Biden signs many executive orders during his first week in office
It’s been a whirlwind of action for President Joe Biden starting the very day he was inaugurated.
Just hours into the job, Joe Biden signed orders to rejoin the Paris climate accord, mandate masks in federal buildings and rescind the Keystone pipeline permit.
Then he in a round of executive orders, he extended moratoriums on evictions and student loan, rejoined the World Health Organization and expanded food assistance. Took action reopening enrollment on the federal Affordable Care Act exchanges as part of two health care executive actions that he signed Thursday, taking a step to help uninsured Americans that former President Donald Trump rejected.
He proposed a massive overhaul of immigration laws, including a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants.
All of his actions were all executive orders. Next come the hard part. Getting the congress to pass the legislation he wants. With Democratic Party control of both houses of congress, even though its very thin, we can expect the president to leave no stone unturned in obtaining the results he wants.
This is obvious. The new Biden administration is inheriting a seriously damaged economy. The decline in payroll employment reflects the recent increase in coronavirus (COVID-19) cases and efforts to contain the pandemic.
The BLS December report said this:
“In December, 15.8 million persons reported that they had been unable to work because their employer closed or lost business due to the pandemic-that is, they did not work at all or worked fewer hours at some point in the last 4 weeks due to the pandemic.”
“This measure is 1.0 million higher than in November. Among those who reported in December that they were unable to work because of pandemic-related closures or lost business, 12.8 percent received at least some pay from their employer for the hours not worked, little changed from November.”
After trending down to 787,000 new jobless claims from a high of over 6 million at the end of March 2020, the new claims jumped to 965,000 last week.
Food Pantry line in NYC
This situation was obviously driven by the continuing and growing impact of COVID-19.
However as the virus continues to spread car sales have been surging. Home sales have been surging. The stock market set an all time high this month.
These realities reflect on the fact that we have an enormously divided society between the haves and the have-nots.
For the better educated, who hold white collar jobs, their accumulation of wealth has created a whole class of people — at least the top 20% or so of earners — who’ve had to worry little about such things as having a job. And as lockdowns gripped the nation, millions of people, especially those at the upper end of America’s socio-economic ladder, were able to redirect money they would have otherwise spent on things like entertainment, dining and travel toward savings or, better yet, investments. With the rising stock market their wealth has grown significantly.
The continuing pandemic isn’t ending any time soon. According to Biden administration Surgeon General nominee Dr. Vivek Murthy, it may take until late spring to finish vaccinating high-risk populations, if all goes according to plan. If that happens, the general public may be looking at a rough time-frame of the middle summer before widespread vaccine distribution begins. To me that translates to millions not going back to work until the fall of 2021.
Unless Americans are willing to have a nation of massive homelessness the federal government will have to provide funding for rents, food, and education for our youth. Joe Biden will have to convince a majority of both houses of congress that this must be job one.
Two additional vaccines for Covid-19 may be authorized for use in the US in the coming months as the country tries to deal with record hospitalizations and deaths.
The COVID-19 vaccine developed by the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca wasn’t the first to be OK’d by regulators in the U.K.—health officials authorized the Pfizer-BioNTech jab nearly four weeks earlier. And it’s not the most effective—Stage 3 clinical trials suggest it prevents COVID-19 symptoms about 70% of the time vs. about 95% for the Pfizer vaccine and a similar one from Moderna (which is authorized in the U.S., but not the U.K.).
The first thing to know about the Oxford-AstraZeneca jab is that it’s cheap. AstraZeneca has promised it will not make a profit on the vaccine during the pandemic. As a result, it costs $3 to $4 per dose around the world. Compare that to $25 to $37 a dose for the vaccine developed by Moderna and about $20 a dose for Pfizer’s jab, according to figures reported in Europe.
In addition, Johnson and Johnson’s single-dose vaccine may be authorized for emergency use in February and could be a “game changer” for the US, Slaoui said. Phase 3 trial recruitment for this vaccine has been completed.
Source for this information is CNN and Time magazine.
This makes my heart burst with pride as Moses led our people out of bondage these scientists are going to lead the world out of the pandemic. Happy Hanukkah!
