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      Can Joe Biden and Kamala Harris unite America after Trump – video explainer

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      When Joe Biden formally takes over the presidency in January he will face some of the greatest crises to hit the US in recent history: a pandemic that has killed more than 200,000 Americans, a devastated economy, a rapidly overheating climate and a deeply fractured nation.
      The Guardian’s Lauren Gambino looks at how Biden and the vice-president-elect, Kamala Harris, plan to ‘heal’ the country after four years of Trumpism – and the challenges they will face with the prospect of having to navigate these times without a majority in the Senate
      How Joe Biden beat Donald Trump in the fight for America’s soul – video More

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      US passes 10m Covid cases as virus rages across nation

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      [embedded content]
      The number of US coronavirus cases passed 10m on Monday as the virus raged across many parts of the nation.
      The US recorded more than 100,000 new coronavirus cases for a fifth day in a row on Sunday, and the death toll passed 237,000.
      The numbers were released as Joe Biden named the members of his own Covid taskforce – and it was reported that Ben Carson, the housing and urban development secretary, had become the latest senior Trump aide to test positive for the virus.
      Trump adviser David Bossie also tested positive as a new cluster of infections appeared to spring up in White House circles.
      There was also promising news about the quest for a vaccine.
      Some counts had previously put the US caseload over 10m but according to data from Johns Hopkins University in Maryland, 105,927 new cases on Sunday brought the total to 9,964,540 earlier on Monday and the total did not pass the 10m mark until the afternoon.
      The daily number was down from record highs on Friday and Saturday. The death toll stood at 237,409. But with cases holding at more than 100,000 a day, Dr Anthony Fauci’s infamous warning earlier this month still rang true.
      “We’re in for a whole lot of hurt,” Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told the Washington Post. “It’s not a good situation. All the stars are aligned in the wrong place as you go into the fall and winter season, with people congregating at home indoors. You could not possibly be positioned more poorly.”
      Deaths are expected to rise. “The next two months are going to be rough, difficult ones,” Dr Albert Ko, an infectious disease specialist at the Yale School of Public Health, told the Associated Press. “We could see another 100,000 deaths by January.”
      During the presidential election, Donald Trump repeatedly insisted the US was “rounding the corner” and refused to enforce mitigation measures at the White House and campaign events. On Monday, Carson followed the president, members of his family, senior White House and campaign aides and top Republicans in Congress in contracting the virus.
      Carson reportedly experienced symptoms and was tested at Walter Reed hospital, outside Washington DC, though he did not remain there for care. According to Bloomberg News, other attendees at a White House election night watch party last Tuesday included the attorney general, Bill Barr, the treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, and the health secretary, Alex Azar.
      On Monday morning, Pfizer and BioNTech announced that interim results in large-scale trials showed their Covid-19 vaccine was more than 90% effective. The companies touted “a great day for science and humanity”.
      Biden heralded the scientists’ work. From Delaware, where transition planning continued, the president-elect said: “It is also important to understand that the end of the battle against Covid-19 is still months away.”
      Even if the vaccine were to be approved by late November, as industry leaders predicted, Biden said “it will be many more months before there is widespread vaccination in this country.”

      He also said that for now, “a mask remains a more potent weapon against the virus than the vaccine” and emphasized precautions such as face coverings, social distancing and contact tracing.
      Mike Pence tried to take credit for the vaccine breakthrough, claiming Trump’s Operation Warp Speed initiative had spurred it – an assertion Pfizer rejected outright.
      “We were never part of the Warp Speed,” said Kathrin Jansen, the head of vaccine research and development. “We have never taken any money from the US government, or from anyone.”
      States across the US are struggling. On Sunday the Republican governor of Utah, Gary Herbert, declared a new state of emergency.
      “Due to the alarming rate of Covid infections within our state, tonight I issued a new state of emergency with several critical changes to our response,” Herbert said. “These changes are not shutting down our economy, but are absolutely necessary to save lives and hospital capacity.”
      The governor said the state was being placed under a mask mandate until further notice and casual social gatherings were being limited to household-only for the next two weeks. All extracurricular activities were being put on hold, he said.
      Utah has had 132,621 total confirmed cases and 659 deaths.
      In California, governor Gavin Newsom warned on Monday that the state’s positivity rate was on the rise, after a period of relative success in containing the virus. He also said some counties could move “backward” into more restrictive rules for reopening.
      Fauci and other experts have described how the work of the White House coronavirus taskforce has stuttered and dwindled. On Sunday, the day after his victory over Trump was called, Biden made his first two appointments to his own panel of Covid advisers.
      The former surgeon general Dr Vivek Murthy and the former Food and Drug Administration commissioner Dr David Kessler will be co-chairs. Members include Rick Bright, a scientist and Trump critic who quit the government in October; the surgeon and New Yorker writer Atul Gawande; bioethicist and former Obama aide Zeke Emanuel; Luciana Borio, the FDA acting chief scientist and national security council member under Trump; and Michelle Osterholm, an infectious diseases specialist at the University of Minnesota.
      Andrew Cuomo, the governor of New York, said he believed “the political pressure of denying Covid is gone” now Trump had been defeated. Cuomo clashed with Trump in the early days of the pandemic, when New York was hit hard.
      “I think you’ll see scientists speak with an unmuzzled voice now,” the Democrat told ABC’s This Week, on Sunday. “And I think the numbers are going to go up, and Americans are going to get how serious this is.”
      One leading Democrat expected to be named to Biden’s cabinet said there was “a sense of urgency throughout” the president-elect’s team.
      “We know that every day is bringing more loss, more pain and more danger to the American people,” Pete Buttigieg, a former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, and candidate for the Democratic nomination, told Fox News Sunday. “And it’s why he’s not waiting until he’s taking office to begin immediately assembling people who have the right kind of expertise and planning to actually listen to them.” More

