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      in Elections

      Biden announces 'wartime' boost in vaccine supply – video

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      The Biden administration is increasing vaccination efforts with a goal of protecting 300 million Americans by early fall, as the administration surges deliveries to states for the next three weeks following complaints of shortages and inconsistent supplies. ‘This is enough vaccine to vaccinate 300 million Americans by end of summer, early fall,’ Biden said. ‘This is a wartime effort,’ he added, saying more Americans had already died from the coronavirus than during all of the second world war
      Biden vows to vaccinate 300m in the US by end of summer or early fall – live
      Joe Biden appears to boost vaccination goal to 1.5m Americans per day More

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      in Elections

      Biden vows to vaccinate 300m people in US by end of summer or early fall

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      Joe Biden vowed on Tuesday to ramp up vaccination programs so that most of the US population is inoculated by the end of summer or early fall.“This will be enough vaccine to fully vaccinate 300m Americans by the end of the summer,” the US president said on Tuesday afternoon, later adding “end of summer, beginning of the fall”, in a briefing at the White House.The new administration will increase vaccine supplies to states, exercise an option to buy a total of 200m more vaccine doses from Pfizer and Moderna and will give states more lead time on the amount of vaccine it will deliver.The administration’s immediate plan is to accelerate vaccine distribution to deliver roughly 1.4m shots a day and 10m doses a week for the next three weeks, as part of the White House’s earlier-stated ambition to vaccinate 100 million people in 100 days.“This will be one of the most difficult operational challenges we’ve ever undertaken,” said Joe Biden on Tuesday, announcing the plans. But, he added, “Help is on the way”.He indicated that the vaccination program he inherited from the Trump administration was not in adequate order.“When we arrived, the vaccine program was in worse shape than we expected or anticipated,” Biden said.He added: “Until now, we’ve had to guess how much vaccine to expect for the next week, and that’s what the [state] governors had to do. This is unacceptable.”The new purchase order is expected to allow the government to vaccinate 300 million people with a two-dose regimen of either the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine, a senior administration official said earlier.The official said there were two “constraining factors”, for delivering vaccines quickly: supply and distribution. The official said the White House was working to increase capacity for both, by purchasing more vaccine, raw supplies and setting up federal vaccination sites.“This is a wartime undertaking, it’s not hyperbole,” said Biden.The official called the rollout a “daunting effort”, and called on Congress to pass a $1.9tn stimulus package which includes more money for state vaccination campaigns.The Biden administration has repeatedly said it aims to vaccinate 100 million people in 100 days, a goal that appeared to be in hand as the US exceeded 1m doses a day in the president’s first week. As of Tuesday, 19 million people had received one vaccine shot, and 3.4 million received a second.On Monday, Biden said he was hopeful the US was on track to deliver nearly 1.5m vaccinations a day, and that the US would be “well on our way” to herd immunity by the spring. Over the weekend, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, Dr Anthony Fauci, described 1m vaccinations a day as, “a floor, not a ceiling”.However, Biden also forecast a more harrowing death toll, and on Monday said the US “could see” 660,000 deaths total before the pandemic is brought under control. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) predicts up to 508,000 people in the US could have been killed by Covid-19 by 13 February. The death toll so far is 423,000, according to the Johns Hopkins coronavirus research center.The Biden administration is also planning to exercise an option to purchase 200m more vaccine doses, 100m from Pfizer/BioNTech and 100m from Moderna, the two producers with US emergency use authorization so far, through contracts first established by the Trump administration.This would increase the government-purchased vaccine supply to 600m doses, enough to inoculate 300m people. The senior official said the government expects to deliver 10m vaccine doses to states each week for the next three weeks, and will give states at least three weeks’ notice of upcoming shipments. Vaccine allotments are determined by state population.The vice-president, Kamala Harris, and the second gentleman, Doug Emhoff, received the second dose of a Covid-19 vaccine on Tuesday afternoon. More

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      in World Politics

      Sovereign Wealth Funds Bet Big on India

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      Since the outbreak of COVID-19, bad news has dogged India on the economic front. By the end of the 2020-21 financial year, which begins on April 1 and ends on March 31, the country’s GDP is estimated to shrink by 7.7%, the biggest contraction since 1952. In the first quarter of the 2020-21 financial year, the economy contracted by a historic 23.9%.

