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      US could have averted 40% of Covid deaths, says panel examining Trump's policies

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      The US could have averted 40% of the deaths from Covid-19, had the country’s death rates corresponded with the rates in other high-income G7 countries, according to a Lancet commission tasked with assessing Donald Trump’s health policy record.Almost 470,000 Americans have died from the coronavirus so far, with the number widely expected to go above half a million in the next few weeks. At the same time some 27 million people in the US have been infected. Both figures are by far the highest in the world.In seeking to respond to the pandemic, Trump has been widely condemned for not taking the pandemic seriously enough soon enough, spreading conspiracy theories, not encouraging mask wearing and undermining scientists and others seeking to combat the virus’ spread.Dr Mary T Bassett, a commission member and director of Harvard University’s FXB Center for Health and Human Rights, told the Guardian: “The US has fared so badly with this pandemic, but the bungling can’t be attributed only to Mr Trump, it also has to do with these societal failures … That’s not going to be solved by a vaccine.”In a wide-ranging assessment published on Thursday, the commission said Trump “brought misfortune to the USA and the planet” during his four years in office. The stinging critique not only blamed Trump, but also tied his actions to the historical conditions which made his presidency possible.“He was sort of a crowning achievement of a certain period but he’s not the only architect,” said Bassett, “And so we decided it’s important to put him in context, not to minimize how destructive his policy agenda has been and his personal fanning the flames of white supremacy, but to put it in context.”The commission condemned Trump’s response to Covid, but emphasized that the country entered the pandemic with a degraded public health infrastructure. Between 2002 and 2019, US public health spending fell from 3.21% to 2.45% – approximately half the share of spending in Canada and the UK.To determine how many deaths from Covid the US could have avoided, the commission weighted the average death rate in the other G7 countries – Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the UK – and compared it to the US death rate.In another comparison, the commission found if US life expectancy was equivalent to the average in the other G7 countries, 461,000 fewer Americans would have died in 2018.The Lancet commission on public policy and health in the Trump era, launched in April 2017 to catalogue Trump health policies, examines the driving forces of his 2016 election win and offers policy recommendations. The 33 commissioners are from the US, UK and Canada and work in public health, law schools, medicine, unions, indigenous communities and other groups.The commission devotes as much time in the report to its namesake as it does to the conditions that made him possible.A line is drawn from neoliberal policies pushed in the past 40 years, such as those that intensified the drug war and resulted in mass incarceration, to health inequities Trump exacerbated while in office. Many of the connections date back even further, to the colonization of the Americas and the persistence of white supremacy in society.“I really think one of the accomplishments of the report is its historical truth-telling,” said Bassett, New York City’s health commissioner from 2014 to 2018.Trump’s response to documented health inequities and growing inequality was to attack programs and policies intended to make health insurance more affordable and accessible. In Trump’s first three years in office, there were 2.3 million more people without health insurance.Between 2017 and 2018, the health insurance coverage rate decreased by 1.6 percentage points for Latinos – roughly 1.5 million people – and by 2.8 percentage points for Native American and Alaska native people, while remaining stable for the white population, according to the commission.The report not only assesses health policy, but also includes lengthy sections on immigration, Puerto Rico, reproductive rights, racism and the environment. Dr Adam Gaffney, a commission member and Harvard Medical School assistant professor, said: “To only focus on medical care would neglect the many other inequities and injustices that produce health and sickness.”The commission said evidence is growing that Trump’s regulatory rollbacks have increased death and disease. Between 2016 and 2019, the annual number of deaths from environmental and occupational factors increased by more than 22,000 after years of steady decline.The negative consequences of the rescinded regulations disproportionately affected the states which most supported Trump in 2016. These are also states most affected by rollbacks in health insurance coverage, according to the report.The commission did identify a positive in Trump’s domestic agenda: his support for the First Step Act, a prison and sentencing reform bill which reduced mandatory minimum sentences for a number of drug-related crimes among other things.The commission also noted that historical advances usually follow a period of conflict and struggle and included recommendations for healthcare workers to advance progress in the wake of Trump’s presidency.The report includes a list of policy recommendations to address the issues it raised, including providing compensation for descendants of enslaved Africans and indigenous people, raising taxes on the wealthy, reducing defense spending and adopting a single-payer, national healthcare system.Gaffney said: “I hope this report pushes those with power to pursue the necessary policies to make this a healthier and happier nation.” More

