COVID-19 Update

World

New Cases:   476,355 (⬆︎ .50%)

New Deaths:      9,242 (⬆︎ .45%)

USA

New Cases:   142087 (⬆︎ .58%)

New Deaths:     1,425 (⬆︎ .35%)

Vaccinations took another day off

10.6 million total vaccintated

9.6% Priority Population

3.2% Total population

Wouldn't it be nice if the dip in numbers over the last few days turns out to be a downward trend - like the holiday surge is done and we're going back down into relatively low trough, or maybe we've even started to get a handle on this thing.

Looking for the bright spots in what has been a very dark aspect of the world.

Coverage of the pandemic is a little sparse these days. Seems there must be a few other things occupying the Press Poodles' time.

Unfortunately, there's never a shortage of stories about how shitty it's been to lose good people to a monster largely of our own creation.

NYT:

Lives Cut Short

On one single day in a monthlong period during which the United States lost more people to Covid-19 than in any other during the pandemic, Stacey Williams, a beloved youth football coach and father of five in Florida, was among more than 2,000 Americans with the virus to die.

Along with Mr. Williams, Jose H. Garcia, 59, the longtime chief of the Roma Police Department in the South Texas border region who was known to friends and family as Beto, died of Covid-19 complications. So did Nelson Prentice Bowsher II of Washington, D.C., 80, an affordable-housing advocate whose family’s feed mill business was a fixture of South Bend, Ind., through the 1960s.

Combing through hundreds of local obituaries, county records and interviews with families, New York Times reporters were able to piece together a tapestry of some of the lives lost on that day, Jan. 4.

Sherri Rasmussen, 51, of Lancaster, Ohio, was one. She is survived by a daughter who said she will always remember the day her mother gave her purse to a woman who complimented it in a CVS store, saying, “I want to pay it forward.”

And then there was Pedro Ramirez, 47, who loved his Puerto Rican homeland, salsa dancing and restoring Volkswagen bugs. Days before, he told his wife, Shawna Rodriguez, about the vaccine and how people like him, with chronic medical issues, would be getting it soon.

“I told him I loved him and how sorry I was that he had to be in the hospital by himself,” said Ms. Ramirez, 52, who works in a bridal salon in Macon, Ga.

The surge in deaths reflects how much faster Americans have spread the virus to one another since late September, when the number of cases identified daily had fallen to below 40,000. Since early in the pandemic, deaths have closely tracked cases, with about 1.5 percent of cases ending in death three to four weeks later.

Today's Tweet

And they'll call some of us the "Good Americans".

History will look back on the Trump presidency & wonder how Americans fell for him, why they tolerated him & his crimes for so long & how slowly they shook it off, even when it was clear it was over. It will seem inexplicable.

— Joyce Alene (@JoyceWhiteVance) January 19, 2021

I Wanna Sue Nazis

When some shit like Qult45's un-reality gets going, it's hard to stop.

They can keep it going almost like a runaway nuclear reaction when the fuel pile reaches critical mass. 

If you stack up the shit fast enough, then it's easier to make that shit sound plausible than it is to refute each separate turd. And because people will begin to believe the shit just through repetition, then eventually, it has to come down to finding a way to force the thing to a screeching halt so somebody can at least sort one piece of it out.

It's not a nice analogy because it's not a nice task - sorting thru the shit. Which is why guys like Trump do the dirtiest nastiest shittiest things they can think of - because somebody has to get down in all that muck to make it stop, and not many people are lining up to volunteer for the duty.

But once that one piece has been taken apart, then the Gordian Knot starts to unravel and the whole mess begins to flip the other way. It "suddenly" becomes a lot easier to see how similar the individual instances of bullshit were, and that makes it easier to see most of what Qult45 has been up to for the bullshit it's always been.

The main avenue for forcing the halt, and unraveling the knot has traditionally been the courts.

And don't get me started on how hard Republicans have been working at fucking up the whole court system - suffice to say we still have a shot at making this thing work in favor of someone other than some rich legacy puke in spite of "conservative" efforts.

Anyway, here's hoping Mr Trump is heading for some very rough water.

WaPo:

On the other side of Donald Trump’s turbulent presidency, the lawyers are waiting.

Leaving aside his Senate impeachment trial, mounting government investigations include a civil probe by New York Attorney General Letitia James, a criminal probe by Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr., and a federal probe by acting U.S. Attorney for D.C. Michael Sherwin that may include Trump’s role in the catastrophic storming of the U.S. Capitol this month.