      To put things in perspective, India has suffered its first contraction since the 1979-80 financial year. Then, India’s GDP shrunk by 5.2% because of a double whammy. First, the 1979 Iranian Revolution led to a doubling of crude oil prices, hurting an energy importer like India. Second, a severe drought led to crop failure, falling incomes and declining demand. The 2020-21 recession is worse than that of 1979-1980. In fact, India’s contraction is the second-worst in Asia after the Philippines, whose economy has contracted by 8.5%-9.5%.

      Green Shoots of Recovery

      In 2021, better news has trickled in. India’s manufacturing sector is rebounding. The Nikkei Manufacturing Purchasing Managers’ Index, compiled by IHS Markit, rose to 56.4 in December 2020, up from 56.3 in the previous month. Any figure over 50 signals growth, and manufacturing has now been increasing for five months. More importantly, India’s agricultural sector is expanding strongly. In fact, it grew even during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

      Deloitte estimates that “India may have turned toward the road to recovery.” It bases its judgment on recent high-frequency data. India has been fortunate to have lower infection and fatality rates than countries like the US or the UK. It has also launched the world’s biggest coronavirus vaccine drive. This should improve consumer and business confidence and boost economic recovery.

      Why Is Foreign Investment Flooding Into India?

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      The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is predicting a return to growth in 2021 as are investment banks and large funds. The Indian government is bullishly claiming that India can achieve double-digit growth through increased digital services and the expansion of its manufacturing base. This would be driven by growing demand in the rural sector, the youth and India’s aspirational middle class.

      Even if the government claims might be optimistic, many companies and investors have bought into the India growth story. In particular, sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) have been betting on India. In 2020, they invested a record $14.8 billion in the country. In the same period, they invested only $4.5 billion in China, meaning that SWF investment in India is three times that of China. What is going on?

      Dark Clouds in Sunny Skies

      To understand why SWFs are turning to India, we have to understand their incentives. These funds do not answer to investors who crave quarterly or yearly or even five-year returns. As custodians of a nation’s wealth, SWFs are long-term investors. In their view, India is operating from a lower base than China. So, India’s growth prospects are higher than China’s as it plays catch-up. 

      Furthermore, unlike venture capital or private equity players, SWFs place a high premium on the long cycle factors like political stability, social cohesion and geopolitical importance. As a robust democracy with many decades of experience in the peaceful transfer of power, India is increasingly attractive in a volatile, complex and ambiguous world. China’s actions in Hong Kong and Xinjiang have shaken up many SWFs that are choosing to park their money in India.

      There is another reason for SWFs to invest in India. They agree with IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva, who praised India for taking “very decisive action, very decisive steps to deal with the pandemic and to deal with [its] economic consequences.” Like her, they are impressed by New Delhi’s appetite for structural reforms and the surprising competence India’s much-maligned government has demonstrated during the pandemic.

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      On December 31, India’s health ministry revealed that the country’s COVID-19 recovery rate was an astonishing 96.04%. This is one of the highest recovery rates in the world. Despite the economic contraction, the government has fed hundreds of millions, brought in much-needed economic reforms and kept the budget deficit down to reasonable levels. At a time when countries have sunk into unsustainable debt traps, India presents a relatively better investment opportunity for SWFs with strong prospects of sustainable, long-term growth.

      There are two dark clouds threatening this sunny economic scenario. First, India faces the twin external threat of China and Pakistan. Both these nuclear powers make territorial claims against India. They have been ratcheting up rhetoric, and tensions are running high. Even at the height of a bitterly cold winter, Indian and Chinese troops have clashed yet again on the border. Once the Himalayan snows start melting in late spring and early summer, troops could start clashing and a military conflict might ensue. This would inflict a tremendous economic setback in the short run. If India is able to defend its territory, then its economy would benefit in the long term. However, there is no guarantee how such a conflict might play out, and this remains a great risk to the economy.

      Second, India faces the threat of domestic unrest. The ruling Bharatiya Janata Party has had to deal with numerous protests since its reelection in 2019. The Citizenship Amendment Act triggered protests in many cities across the country. They died down as the pandemic spread. Currently, farmer protests are rocking New Delhi on Republic Day. In a country as large and diverse as India, threats of more protests and unrest are never far away. As long as the government can contain protests, they remain immaterial. However, a breakdown in social cohesion would damage India’s growth story.