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      CDC study recommends double masking to reduce Covid-19 exposure

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      The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has found close-fitting surgical masks worn underneath cloth masks – known as double masking – can significantly enhance protection against Covid-19.This is the first CDC-backed research to recommend “double-masking”, although the nation’s top infectious disease expert, Dr Anthony Fauci, has recommended the public consider the measure in past briefings.“There’s nothing wrong with people wearing two masks,” Fauci said at a press briefing one week before the research was released. “I often myself wear two masks.”The CDC study found the most protective masks fit well around the face “to prevent leakage of air around the masks edges”, and also recommended knotting ear loops near the facial covering portion of the mask to contour the mask closer to the face.The study did not look at the effectiveness of respirators, like N95s, and most health authorities recommend the public continue to reserve respirators for medical personnel.This CDC study compared wearing no mask, a poorly fitted surgical mask, cloth-only mask and double-masking in a simulation of respiratory droplets between two people – a source and a receiver.The study found when people wear a well-fitted surgical mask covered by a cloth mask, they can increase their own protection from aerosol droplets by 90% or more, and that possible transmission is significantly reduced when both parties wore masks.“Universal masking is a highly effective means to slow the spread of Sars-CoV-2 when combined with other protective measures, such as physical distancing, avoiding crowds and poorly ventilated indoor spaces, and good hand hygiene,” the study found.Importantly, the study also had limitations. The findings are not generalizable to men with beards and facial hair, which can interfere with masks, or to children, whose faces are smaller. As well, the study did not compare two surgical masks or two cloth masks, and the study looked at only one type of cloth mask, though there are many types of mask on the market.Fourteen states and Washington DC have universal masking policies. The Joe Biden administration also recently ordered masks be worn on all federal grounds and on domestic transport. Biden called on all Americans to wear masks for the first 100 days of his presidency, calling it a “patriotic duty”.Recent forecasts have also begun to take universal masking into account. If 95% of people wore masks in public, forecasters at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation believe more than 116,000 lives could be saved by 1 June, compared with the institute’s “worst-case” scenario, in which 702,000 people could die from Covid-19.The CDC first recommended the public wear cloth masks in April 2020, about one month after the American north-east was hit hard by the virus. At the time, those recommendations were vague, asking Americans to consider wearing masks, “fashioned from household items or made at home from common materials at low cost”.While the science on face coverings is “advancing rapidly”, a recent review in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences noted face coverings have been worn to contain airborne pathogens since the 13th century. More

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      The Guardian view on Covid relief: ideologies matter in democracies | Editorial

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      When Covid struck, it was governments that decided people could not go to work and governments that took people’s money away. It is now down to governments to decide whether or not to return that money and when to open up the economy. In the US, Democrats want to give generously. While $1.9tn dollars is a lot of money – about the size of Canada’s GDP – it probably is not enough.As Randall Wray of the Levy Institute has pointed out, the US government is engaged in relief, not stimulus, spending. It is offering much-needed assistance to the devastated balance sheets of households, school districts and local governments. Rescuing public services, making sure people don’t starve and building Covid-testing systems is not an economic stimulus but a necessary antidepressant. Reducing the size of the relief package would prolong the recession, which, given the virus’s capacity to surprise, may last longer than the experts predict. President Joe Biden was right to rebuff criticism that Democrats risked overheating the economy, saying the problem was spending too little, not too much. There is slack in the US economy: 400,000 Americans left the labour market in January.Mr Biden aims to control the virus and then create jobs with infrastructure investments to reinvent the post-crisis economy for a zero-carbon world. Call it a spend-then-tax policy. If he succeeds, Mr Biden will go some way to repudiate the conventional economic wisdom that argues that if governments keep borrowing too much, they risk defaulting, will end up printing money and be forced in a panic to put up interest rates. The pandemic revealed this to be bunk. Central banks can keep interest rates low by buying government bonds with money created from thin air. Last year, they bought 75% of all public debt.Within days of assuming power, Mr Biden had a plan, and new thinking, to rebuild a Covid-scarred country. Boris Johnson has little to show after months. His government intends to cut universal credit, raise council tax bills and freeze public-sector pay, weakening household finances. Given this mindset, which has dominated policy since 2010, it is hardly surprising that the £900bn of Bank of England “quantitative easing” money sitting with banks can’t find profits in the real economy. The Bank has “knowledge gaps” about QE. Yet there is truth in the quote attributed to Keynes that “you can’t push on a string” – when demand is weak, monetary policy can do little about it.With interest rates low, no recovery to invest in and no new regulations, UK banks will turn inwards, not outwards. Instead of the City contributing to the productive economy and a just green transition, expect speculation and Ponzi-like balance sheets. It is lobbying to expand lucrative but socially useless activities. In January, Tory peers with City interests argued for a new finance regulator with a “competitiveness” objective – a Trojan horse for deregulation.Central banks are creatures of their legislatures, but have been permitted, for ideological reasons, to work without a social contract. In her recent paper, Revolution Without Revolutionaries, the economist Daniela Gabor warned that unelected technocrats must not be allowed to hand politicians reasons to adopt external constraints that can be blamed for unpopular policies. It is timely advice. The UK will have record peacetime levels of debt. Rishi Sunak says such borrowing is “unsustainable”. Yet UK gilts are a risk-free financial asset, which is why banks crave them.The inequality, financial instability and ecological crises have multiple causes, but their existence is built on radical, free-market economics. It is not the case that the government’s ability to spend is temporary while interest rates remain low, as Mr Sunak claimed. Bond-purchasing programmes can control yields. A system that benefits private finance but subordinates the state and threatens to expose it, post-pandemic, to austerity and elevated levels of unemployment must be resisted. Only those unable or unwilling to believe the evidence of their own eyes would say otherwise. More