But already pending for the soon-to-be South Florida retiree is a trio of lawsuits that allege defamation, fraud and more fraud — all of which are helmed by one attorney.

Roberta Kaplan’s clients include writer E. Jean Carroll, who filed a defamation case after Trump claimed she was “totally lying” about her allegation that he raped her a quarter-century ago in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room, and niece Mary L. Trump, who claims that Trump and two of his siblings deprived her of an inheritance worth millions.

“I became the go-to person to sue the president,” says Kaplan, 54, with considerable relish.

She is in many ways the ideal legal adversary to take on Trump. Kaplan is a brash and original strategist, with neither a gift for patience nor silence, a crusader for underdogs who has won almost every legal accolade imaginable. Kaplan, says New York Democratic Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo in an email, “has been indispensable in the fight against the cancer of hate and division that Trump spent four years exacerbating.”

Before the presidency, Trump was often as engaged in legal tussles as he was in real estate, suing and threatening to sue his way out of financial trouble. With a return to private life, “his terror is that he will no longer be protected by the office and will have to deal with these lawsuits,” says his niece. Trump faces the prospect of spending considerable time in the role of defendant. Kaplan says she will seek to depose him in all three cases. Trump’s lawyers did not respond to requests for comment on the cases in this story.

For much of her career, there was little in Kaplan’s professional bio to suggest she would become an attorney suing behemoths. Kaplan, known to all as Robbie, is a self-described “traditionalist,” in pearls, pumps and, pre-coronavirus, superior blond highlights, who long worked as a top commercial litigator at Paul, Weiss, one of the nation’s preeminent firms, where the fees tend to be if-you-have-to-ask-you-surely-can’t-afford-us.

But she became increasingly identified as an advocate for liberal causes and outside-the-box legal strategies. She is a lesbian, an observant Jew and a die-hard Democrat for whom 12 hours constitutes a light work day.

“My maternal grandmother always hated a bully,” Kaplan says during a series of phone interviews. “One really good job for going after bullies is to be a lawyer.”

Since launching her own firm four years ago, Kaplan has initiated a constellation of cases against powerful, often intimidating forces: white supremacists, major Hollywood players, the president of the United States. Legal writer Dahlia Lithwick calls her “an attorney general for the resistance.”

Stanford University law professor Pamela Karlan says of their frequent legal conversations: “Robbie’s not calling about feelings. She wants to fix it first. She’s the least diffident person I’ve ever met. Plenty of smart people worry about failing. They worry about every little thing. Robbie doesn’t worry about that. In a really disarming way, she doesn’t care if people view her as hyperaggressive.”

In Kaplan’s third Trump case, she represents participants in ACN, a multilevel marketing company promoted on “The Celebrity Apprentice.” They’re suing not ACN, but the former host and his three oldest children, accusing them of endorsing the company as a promising business opportunity.

While Trump billed himself as a populist, Kaplan perceived a consistent disconnect in how Trump University and other enterprises allegedly took advantage of the very people whose interests he claimed to champion.

“Because of his prominence, he marketed his ability to convince unsophisticated, very poor Americans to invest,” says Kaplan, who was indignant that Trump “would exploit people like this to line your own pockets.”

(In a Business Insider story, a Trump organization spokesperson responded to the suit by saying, “Before enrolling with ACN, every participant acknowledged in writing that they are ‘not guaranteed any income.’ ” In that story, ACN co-founder Robert Stevanovski claimed the plaintiffs were told that Trump was getting paid to endorse the company. “I think it’s politically motivated that they’re going to sue him and the family and not us,” he said.)

Kaplan remains most celebrated for the Edie Windsor case that, in 2013, successfully struck down the Defense of Marriage Act, paving the way with stunning alacrity for the legalization of same-sex marriage two years later to the day.

Among Kaplan’s strategic moves — “I don’t know where I found the chutzpah to do this” — was to help coax Bill Clinton to publish a Washington Post opinion piece renouncing his 1996 support of DOMA before she appeared before the nation’s highest court. United States v. Windsor remains the only U.S. Supreme Court case that she has ever argued.

“A little girl with a big mouth.” That’s how Kaplan’s grandmother described her, meant with affection. Growing up in Cleveland, she was a rigorous student who designed a plan. Head East to a top school (Harvard), train as a lawyer (Columbia), become a New Yorker.

Five years ago, that plan expanded to landing a top Justice Department position in Hillary Clinton’s administration.

So, no.

Instead, in the summer of 2017, Kaplan launched her own boutique firm, still a rarity among female corporate lawyers, creating an unusual model that combines lucrative commercial litigation with a progressive public-interest practice. Free from the agendas of risk-averse institutional clients, Kaplan and her colleagues became free to take on any case they believed had merit.