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      in Elections

      Janet Yellen confirmed as first female treasury secretary

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      Janet Yellen has been confirmed as the first woman to head the US Treasury.The former chair of the Federal Reserve and noted economist was approved by the Senate on an 84-15 vote. She sailed through a congressional hearing last week and had already been unanimously approved by the Senate finance committee and backed by all living former treasury secretaries.She faces a monumental task. Last week another 900,000 people filed for unemployment benefits – more than the population of San Francisco and four times the number of weekly claims made before the coronavirus pandemic struck.Businesses are closing across the US amid a surge in infections. The US reported more than 188,000 new cases for Thursday, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University, and close to 4,000 people are dying each day.At the hearing Yellen said it was imperative for the government to “act big” on the next coronavirus relief package and argued now is not the time to worry about the costs of a higher debt burden.Tackling the fallout of Covid-19 would be her top priority, said Yellen, and especially its disproportionately hard impact on communities of color. Black and Latino workers are still experiencing far higher rates of unemployment, at 9.9% and 9.3%, compared with their white counterparts, 6%.“We need to make sure that people aren’t going hungry in America, that they can put food on the table, that they’re not losing their homes and ending up out on the street because of evictions,” Yellen said. “We really need to address those forms of suffering, and I think we shouldn’t compromise on it.” More

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      in US Politics

      Deborah Birx says Covid deniers in Trump White House 'derailed' response

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      The former US coronavirus response coordinator Deborah Birx has said people in the Trump White House considered Covid-19 a hoax.Birx questioned the Trump administration’s response to the coronavirus pandemic in a wide-ranging interview broadcast on Sunday. Elsewhere, advisers to Joe Biden described the new president’s plans to control Covid-19 – a challenge made tougher, chief of staff Ron Klain said, by Trump having left office without a vaccine distribution plan in place.More than 417,000 people have died of Covid-19 in the US, out of a caseload of nearly 25m, according to figures kept by Johns Hopkins University in Maryland.In the White House and in the broader public “there were people who definitely believed this was a hoax”, Birx told Face the Nation, on CBS.The former army physician attributed some such skepticism to people’s different experiences with the virus.“They saw people get Covid and be fine and then they had us talking about how severe the disease is and how it could cause these unbelievable fatalities to our American public,” she said.The process to distribute the vaccine … did not really exist when we came into the White HouseAsked if she blamed some such skepticism on Donald Trump, who repeatedly downplayed the virus, Birx said some statements by political leaders “derailed” the coronavirus response.“When you have a pandemic where you’re relying on every American to change their behavior,” she said, “communication is absolutely key, and so every time a statement was made by a political leader that wasn’t consistent with public health needs, that derailed our response. It is also why I went out on the road, because I wasn’t censored on the road.”Birx, who played a key role in the fight against Aids, said she believed the 2020 election was a factor in how information about the coronavirus was shared and that she had “always” considered quitting her White House role under Trump.“I always feel like I could have done more, been more outspoken, maybe been more outspoken publicly,” Birx said. “I didn’t know all the consequences of all of these issues.”Birx has long promoted a data-driven response to disease outbreaks and she suggested such efforts were undermined by people working in the Trump White House. From the time she arrived until she left, she said, unknown advisers were supplying “parallel” coronavirus data.“I saw the president presenting graphs that I never made,” Birx said.Efforts to vaccinate the public have been plagued by delays while a new and more contagious variant of coronavirus that originated in Britain has been identified in at least 20 states.On Sunday Dr Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases who also served under Trump but unlike Birx has transitioned to advising Biden, told CBS: “The Moderna and Pfizer vaccines seem to continue to be protective against the mutant strain.”He also said a “mutant” virus variation “now prevalent in South Africa” was “a little bit more concerning”.“It looks like it does diminish more so the efficacy of the vaccine,” he said. “But we’re still within that cushion level of the vaccines being efficacious against these mutants.”On Thursday, the first full day of his presidency, Biden released a 198-page Covid-19 strategy. He has also signed 10 related executive orders or other directives since taking office. The White House said it aims to provide 100m vaccine doses in 100 days.Biden’s nominee for surgeon general, Dr Vivek Murthy, told ABC’s This Week the success of the vaccination campaign should be determined by not just by quantity, but also by how equitably inoculations are delivered.To do this, Murthy said, the government must increase supply by using the Defense Production Act and better targeting distribution with mobile units and community vaccination centers.“We already know from the Covid crisis over the past year that there are certain communities that have been hard hit by this virus,” he said, “that rural communities have had a harder time getting access to resources, that communities of color have experienced more cases and deaths, that seniors have struggled, especially those in long-term facilities”.Murthy also called for a greater investment in treatment strategies, contract tracing and testing. Such efforts combined with people getting vaccinated and adhering to public health guidance, he said, could allow the US to control the pandemic.“If we do these things, and if we continue to work on taking the safety precautions, like masking and avoiding indoor gatherings of people outside your household, then I think we can be on a path to not only turning the pandemic around, but, most importantly, getting our schools open, our workplaces back up and running, and regaining our way of life.”Biden’s nominee for health secretary, Xavier Becerra, warned that improving the pandemic response “won’t happen overnight”.“We can’t just tell the states, ‘Here’s some PPE, some masks, here’s some vaccines, now go do it,’” Becerra told CNN’s State of the Union.Klain, Biden’s chief of staff, told NBC’s Meet the Press: “The process to distribute the vaccine, particularly outside of nursing homes and hospitals out into the community as a whole, did not really exist when we came into the White House.”Klain said obstructions to better distribution include the need for more vaccines, more people to administer shots and more sites to provide it. Klain said the Biden administration was focused on convincing people who are vaccine hesitant, particularly in communities of color, that the vaccine is safe.“Unless we can reduce vaccine hesitancy,” he said, “unless we can get all Americans to take this vaccine, we’re going to continue to see Covid be a problem in our country.” More