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      California’s governor, once praised, faces backlash over pandemic response

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      California’s coronavirus death toll is continuing to climb. Its vaccination rates remain low. And some of its residents are losing faith in their governor.California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, has found himself in an increasingly precarious political position: a Republican-led recall movement is garnering support from far-right groups as well as mainstream Republicans and some Silicon Valley bigwigs. And while the effort is unlikely to succeed in unseating him, even long-term allies are publicly questioning his leadership through this latest, most deadly phase of the crisis.He was hailed as a national hero in the early months of the pandemic, but Newsom’s job rating has plunged in recent weeks. Just under a third of voters polled by the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies rated the governor’s overall handling of the pandemic well, while 44% said he was doing badly. It’s a complete reversal from September, when 49% of those polled by the institute said Newsom was doing an excellent or good job – and 28% rated him poorly.Criticism has come from all sides. Legislators have been divided over his decision to lift regional stay-at-home orders a week after the state surpassed 3m coronavirus cases. Health workers have been dismayed that some of his recent health directives have diverged from established and emerging scientific research. He has bickered with teachers unions and parents over when and how to reopen the state’s public schools. Activists say he is failing Latino and Black residents, Californians with disabilities and essential workers who are dying at disproportionate rates. And jobless Californians, struggling to access unemployment benefits, have cursed the administration’s bureaucratic inertia.For many across the state, Newsom’s announcements on the economy, vaccine distribution or school reopenings have felt increasingly dissonant from their dire realities as the pandemic progressed.Amy Arlund, an ER nurse in the central valley , said she was enraged that hospitals continued to face staff and equipment shortages. “The trust has been broken with especially our government officials, our leaders and the organizations and the agencies that are meant to protect us,” Arlund said. “It feels like we’re expendable.”Four of her coworkers at the Kaiser Fresno hospital have died because of Covid-19, Arlund said, including a fellow nurse who contracted the virus last summer after the hospital ran so short on PPE and staff resorted to using homemade face shields made of plastic sheets and electrical tape.For Héctor Manuel Ramírez, a disability rights advocate in Los Angeles who had worked on a behavioral health taskforce the governor launched last year, a breaking point was Newsom’s announcement that in an effort to speed up vaccine distribution, the state would start prioritizing people by age, rather than a profession or medical history.The news came as Ramírez was preparing funeral arrangements for their brother, Eduardo.Eduardo was 35, and severely immunocompromised due to Aids, so Ramírez, their family and friends had anxiously watched the state’s chaotic vaccine rollout, hoping his turn would come in the nick of time.It didn’t. Eduardo died – the fourth of Ramírez’s family to have succumbed to Covid-19.Ramírez said Newsom had, unlike many of his counterparts in other states, made a strong commitment to addressing health disparities. “I listened to the governor’s coronavirus updates quite regularly, and his words had always brought hope. Now I feel misled, I feel used. I feel like I am without leadership,” they said.