someone Listens.For now, Juarez said, her intention is making up for lost time.“They need my cooking and they already told me what they want for breakfast on Sunday, so I’ll go grocery shopping like I always did, make breakfast for all of them and go to church like we used to,” she said. “I just want to enjoy my house and my family again.” More

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      To understand why Joe Biden has shifted left, look at the people working for him | Joel Wertheimer

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      In president Joe Biden’s first address to Congress last week, he celebrated the $1.9tn relief plan that passed within the first days of his presidency and proposed an ambitious $4tn plan for family care, green infrastructure, education and jobs that Democrats might have been surprised to hear from even Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders. To understand how Biden, the 78-year-old self-proclaimed moderate, came to push such an ambitious and progressive domestic policy agenda, you can start by looking at the young lanyard-wearing staffers who populate the West Wing and Old Executive Office Building.Policy decisions in Washington are made by the principals – the president, the senators and the cabinet secretaries – but their decisions are significantly constrained by the information they receive. I served as associate staff secretary to President Obama from 2015 until the end of his term, building his briefing book and ensuring the appropriate staff edited and commented on the memos he received, and I saw how this information shaped the president’s choices. The president’s staff give the president a policy menu of memos, data and updates on government programmes. Extending the menu analogy, presidential decision-making looks a lot more like choosing from a few items on the prix fixe than dictating a specific meal to a private chef.And what the meal looks like depends on how it’s described. Was the American economy strong for working Americans in 2015 because unemployment was low, or was the economy not nearly at full employment because the employment-to-population ratio had not recovered sufficiently from the Great Recession? That depends on the views of the members of the Council of Economic Advisers preparing data memos for the president. Should the administration pursue a carbon tax because it is the right thing to do even if it is unpopular, or should the administration pursue a more popular and less effective green energy policy? That in turn depends on what the data crunchers throughout the administration tell the principals, and how staff define what’s “popular”: is it what the polls say, or the consensus among Washington pundits?So Biden’s decisions, like those of any president, are heavily influenced by what the staffers who populate the White House tell him. The new cohort of staff, who joined the administration when Biden took office, have fundamentally different views and experiences to those who worked under Obama’s presidency 12 years ago. Indeed, many of those staffers, myself included, saw Republicans block Obama at every turn, threatening to breach the debt ceiling in 2011, refusing to agree to additional stimulus when it was obviously necessary in 2013 and 2014, and preventing Merrick Garland from joining the supreme court. That was before the Republicans led America into a Donald Trump presidency, which exposed their austerity concerns as bogus and ended in an attempted coup.The young Democratic staffers who dominate the White House and Capitol today have never known a Republican party worth negotiating with. They are tired of the Republicans and are convincing their principals to join them. And so a huge, popular stimulus package that includes child tax credits, increased health care subsidies and direct relief payments made its way through the Senate within two months of Biden’s inauguration, without a single Republican vote. When Washington pundits howled that the package was too large and not bipartisan, White House staff simply pointed to public opinion polling demonstrating the overwhelming popularity of the bill, marking a generational shift away from the centralised gatekeepers of Washington’s “Sunday shows”, the political talkshows that have represented and defined the mainstream current of Washington opinion for decades.This generation of staffers haven’t just got different tactics: their ideological commitments are different too. Many of them lived through the Great Recession, have accumulated significantly less wealth than their baby boomer and gen X elders, and therefore have a much more positive view of how government action can improve people’s lives.Beyond their economic experiences, they are also more diverse than their forebears. The Biden administration announced in January that of its first 100appointees, over half were women and people of colour. Even young white Democrats, spurred by activists and protesters across the country, are significantly more progressive on racial justice and immigration issues than they would have been four or eight years ago. Many of the staffers who now occupy the White House worked for the Senate offices and primary campaigns of Warren and Sanders. Those senators didn’t win the primary, but their ideas can still be found in the White House, at least on domestic policy.Yet while Democratic staff largely agree on most domestic issues, from transgender rights to increasing the power of workers, resistance still exists among some principals on other issues. The White House still remains hesitant over marijuana policy, for example; Biden is unwilling to join the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, in calling for a full legalisation of marijuana, and instead favours decriminalisation. And the Biden administration’s clear-sighted, progressive vision for domestic policy doesn’t extend to foreign policy. Unlike the numerous former Warren staffers running around the National Economic Council and treasury departments, the Situation Room doesn’t have leftwing Senate staffers moving through its doors.Still, some good signs are perhaps emerging. The Democrats who now staff the White House came of age knowing that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were failures, and that Washington’s foreign policy “blob” – from the state department to the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies – led us astray. And the agreement on what went wrong has paid some immediate dividends, with Biden overriding the national security apparatus to announce that the United States will leave Afghanistan this year after two long, largely pointless decades spent in the country.Moving beyond what America should not do – like invade Iraq for no good reason – to the question of what America should do on the global stage will require leftwing Democrats to produce a robust, positive vision of American foreign policy. Foreign policy often involves making hard choices from a menu containing only bad options, and the left remains split over how to make those choices. Knee-jerk interventionism is bad, but so are China’s “re-education” camps and anti-democratic actions in Hong Kong. Sanctions often harm the people they’re intended to help, but how else should the United States fight back against the tide of rightwing authoritarianism?As in the domestic sphere, there is space here for a younger, more diverse generation to begin to shift the paradigm. If Biden’s presidency is remembered as more progressive than anyone anticipated, they will have played no small part in making it so. More