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      in US Politics

      Deborah Birx 'always' considered quitting Trump coronavirus taskforce

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      Dr Deborah Birx, White House coronavirus task force co-ordinator under Donald Trump, “always” considered quitting as the US lurched into disaster under the 45th president – but didn’t.Speaking to CBS in an interview to be broadcast in full on Sunday, Birx said: “I had to ask myself every morning: is there something that I think I can do that would be helpful in responding to this pandemic? And it’s something I asked myself every night.“And when it became a point where … I wasn’t getting anywhere and that was like right before the election, I wrote a very detailed communication plan of what needed to happen the day after the election and how that needed to be executed. And there was a lot of promise that that would happen.”Joe Biden won the election and was sworn in as the 46th president on Wednesday. Another senior US public health official, Dr Anthony Fauci, has since spoken of his relief over the change of administration.According to Johns Hopkins University, by Saturday morning 413,791 people had died of Covid-19 in the US, out of nearly 25m cases. There were 3,758 deaths on Friday. It was also reported that hundreds of national guard troops who provided security for Biden’s inauguration have tested positive for the virus.[embedded content]“There are national guard troops here from every state in the union, probably,” Birx said. “Young individuals who are most likely to have asymptomatic infection if they do get infected. And they’re congruently living and eating mask-less, 25,000 to 30,000 of them from all over the United States.”Birx said the inauguration could prove to be a massive super-spreader event, because it had brought “30,000 people together where you know that they’re most likely to have asymptomatic infections and you haven’t pre-screened, pre-tested and serially tested.“These are dedicated troops. They’re going to do their mission. I can promise you that they will sacrifice their own health to do their mission, because … that’s what I came from. You sacrifice for others out of the military.”Birx, a US army physician, joined the Trump White House task force after a stellar career in public service, particularly in the fight against Aids.On Friday, as Biden signed executive orders to tackle hunger and economic pressure during the pandemic, the new president predicted a US death toll of more than 600,000. Vaccines were developed quickly under Trump but their rollout has been slow. Biden has promised to oversee 100m vaccinations in his first 100 days in office.The botched vaccination rollout has hit states with the capacity to vaccinate far more people than are currently receiving shots.On Saturday, New York governor Andrew Cuomo said a Trump-era decision that extended eligibility beyond healthcare and essential workers to seniors wasn’t working because of limited supplies. While 7 million New Yorkers are now eligible for vaccines, the state is only receiving 250,000 doses weekly, down from 300,000, Cuomo said.“They said they would increase the supply,” Cuomo told reporters in Albany. “They never did.”Like Fauci and other experts thrust on to the media front line, Birx became a familiar face in a task force all too evidently at the mercy of a mercurial president given to lies, conspiracy theories and the politicisation of every aspect of the public health response.Birx came under fire both from the president, who called her “pathetic”, and Trump’s critics. Nancy Pelosi was reported to have called her “the worst”.Asked by CBS’s Face the Nation if she had considered quitting, Birx said: “Always. I mean, why would you want to put yourself through that, um, every day?“Colleagues of mine that I had known for decades in that one experience, because I was in the White House decided that I had become this political person, even though they had known me forever.”Asked if she thought “the election was a factor in communication about the virus”, she said: “Yes. Yes.”Birx said she had been “censored” by the White House. Asked if she ever withheld information from the public, she said: “No.”Birx was criticised in December for a visit to family despite pandemic restrictions. She told CBS she would “need to retire” from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “probably within the next four to six weeks”. More