“There has been so much fear and desperation in my community,” they added. “Whether it’s intentional or unintentional, it feels like our leaders have forgotten about us.”I feel misled, I feel used. I feel like I am without leadershipCriticism has also mounted over the state’s handling of school reopenings and unemployment aid. As many of the state’s businesses reopen Newsom has found himself caught up in crossfire between parents of 6m public school students who are anxious to get their children back to class and teachers unions who are worried it’s not safe enough to return.Newsom late last year had proposed a $2bn plan to help schools reopen in the spring, but school leaders, unions and lawmakers have said it’s inadequate. In a heated meeting with the Association of California School Administrators last week, Newsom responded to demands that all teachers receive vaccines before returning to in-person schooling: “If we want to find reasons not to open, we’ll find plenty of reasons.”Meanwhile, the state’s unemployment agency has been under fire over a scathing audit last month, which found that as millions of jobless Californias are still to access unemployment benefits the agency paid out more than $11bn on fraudulent claims.At a hearing on Wednesday, lawmakers from both parties were furious that constituents were queuing in snaking lines at food banks and sleeping in their cars while the state held up aid. “Californians are frustrated, they are infuriated, they are fed up,” said Rudy Salas, a Democratic assemblyman representing parts of the rural Central Valley.Making life-and-death decisions about who should get the vaccine first, balancing the need to address the state’s economic crisis alongside its health crisis, discerning what is and isn’t safe amid a once-in-a-century pandemic, is of course, impossibly difficult, said Dr Peter Chin-Hong, an infectious disease specialist at the UCSF medical center in San Francisco. Through much of last year, while Donald Trump denied the severity of the pandemic and hawked false miracle cures, Newsom and other governors became “beacons of leadership for the whole country”, Chin-Hong continued. Another poll, from Morning Consult, found that though Newsom’s job ratings had dipped in recent weeks, he’s more popular now than he was before the pandemic struck.As the pandemic has progressed, people have higher expectations“But as the pandemic has progressed, people have higher expectations,” Chin-Hong said – they expect leaders to explain the reasoning behind public health decisions.Newsom failed to do that two weeks ago, when he suddenly announced that he would be lifting the state’s most restrictive stay-at-home orders, Chin-Hong said. Even state legislators said they were taken off guard.“If you think state legislators were blindsided by, and confused about the shifting and confusing public health directives, you’d be correct,” said assemblymember Laura Friedman after Newsom’s announcement. “If you think we have been quiet about it in Sacramento, you’d be wrong.”Health workers said it doesn’t help that Newsom initially kept the data and reasoning behind the changing rules and guidelines opaque. “The reopening announcement was so sudden. People were so confused because outside hospitals there were mobile morgues full of the body bags of people who’d died from Covid-19,” said Chin-Hong. “It really made people feel unsafe.”“There’s definitely a communication problem,” said Mark DiCamillo, director of the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies. “We’re finding that about half of the public is saying that they don’t have trust in the governor.”Newsom’s office did not respond to multiple requests for comment on such critiques. Many of the groups questioning the governor’s recent policies said he could easily earn back their trust – if he’s willing to work with them.Christian Ramirez, a policy director for SEIU-USWW, a union that represents more than 45,000 service workers in California, said he was excited to hear Newsom announce last month a plan to send $600 to low-income Californians, including undocumented immigrants. “There has been a willingness from Governor Newsom to ensure that essential workers regardless of their immigration status are not left to fend for themselves,” Ramirez said. But the proposal has not yet been signed into law.Ramirez said he’d like for the governor to collaborate with unions and advocacy groups to deliver on his promises. “We know how to reach our community – we have mobilized a record-breaking number of folks to go to the polls and vote in recent elections,” he said. The union could easily leverage its network to help hundreds of thousands of workers quickly fill out the paperwork for unemployment benefits, or sign up for vaccination appointments. “We’re not expecting the governor to do it all alone – and we’re willing to stand with him,” Ramirez said. More

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      Biden urges Congress to pass Covid relief quickly amid 'enormous pain'