Feeling good about the info below, I thought you might be interested –
Mikael Dolsten, Chief Scientific Officer at Pfizer, is Jewish. He grew up in Halmstad, Sweden, the son of a Jewish father with prewar roots in Sweden and a Jewish mother who escaped Austria in the early days of WWII. He visited Israel several times as a youngster and did a year of his doctoral work at the Weizmann Institute. There he learned cutting edge immunology which led him to pharmaceutical science. Dolsten has referred in interviews to rising anti-Semitism in Sweden.
Pfizer CEO Albert Borla is a Sephardic Jew from Thessalonika, Greece, a city whose Jewish population was almost completely wiped out during WWII. The Borla family’s history in Thessalonika goes back 5 centuries, and Borla visits his remaining family members there yearly. He now lives in New York City.
The Chief Medical Officer for Moderna, a Cambridge, Mass.- based company, is an Israeli immigrant named Tal Zaks. Previously, he served as head of Global Oncology at Sanofi Pharmaceuticals. Zaks received his M.D. and PhD. degrees at Ben Gurion University and conducted post-doc research at the NIH.
The scientist responsible, with a colleague, for the pioneering breakthroughs that allowed the development of an mRNA vaccine (the novel approach used by Moderna and Pfizer for dealing with COVID-19) is University of Pennsylvania’s Drew Weissman. A Professor of Medicine at Penn, he received his BA and MA degrees at Brandeis and MD/Microbiology and PhD at Boston U. Weissman once worked with a fellowship at the NIH under Dr. Fauci.
Final related notes: President-Elect Joe Biden this week named his new head for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (“CDC”): Dr. Rochelle Walensky, Professor Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Chief of Infectious Diseases at Massachusetts General Hospital. She works as a physician at a Jewish camp for a week each summer. Also in the clan is Jeff Zients, who will be Biden’s overseer for the entire federal coronavirus response. Zients led the successful effort to fix the government’s Health.gov website when it became damaged during the launch of the Affordable Care Act.
And remember that we are less than 2% of the US population.
We are anxious to be vaccinated against COVID-19. My question is how safe is a vaccine that has been rushed to be approved? Today’s LA Times brings up some of my issues about taking the vaccine.
The Covid-19 vaccines have not been tested in the frail elderly, many of whom are residents of long-term care facilities.
Dr. Kelly Moore, associate director of the Immunization Action Coalition, is supporting frontline workers who will administer Covid-19 vaccinations to be first in line for a vaccination. Moore said, “There’s a question about the direct benefit of the vaccine, if given to people who live in those facilities, because we haven’t studied how well it works in that group yet.” That concern led Dr. Helen “Keipp” Talbot, of Vanderbilt University to vote against giving them a priority to obtain a vaccination.
That concern leads me (I am not an epidemiologist) to ask what groups of people were included in the phase 3 testing of the vaccines? What were the side effects and how many of the vaccine’s recipients experienced those effects?
Until I get the answers to those questions go ahead and push your way in front of me as we stand waiting for an injection. Call me in a week or two and tell me how you feel. Thank you.
Efficacy is the ability to perform a task to a satisfactory or expected degree. The word comes from the same roots as effectiveness, and it has often been used synonymously, although in pharmacology a distinction is now often made between efficacy and effectiveness. Efficacy can be defined as the performance of an intervention under ideal and controlled circumstances, whereas effectiveness refers to its performance under ‘real-world’ conditions.
Adequate testing of any new drug is mandatory. What are the side effects and how likely are they to occur?
Pulled from the market in 1961, thalidomide caused approximately 10,000 children to be born with deformed limbs, brain defects, or other developmental deformities. In July of 1962, president John F. Kennedy and the American press began praising their heroine, FDA inspector Frances Kelsey, who prevented the drug’s approval within the United States despite pressure from the pharmaceutical company and FDA supervisors. Kelsey felt the application for thalidomide contained incomplete and insufficient data on its safety and effectiveness. Among her concerns was the lack of data indicating whether the drug could cross the placenta, which provides nourishment to a developing fetus. While thalidomide is not a vaccine the message seems obvious to me.