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      in US Politics

      Biden executive orders target federal minimum wage and food insecurity

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      Joe Biden on Friday will sign a pair of executive orders aimed at providing immediate relief to millions of American families grappling with the economic toll of the Covid-19 pandemic and expanding safety protections for federal workers.Sign up for the Guardian’s First Thing newsletterPressing ahead with an ambitious set of executive actions, the new administration is seeking to marshal an “all-of-government” effort to combat hunger as tens of millions of Americans face food insecurity amid historically high unemployment rates.“The American people can’t afford to wait,” said Brian Deese, the national economic council director, on a call with reporters. “So many are hanging by a thread.”The measures, he said, were a “critical lifeline” for American families, but were “not a substitute” for the nearly $2tn relief package Biden has called on Congress to pass.Biden will direct the Department of Agriculture increase a Covid-19 food program that helps families with children who would normally receive free or reduced-price meals at school, as well as expand the emergency increases approved by Congress to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program for low-income Americans.He will also ask the Department of Treasury to update its process for delivering stimulus checks to millions of eligible Americans who reported issues or delays with the first rounds payments. And Biden will the Department of Labor to make clear that out-of-work Americans who refuse employment that could jeopardize their health would still qualify for unemployment benefits. Until now, workers who refused offers to return to their jobs out of concern for their safety no longer qualified for unemployment aid.The second order is aimed at expanding protections for federal workers by restoring collective bargaining powers and lay the groundwork for the federal government to implement a $15 federal minimum wage. As a first step, Biden will direct federal agencies to conduct a review of federal workers earning less than $15 an hour and develop recommendations for raising their wages.The latest executive actions come one day after a labor department report showed that unemployment claims remained at historically high levels, with 900,000 Americans filing for unemployment benefits last week. The figures reflected the magnitude of the economic challenges Biden inherited, amid a resurgence of the coronavirus this winter.Friday’s actions are part of a blitz of executive orders and directives Biden has taken since assuming the presidency.Hours after his inauguration, Biden signed an executive order extending a federal pause on evictions through the end of March, a move that will shield millions of Americans struggling to pay rent amid the pandemic. He also directed federal agencies to extend their moratorium on foreclosures of federally guaranteed mortgages and asked the education department to prolong its freeze on federal student loan payments through the end of September.On Thursday, he unveiled a “full-scale wartime” national Covid-19 strategy aimed at growing the production of vaccines, creating guidelines to reopen schools and businesses and imposing new requirements on mask-wearing.Biden has long argued that economic recovery is tied to combatting the coronavirus, a starkly different approach to his predecessor who urged states to lift restrictions even as infections rose.The centerpiece of Biden’s plan to address fallout from the pandemic is a $1.9tn relief package called the American Rescue Plan, which includes $1,400 direct payments to Americans, more generous unemployment benefits and billions of dollars for a national vaccination program.Already Republicans are objecting to the cost of the legislation, raising doubts about whether Biden will be able to attract bipartisan support as he had hoped. Several Republicans have questioned the need for an additional relief package weeks after they passed a $900bn coronavirus relief bill.Stressing that urgent action was needed, Deese declined to say how long the White House planned to court Republican support before potentially moving to a process that would allow Democrats to move the legislation forward without them.His team plans to hold a conference call with a bipartisan group of senators on Sunday to make the case for another round of stimulus, without which he said the nation’s economy would plummet further into “a very serious economic hole”.“When you’re at a moment that is as precarious as the one we find ourselves in,” he said at a White House press briefing on Friday, “the risk of doing too little the risk of undershooting far outweighs the risk of doing too much.” More