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      PM channels his inner John Wayne in vaccine metaphor meltdown | John Crace

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      Shortly before 5pm in the UK, president-elect Joe Biden gave a press conference. The results of the trials were very promising, he said, but there was still a long way to go before a vaccination programme could be rolled out nationwide. So it was now more important than ever not to let your guard down and to carry on wearing masks. It was coherent, informative and in less than five minutes Biden had told Americans just about everything they needed to know.
      Boris Johnson likes to do things rather differently. Almost to the second after Biden had finished speaking, the prime minister stepped out into the Downing Street briefing room, flanked by the deputy chief medical officer, Jonathan Van-Tam, and Brigadier Joe Fossey, dressed in full camo gear that had the reverse effect of drawing attention to himself. A new form of anti-camo perhaps.
      After a few introductions, Boris went on one of his long rambles. He didn’t really have anything to say that couldn’t have been wrapped up in minutes but he considers a press conference not to have taken place unless he’s wasted the best part of an hour of everyone’s time.
      Perhaps it was the excitement of having a real life soldier standing next to him, but Johnson’s explanation of the new vaccination was relayed in a series of metaphors straight out of the movie Stagecoach. The arrows were in the quiver! The cavalry was on its way, the toot of the bugle – Michael Gove’s presumably – was getting louder but still some way off. Having a prime minister who manages to trivialise something really important is getting extremely draining and it’s hard not to zone out within moments of him starting a sentence. So much for the great communicator.
      Next up was the brigadier who is in charge of the mass testing in Liverpool and looked uncomfortable throughout. “Two thousand troops have answered the call,” he said, making it sound as if the soldiers had had some say in their deployment rather than been told they were off to Liverpool for the next four weeks.
      He then pulled out a piece of plastic from his pocket. “You know what a swab is,” he continued. “Well this is the lateral flow that gives you a result within an hour.” And that was all he had to say. He didn’t seem at all sure what the lateral flow actually was or how it worked but then he was only following orders. If he’d had his way, he’d have saved the taxpayer a return train ticket from Liverpool to London.
      There was no slideshow this time – obviously No 10 has started to wonder if they are more trouble than they are worth after recent events – so Van-Tam was left to ad lib on the vaccine trial. Even though he had no more information than Boris, so all he could do was repeat the fact that it was exciting but we shouldn’t get carried away just yet. Try to think of it as a penalty shootout, he said – Boris’s crap analogies are as contagious as the coronavirus. We’ve scored the first goal, so we know the keeper can be beaten, but there was a long way to go before the match was won. No one seemed to have told Van-Tam that the expectation in a shootout was that the penalty-taker would score.
      Things carried on in much the same vein when questions came in from the media. The brigadier tried to make himself as inconspicuous as possible – merging into the background was part of his SAS training – and so the only other thing he had to offer was that he was just on day four of his deployment so it was hard to tell whether things were going well or badly. Van-Tam desperately hunted around for new ways of saying the vaccination trials were still at an early stage, but things were looking more hopeful for next year.
      Try to think of yourself as being on a railway station on a wet and windy night, he said, doing his best to channel his inner Fat Controller. You could see the lights of the train two miles away. Then the train pulled into the station and you didn’t know if the door was going to open. Next you couldn’t even be sure of whether there would be enough seats for everyone. The UK had only ordered enough vaccine for about a third of the population, so unless more doses came online most people were going to miss out. It didn’t sound quite as hopeful as he had suggested. But maybe that’s just the way he tells them.
      Boris, meanwhile, just looked relieved to only get one question on the US presidential election. And that wasn’t even on if he had spoken to the president-elect – he hadn’t as Biden has been too busy taking calls from Micronesia – or if he had any reaction to being called a “shape-shifting creep” by a former adviser to Barack Obama. The Democrats still haven’t forgiven Boris for his remarks about Obama’s part-Kenyan ancestry giving him a dislike of the British empire.
      “I congratulate the president-elect,” said Johnson, sidestepping a suggestion he give Donald Trump a call to persuade him to throw in the towel. The US and the UK had had a close relationship in the past and no doubt would do so in the future. He had nothing to say on Brexit. Rather he chose to accentuate the shared climate change objectives of Cop27. Or Cop26 as the rest of the world knows it. More