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      Biden raises US refugee admissions cap to 62,500 after delay sparks anger

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      Joe Biden has formally raised the US cap on refugee admissions to 62,500 this year, weeks after facing bipartisan blowback for his delay in replacing the record-low ceiling set by Donald Trump.Refugee resettlement agencies have waited for Biden to quadruple the number of refugees allowed into the United States this year since 12 February, when a presidential proposal was submitted to Congress saying he planned to do so.But the presidential determination went unsigned until Monday. Biden said he first needed to expand the narrow eligibility criteria put in place by Trump that had kept out most refugees. He did that last month in an emergency determination, which also stated that Trump’s cap of up to 15,000 refugees this year “remains justified by humanitarian concerns and is otherwise in the national interest”.That brought sharp pushback for not at least taking the symbolic step of authorizing more refugees to enter the US this year, and within hours the White House made a quick course correction. The administration vowed to increase the historically low cap by 15 May – but probably not all the way to the 62,500 Biden had previously outlined.In the end, Biden returned to that figure.“It is important to take this action today to remove any lingering doubt in the minds of refugees around the world who have suffered so much, and who are anxiously waiting for their new lives to begin,” Biden stated before signing the emergency presidential determination.Biden said Trump’s cap “did not reflect America’s values as a nation that welcomes and supports refugees”.But he acknowledged the “sad truth” that the US would not meet the 62,500 cap by the end of the fiscal year in September, given the pandemic and limitations on the country’s resettlement capabilities – some of which his administration has attributed to the Trump administration’s policies to restrict immigration.Biden said it was important to lift the number to show “America’s commitment to protect the most vulnerable, and to stand as a beacon of liberty and refuge to the world”.The move also paves the way for Biden to boost the cap to 125,000 for the 2022 fiscal year, which starts in October.Since the fiscal year began last 1 October, just over 2,000 refugees have been resettled in the US.Refugee resettlement agencies applauded Biden’s action.“We are absolutely thrilled and relieved for so many refugee families all across the world who look to the US for protection,” said Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, the head of Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, one of nine resettlement agencies in the country. “It has a felt like a rollercoaster ride, but this is one critical step toward rebuilding the program and returning the US to our global humanitarian leadership role.”Biden has also added more slots for refugees from Africa, the Middle East and Central America and ended Trump’s restrictions on resettlements from Somalia, Syria and Yemen.“We are dealing with a refugee resettlement process that has been eviscerated by the previous administration and we are still in a pandemic,” said Mark Hetfield, president of Hias, a Maryland-based Jewish non-profit that resettles refugees. “It is a challenge, but it’s important he sends a message to the world that the US is back and prepared to welcome refugees again.” More

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      Biden adviser: president wears mask outdoors out of habit and Covid caution