My own wife started taking Tumeric on advise from her doctor to ease her arthritis pain. The non-prescription drug is advertised as a potent anti-inflammatory and antioxidant and may also help improve symptoms of depression and arthritis. The doctor did not warn her about any side effects. But there are some: stomach upset, nausea, dizziness, or diarrhea. She suffered from diarrhea even after she stopped taking the medication for four months. That led to her having a colonoscopy that found nothing but an irritation to her colon.
Pascal Soriot, CEO of AstraZeneca, confirmed to Bloomberg on Thursday the British pharmaceutical giant was likely to run an additional global trial to evaluate the efficacy of its Covid-19 vaccine.
In our rush to obtain a vaccine for Covid-19 (Warp Speed) will side effects be known? AstraZeneca and Oxford “get a poor grade for transparency and rigor when it comes to the vaccine trial results they have reported,” said Natalie Dean, a biostatistician at the University of Florida. Side effects may not be known for many months. We may want the vaccination but I will be standing at the back of the line.
What in hell is it going to take to get your attention? The corona virus is spreading more than ever. Of course I am sick of this damned disease. We all are. Quit whining. If you can fight in wars you can sacrifice yourself to protect other people.
Nov 4 New Cases 108,389 New Deaths: 1,201
Nov 5 New Cases 118,204 New Deaths: 1,125
Nov 6 New Cases 132,540 New Deaths: 1,248
Nov 7 New Cases 124,232 New Deaths: 1,031
Nov 8 New Cases 102,726 New Deaths: 512 this is a Sunday
Donald Trump may say that the corona virus is going away but that is a lie. The election is a referendum on the president’s management of the pandemic. Doctor Anthony Fauci has warned that things could get a lot worse Trump’s response is he doesn’t like what the doctor has said an might fire him.
Great leadership Mr. President.
Graph of New Reported Cases in the U.S. from the New York Times.
‘Covid, covid covid’ – Trump says opponents are using the pandemic to make him look bad. His opponents are correct. And Yes his opponents and the news media has every right to report the facts to the public. His handling of the virus has been a disaster. By Trump’s own admission to Bob Woodward in February he knew that the disease was going to have a disastrous impact on the public but wanted to ‘play it down.’
THE NYT notes that there have been 500,000 cases recorded this week, and “half of U.S. counties saw new cases peak during the past month. Almost a third saw a record in the past week.” TAKE A LOOK at the hardest-hit areas, and they line up with some of the most critical areas for the presidential contest: vast swaths of Midwestern swing states.
WaPo’s JULIE ZAUZMER notes:“The daily rate of new coronavirus cases in DC rose above 10 per 100,000 residents today for the first time in months. Today’s rate is the highest since June 8. On Sept. 30, we were at 5.1 per 100,000.”
Mismanagement of controlling the virus spread provides another message. Donald Trump does not function well in an emergency. He turns everything into an opportunity to remake the government in his image.
We have now had 27 hurricanes hitting the Gulf coast this year. The Atlantic hurricane season is the period in a year from June through November. We could experience more this year. Hope is not a strategy. “The Trump administration has recently removed the chief scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the nation’s premier scientific agency, installed new political staff who have questioned accepted facts about climate change and imposed stricter controls on communications at the agency.”
As I post this commentary early afternoon in California the number of new corona virus exceeds 67,000 today. Yes, ‘Covid, covid covid’ should be topic one!
To many of the commentator’s surprise Donald Trump behaved like a mensch. That made the debate rather boring.
Trump needed to impress viewers that he has done an excellent job in his first four years and deserves another term. He did not make the case.
The two issues that are front and center for most Americans are COVID-19 and health care.
1) Trump repeated what he has said at his rallies that the disease would go away and added that we will have a vaccine by the end of the year (scientists in the know say a vaccine won’t be available until late in 2021 at the earliest).
2) Trump has a health plan that is far better than Obamacare (that plan has been promised ever since Trump was inaugurated in January 20, 2017).
Joe Biden has not made an overwhelming case for his election. Donald Trump has not delivered protection against the virus nor presented a new health plan.
This election is not a choice. It is a referendum on Donald Trump. Trump knows that fact.
Red states are likely to remain red and blue states remain blue. If Trump can win all the states he won in 2016 he will be in office for another term. However, if polls are to be believed Trump will not be inaugurated on January 20, 2020 for second term. Just remember that almost all the polls predicted Hillary Clinton would win four years ago.
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