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      Joe Biden vows to 'spare no effort' in tackling Covid as US sees record cases

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      [embedded content]
      Joe Biden vowed on Monday to spare no effort in tackling the coronavirus pandemic as soon as he enters the White House and warned the US is “facing a very dark winter”.
      Speaking in a televised address to the nation – little more than 48 hours after he was announced the winner of the presidential election – the Democrat said he was ready to get to work, laying out plans as the pandemic on Monday was approaching 10m cases.
      The US has experienced record new infections in recent days, a figure expected to significantly worsen before the former vice-president’s inauguration on 20 January. According to Johns Hopkins university, as of Sunday the coronavirus had killed 237,570 people in the US and had infected more than 9.9 million.
      While he welcomed Pfizer’s announcement earlier in the day that it has found a vaccine that it believes is 90% effective, he warned America could lose 200,000 more lives in the next few months before a vaccine becomes available.
      “I will spare no effort to turn this pandemic around once we’re sworn in on 20 January,” he said, speaking to the camera from his home town of Wilmington, Delaware.
      “Get our kids back to school safely, our businesses growing and our economy running at full speed again. And get an approved vaccine manufactured and distributed as quickly as possible to as many Americans as possible free of charge. We’ll follow the science.”
      But he warned that the challenge ahead was “immense and growing”. “Although we are not in office yet, I’m just laying out what we expect to do and hope can be done, some of it, between now and the time we’re sworn in.”
      He added: “There’s a need for bold action to fight this pandemic. We’re still facing a very dark winter.”
      Citing statistics that show the US topped 120,000 new cases on several consecutive days last week and rising infection rates, hospitalisations and deaths, he said: “This crisis claims nearly 1,000 American lives a day. Nearly 240,000 deaths so far. The projections still indicate we could lose 200,000 more lives in the coming months before a vaccine can be made widely available.”
      Masks
      On mask-wearing, Biden said: “Please, I implore you, wear a mask. Do it for yourself, do it for your neighbour. A mask is not a political statement, but it is a good way to start pulling the country together.”
      Kamala Harris, the vice-president-elect, was also present but did not speak.
      The announcement came after Biden’s transition team unveiled a coronavirus advisory board of 13 public health experts. The taskforce will be led by three co-chairs: the former surgeon general Vivek Murthy, the ex-food and drug administration commissioner David Kessler and Dr Marcella Nunez-Smith of Yale.
      Other experts on the taskforce include Dr Ezekiel Emanuel, a former Obama health adviser and one of the creators of the Affordable Care Act, and Rick Bright, a former top vaccine official from the Trump administration and a whistleblower.
      The advisory board, he said, would create a “blueprint” to be put in place as soon as the Biden administration is sworn into office. “This group will advise on detailed plans, build on a bedrock of science and … keep compassion, empathy and care for every American at its core.” More

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      Joe Biden: US still facing 'very dark winter' despite promising coronavirus vaccine news – video

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      President-elect Joe Biden said the months ahead would still be very difficult for the United States, despite the encouraging news about Pfizer’s coronavirus vaccine.
      Biden said it would be ‘many months’ before the vaccine was widely available, warning that another 200,000 Americans could die of coronavirus in the coming months.
      Biden also spoke about his coronavirus taskforce and urged Americans to wear face masks to limit the spread of the virus
      Biden gets to work as president-elect while Trump refuses to concede
      US coronavirus cases near 10m as Ben Carson tests positive More