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      A top White House adviser who made headlines for saying “Covid is the best thing that ever happened” to Joe Biden said on Sunday the president still wears a mask outdoors out of habit, even though federal guidance says he need not do so.This week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said fully vaccinated people need not wear masks outside if alone or not in the company of strangers.Announcing the change at the White House, Biden wore a mask as he walked to the microphone. Asked what message that might send as his administration seeks to overcome widespread resistance to vaccines and public health guidelines, the president said Americans should watch him “take it off and not put it back on until I get inside”.He wore a mask for parts of outdoor appearances in the week that followed.On Sunday, Anita Dunn told CNN’s State of the Union: “I myself found that I was still wearing my mask outdoors this week, because it has become such a matter of habit. I think the president takes the CDC guidelines very seriously. And he’s always taken his role as sending a signal to follow the science very seriously as well.“We do take some extra precautions for him because he is the president of the United States. But I would say that people should follow the CDC guidelines, and they should take advantage of getting the vaccine, getting fully vaccinated, and taking that mask off, particularly as the weather grows so beautiful and we all want to be outside.“It’s a lot more fun to take that outside walk without a mask, that outside bike ride. And I think that as people get vaccinated … they’re enjoying that freedom. So, as we move forward, I think that you will see more and more people … getting the vaccine and realising it’s one big step towards normalcy in this country.”Dunn’s remark about Covid being the “best thing” to happen to Biden was reported by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes in Lucky, a book about the 2020 election. Made to an associate, the authors write, the remark dealt with something “officials believed but would never say in public” as the US reeled under the virus last year.Touting his experience in government and commitment to bipartisan co-operation, Biden beat Donald Trump by more than 7m votes and a clear electoral college result.The Biden White House has set goals for progress on vaccine delivery which have been easily met. This week, Biden said public schools should “probably all be open” in September.Asked if that was a definite goal, Dunn said: “Given the science, if the vaccination programme in this country proceeds, if people do go get their vaccines, he does believe that schools should be able to reopen in September, and reopen safely, following the CDC guidelines.“But he said probably. He did not say absolutely, because we have all seen since, unfortunately, January of 2020, it’s an unpredictable virus.” More

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      Yellen seeks to tamp down concern over US government spending under Biden

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      The US treasury secretary, Janet Yellen, on Sunday sought to tamp down concerns that Joe Biden’s plans on infrastructure, jobs and families will cause inflation, saying spending will be phased in over a decade.“It’s spread out quite evenly over eight to 10 years,” the former chair of the Federal Reserve told NBC’s Meet the Press.She said the Fed would monitor inflation carefully.“I don’t believe that inflation will be an issue but if it becomes an issue, we have tools to address it,” Yellen said. “These are historic investments that we need to make our economy productive and fair.”Addressing Congress on Wednesday, Biden said his “American Jobs Plan is a blue collar blueprint to build America. That’s what it is.”He has said his plans will be paid for by a series of tax increases on the wealthiest Americans, less than 1% of the population, and by raising corporate taxes. Some Democrats have expressed concerns such increases will slow economic growth.“We’re proposing changes to the corporate tax system that would close loopholes,” Yellen said.“This comes also in the context of global negotiations to try to stop the decades-long race to the bottom among countries in competing for business by lowering their corporate tax rates. And we feel that will be successful.The president has pledged that no family earning under $400,000 will pay a penny more in taxes“The president has pledged that no family earning under $400,000 will pay a penny more in taxes. And we’ve been assiduous in sticking to that pledge.”Republicans oppose corporate tax increases. The Louisiana senator Bill Cassidy told Fox News Sunday: “Academics would say if you raise taxes on corporations, you have lower wages, you have less investment, and you hurt shareholders. Think pension funds.“Now, if it’s OK to have lower wages for working people, it’s a blue collar thing. If it’s OK to have less investment, it’s a blue collar thing. But if you want higher wages, if you want more investment, if you want more efficient deployment of capital, than it’s anti-blue collar.”Speaking to CBS’s Face the Nation, the White House chief of staff, Ron Klain, countered Cassidy’s claims.Corporations, he said, “got that giant tax cut in 2017 [under Donald Trump]. What we’re talking about is just rolling some of that tax cut back. So we’re talking about putting the rate back up to 28%. It was 35% before that tax cut came. So corporates would still have a lower tax rate than the rate they had prior to 2017.“We think that 2017 tax cut didn’t meet its promise. You didn’t see massive investments in [research and development], you didn’t see wages go up. What you saw was CEO pay go up … So we think we can raise those taxes on corporations and fund the things that make the economy grow. Bridges, roads, airports, rail.”Republicans also oppose the scope of Biden’s infrastructure proposals, contending priorities such as expanding green energy, electric cars and elder and child care should not be pursued.“The administration needs to kind of be honest with the American people,” Cassidy said. “If you really want roads and bridges, come where Republicans already are. If you want to … do a lot of other stuff, well that’s a different story. Roads and bridges, we’re a lot closer than you might think.”Yellen would not speculate on whether Biden would accept a bill from Congress that does not include a way to pay for the spending increases he wants.“He has made clear that he believes that permanent increase in spending should be paid for and I agree,” she said. More