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      Joe Biden urged Congress to swiftly pass a $1.9tn relief package, emphasizing the collective financial and emotional stress millions of Americans face as the pandemic that has claimed more than 450,000 lives continues into its second year.“I know some in Congress think we’ve already done enough to deal with the crisis in the country,” he said. “Others think that things are getting better and we can afford to sit back and either do little or do nothing at all. That’s not what I see. I see enormous pain in this country. A lot of folks out of work. A lot of folks going hungry.”By a party-line vote of 219-209, the House of Representatives passed a budget plan, after the Senate approved it in a pre-dawn vote. Vice-President Kamala Harris cast the tie-breaking vote in the Senate for the first time.Congress can now work to write a bill that can be passed by a simple majority in both houses, which are controlled by Democrats. Mid-March has been suggested as a likely date by which the measure could be passed, a point at which enhanced unemployment benefits will expire if Congress does not act.“The simple truth is, if we make these investments now with interest rates at historic lows, it will generate more growth, higher incomes, a stronger economy, and our nation’s finances will be in a stronger position,” Biden said.Biden’s speech today marked an important shift in his tone about bipartisanship when it comes to providing coronavirus relief at a time when thousands of Americans are still dying from the virus every day and hospitals struggle to handle patient loads.Earlier this week, the president met with a group of Republican senators who had proposed a $600bn relief bill, much smaller than Biden’s plan. Biden said he was open to the senators’ ideas, but the White House acknowledged the president made clear in the meeting that he considered the Republican package to be too small to address the country’s financial needs right now.Biden, a longtime senator who based his presidential campaign around the idea that he could work with Republicans to achieve bipartisan compromise, is now saying Democrats are willing to go it alone on coronavirus relief.[embedded content]“What Republicans have proposed is either to do nothing or not enough,” Biden said. “All of the sudden, many of them have rediscovered fiscal restraint and concern for the deficits. Don’t kid yourself, this approach will come with a cost: more pain for more people for longer than it has to be.”Larry Summers, a former economic adviser to Barack Obama, has warned that Biden might be spending too much. The Republican representative Michael Burgess said Congress should wait until all of the previous $4tn in pandemic relief had been spent. He said $1tn had yet to go out the door.“Why is it suddenly so urgent that we pass another $2tn bill?” Burgess demanded.But Nancy Pelosi predicted the final Covid-19 relief legislation could pass Congress before 15 March, when special unemployment benefits that were added during the pandemic expire. In a letter to her fellow Democratic caucus members, the House speaker celebrated the Senate’s passage of the budget resolution early on Friday morning.“As we all know, a budget is a statement of our values. Our work to crush the coronavirus and deliver relief to the American people is urgent and of the highest priority. With this budget resolution, we have taken a giant step to save lives and livelihoods,” Pelosi said in the letter.Biden’s announcement comes amid more worrying signs about the jobs market. On Friday the labor department announced the US had added an anemic 49,000 new jobs in December. The US added an average of 176,000 jobs a month in 2019, before the pandemic hit the US.The latest numbers did show growth after job losses in December. The revised figures for the last month of 2020 showed 227,000 jobs had been lost, up from an initial estimate of 140,000.Officially, about 10 million people are now out of work but the Economics Policy Institute calculates that, in fact, 25.5 million workers – 15% of the workforce – are “either unemployed, otherwise out of work due to the pandemic, or employed but experiencing a drop in hours and pay”, according to a report released on Friday.The head of the International Monetary Fund on Friday warned that the US faced a possible “dangerous wave” of bankruptcies and unemployment if it did not maintain fiscal support until the coronavirus health crisis ended.“There is still that danger that if support is not sustained until we have a durable exit from the health crisis, there could be a dangerous wave of bankruptcies and unemployment,” said the IMF’s managing director, Kristalina Georgieva.Biden’s proposed budget also brought test votes on several Democratic priorities, including a $15 minimum wage. The Senate by voice vote adopted an amendment from Senator Joni Ernst, an Iowa Republican, opposed to raising the wage during the pandemic. Ernst said a wage hike at this time would be “devastating” for small businesses.None of the amendments to the budget are binding on Democrats as they draft their Covid plan, but passage of a wage increase could prove difficult. Even if a $15 wage can get past procedural challenges in the final bill, passage will require the support from every Democrat in the 50-50 Senate, which could be a tall order.Senator Bernie Sanders, a vocal proponent of the wage increase, vowed to press ahead. “We need to end the crisis of starvation wages,” he said. More

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      US economy adds 49,000 jobs as Biden aims for further Covid relief