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      The first 100 days of Biden were also the first 100 without Trump – that’s telling | Robert Reich

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      By almost any measure, Joe Biden’s first 100 days have been hugely successful. Getting millions of Americans inoculated against Covid-19 and beginning to revive the economy are central to that success.Two-thirds of Americans support Biden’s $1.9tn stimulus plan, already enacted. His infrastructure and family plans, which he outlined on Wednesday night at a joint session of Congress, also have broad backing. The $6tn price tag for all this would make it the largest expansion of the federal government since Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. But for most Americans, it doesn’t feel radical.Rather than bet it all on a single large-scale program such as universal healthcare – which Bill Clinton failed to accomplish and which Barack Obama turned into a target of Republican fearmongering – Biden has picked an array of popular initiatives, such as preschool, public community college, paid family and medical leave, home care and infrastructure repairs, which are harder to vilify.Economists talk about pent-up demand for private consumer goods, caused by the pandemic. Biden is responding to a pent-up demand for public goods. The demand has been there for years but the pandemic has starkly revealed it. Compared with workers in other developed nations, Americans enjoy few if any social benefits and safety nets. Biden is saying, in effect, it’s time we caught up.Even on the fraught issue of race, the contrast with Trump has strengthened Biden’s handBesides, it’s hard for Republicans to paint Biden as a radical. He doesn’t feel scary. He’s old, grandfatherly. He speaks haltingly. He’s humble. When he talks about the needs of average working people, it’s clear he knows them.Biden has also been helped by the contrast to his immediate predecessor – the most divisive and authoritarian personality to occupy the Oval Office in modern memory. Had Biden been elected directly after Obama, regardless of the pandemic and economic crisis, it’s unlikely he and his ambitious plans would seem so benign.In his address to Congress, Biden credited others for the achievements of his first 100 days. They had been accomplished “because of you”, he said, even giving a nod to Republicans. His predecessor was incapable of crediting anyone else for anything.Meanwhile, the Republican party, still captive to its Trumpian base, has no message or policies to counter Biden’s proposals. Donald Trump left it with little more than a list of grievances irrelevant to the practical needs of most Americans: that Trump would have been re-elected but for fraudulent votes and a “deep state” conspiracy, that Democrats are “socialists” and that the “left” is intent on taking away American freedoms.Biden has a razor-thin majority in Congress and must keep every Democratic senator in line if he is to get his plans enacted. But the vacuum on the right has allowed him to dominate the public conversation about his initiatives, which makes passage more likely.Trump is aiding Biden in other ways. Trump’s yawning budget deficits help normalize Biden’s. When Trump sent $1,200 stimulus checks to most Americans last year regardless of whether they had a job, he cleared the way for Biden to deliver generous jobless benefits.Trump’s giant $1.9tn tax cut for big corporations and the wealthy, none of which “trickled down”, make Biden’s proposals to increase taxes on corporations and the wealthy to pay for infrastructure and education seem even more reasonable.Trump’s fierce economic nationalism has made Biden’s “buy American” initiative appear innocent by comparison. Trump’s angry populism has allowed Biden to criticize Wall Street and support unions without causing a ripple.At the same time, Trumpian lawmakers’ refusal to concede the election and their efforts to suppress votes have alienated much of corporate America, pushing executives toward Biden by default.Even on the fraught issue of race, the contrast with Trump has strengthened Biden’s hand. Most Americans were so repulsed by Trump’s overt racism and overtures to white supremacists, especially after the police murder of George Floyd, that Biden’s initiatives to end police brutality and “root out systemic racism”, as he said on Wednesday night, seem appropriate correctives.The first 100 days of the Biden presidency were also the first 100 days of America without Trump, and the two cannot be separated.With any luck, Biden’s plans might prove to be the antidote to Trumpism – creating enough decent-paying working-class jobs, along with benefits such as childcare and free community college, as to forestall some of the rightwing dyspepsia that Trump whipped into a fury. More