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      The US economy added back 49,000 jobs last month as coronavirus restrictions eased and fiscal stimulus from Washington goosed up the economy, the labor department announced on Friday.The unemployment rate dropped to 6.3%, down significantly from its pandemic high of 14.7% in April. While January’s figure marked a return to growth after job losses in December, the number was weak and big problems remain.On Thursday, the labor department said 779,000 people filed new unemployment claims last week, down from the week before but still close to four times pre-pandemic levels. The latest figures showed some 17.8 million Americans are still claiming unemployment benefits.In December the US lost 140,000 jobs as the latest wave of Covid-19 infections led to more shutdowns across the country and a slowdown in economic activity. That figure was revised to a loss of 227,000 jobs on Friday.Professional and business services (up 97,000 jobs) and local government (up 49,000) saw the largest gains over the month. The US is still losing huge numbers of jobs in leisure and hospitality (down 61,000) and retail (down 38,000) and the stark gap in racial unemployment rates remains.The unemployment rate for white Americans was 6% while for Black Americans it was 9.2% and for Latinos it was 8.6%.The jobs figure come as the Biden administration is trying to push through a $1.9tn stimulus package which would send $1,400 cheques to many Americans and provide fresh aid for struggling businesses. It would also increase the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $15 – the first increase since 2009.The plan has widespread support from voters, with a Quinnipiac survey showing more than two-thirds of respondents in favor of the plan. But it has met with opposition from Republicans in Congress, who have balked at the size of the stimulus and proposed a far smaller package. Biden’s plan was approved in the Senate early Friday by a 51 to 50 vote, with the vice-president casting the tie-breaking vote, but still faces hurdles and is not expected to become law before mid March.The recovery in the jobs market may embolden opponents but some economists warned that the economic toll of the virus is far from over.Jason Reed, assistant chair of finance at the University of Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business, said: “We shouldn’t forget that the economy is still down about 10m jobs since the start of the pandemic. We aren’t anywhere close to where we were this time last year.“The rollout of the vaccine will surely help Americans get back to work, but we shouldn’t expect a return to normal until late 2021 or early 2022.” More

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      Kamala Harris uses casting vote to pass Covid relief budget resolution

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      The US Senate has passed a budget resolution that allows for the passage of Joe Biden’s $1.9tn (£1.4tn) Covid-19 relief package in the coming weeks without Republican support.
      The vice-president, Kamala Harris, broke a 50/50 tie by casting a vote in favour of the Democratic measure, which sends it to the House of Representatives for final approval. It marked the first time Harris, in her role as president of the Senate, cast a tie-breaking vote after being sworn in as the first female vice-president on 20 January.
      The House passed its own budget measure on Wednesday. Congress can now work to write a bill that can be passed by a simple majority in both houses, which are controlled by Democrats. Mid-March has been suggested as a likely date by which the measure could be passed, a point at which enhanced unemployment benefits will expire if Congress does not act.
      The vote came at 5.30am on Friday at the end of a marathon Senate debate session, known among senators as a “vote-a-rama”, a procedure whereby they can theoretically offer unlimited amendments.
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      Biden is scheduled to meet with Democratic House leaders and committee chairs early on Friday morning to discuss the Covid economic stimulus, and is expected to make public remarks on the progress at an 11.45am EST (1645 GMT) briefing.
      There was dissent from Republicans in the Senate overnight, particularly over plans for a $15 federal minimum wage. Iowa’s Republican senator, Joni Ernst, raised an amendment to “prohibit the increase of the federal minimum wage during a global pandemic”, which was carried by a voice vote.
      The Vermont senator Bernie Sanders said he still intended to support bringing the measure through: “We need to end the crisis of starvation wages in Iowa and around the United States.”
      He outlined plans to get a wage increase, phased in over five years, included in a budget reconciliation bill. The federal minimum wage is currently $7.25 an hour, and has not been raised since 2009.
      In a tweet after the vote, Sanders said: “Today, with the passage of this budget resolution to provide relief to our working families, we have the opportunity not only to address the pandemic and the economic collapse – we have the opportunity to give hope to the American people and restore faith in our government.”
      During the debate Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell said “This is not the time for trillions more dollars to make perpetual lockdowns and economic decline a little more palatable. Notwithstanding the actual needs, notwithstanding all the talk about bipartisan unity, Democrats in Congress are plowing ahead. They’re using this phony budget to set the table to ram through their $1.9 trillion rough draft.”
      The $1.9 trillion relief package proposed would be used to speed Covid-19 vaccines throughout the nation. Other funds would extend special unemployment benefits that will expire at the end of March and make direct payments to people to help them pay bills and stimulate the economy. Democrats also want to send money to state and local governments dealing with the worst health crisis in decades. More