One week after the firm moved into its 71st-floor offices of the Empire State Building, the furniture yet to arrive, Charlottesville erupted.

Believing that Trump’s Justice Department seemed unlikely to seriously investigate and prosecute the people responsible for the violence during the “Unite the Right” rally — he infamously claimed there “were very fine people, on both sides” — Kaplan announced, and this was her precise language to friends and colleagues: “I want to sue Nazis.”

Because, why not?

Within days, Kaplan and her team flew to Virginia. The firm adopted an outside-the-box approach and sued two dozen avowed neo-Nazis, white supremacists and associated groups, invoking the 1871 Ku Klux Klan Act to argue that they conspired for months to commit racially motivated violence, thereby making it more of a challenge for the organizers to adopt free speech as a defense. The case is scheduled for trial in October.

In the wake of Harvey Weinstein’s sexual misconduct revelations, Kaplan co-founded the Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund, which offers financial assistance for plaintiffs filing harassment cases, and she now serves as chair of the Time’s Up organization. Many women who say they have been sexually harassed or assaulted have come to her. The actress Amber Heard sought Kaplan’s representation in ex-husband Johnny Depp’s $50 million case involving a 2018 Washington Post opinion piece by Heard; he alleges she defamed him by implying that he domestically abused her. (The op-ed does not explicitly name him.) In the complaint, the actor denies any abuse took place.

Heard says of Kaplan, “I’m instantly drawn to the type of individual who can look upon the Goliath and say ‘I think I can take you.’ That kind of energy and temerity is rare in the world, especially in the legal world.”

Suing the powerful has brought repeated threats. Kaplan has an apartment in Manhattan but requested that her country home’s location, where she has spent the pandemic working, go unnamed.

Kaplan says the greatest abuse she’s received on social media has come not from neo-Nazis, white supremacists or Trump’s true believers, but from Depp’s vehement online champions.

A hallmark of Kaplan Hecker & Fink is crafting complaints in layman’s language that pack a wallop. The Mary Trump brief is a doozy. “For Donald J. Trump, his sister Maryanne, and their late brother Robert, fraud was not just the family business — it was a way of life,” the complaint begins, before alleging three duplicitous schemes, “The Grift,” “The Devaluing” and “The Squeeze-Out.”

Says Mary Trump, “That brief is literature.”

The president’s lawyers, in an effort to have the case tossed, claimed that the complaint is “laden with conspiracy theories.”

When Carroll first met with Kaplan, the lawyer quickly understood her client’s objective. “I don’t give two flying figs about an apology,” Carroll says. “I am dying to get him in a deposition. I want him to say that I’m not a liar. I just want him to admit that he lied and that, yes, it happened.”

The last few years of Kaplan’s professional life, with her firm swelling from four to 43 elite lawyers, are inextricably intertwined with Trump. Without his election, Kaplan may not have launched her own firm as quickly or filed three lawsuits against him.

“I’m ready. I’m excited,” says Kaplan. In the Carroll case, Kaplan believes that Trump’s proclivity for false and misleading statements, with more than 30,000 of them during his White House term, according to The Post, will be tested when he is under oath. During a 2007 Trump deposition, lawyers caught him making exaggerated claims 30 times, according to a 2016 Post investigation.

“When we depose you, you’re not going to get away with that,” Kaplan says. “He had the mantle of the presidency, and that’s now gone.”

Kaplan is celebrated for her candor. She’s active in LGBTQ causes, recently serving as the board chair of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis. She rhapsodizes about her “big gay Jewish wedding” in 2005 to Rachel Lavine, a liberal activist who serves on New York’s Democratic committee.

Yet Kaplan remained in the closet until law school graduation.

“Robbie is one of the most conventional radicals you’ll ever meet,” Lithwick says.

In 1991, Kaplan came out to her parents at age 25. It did not go well. Her mother walked up to a wall and began banging her head, repeatedly, in dismay. “Which she has apologized for over and over again,” Kaplan says. The family remains close.

Kaplan experienced a rare episode of depression, which led her to consult a therapist named Thea Spyer, who referenced her lesbian relationship in an effort to comfort Kaplan — and whose death in 2009 left a punitive estate tax bill to her partner, Edie Windsor, because their marriage wasn’t legally recognized, sparking the Supreme Court case that helped define Kaplan’s career.

Why did such an outspoken person hide her true identity for so long?

“I’d never been a burn-down-the-ramparts sort of person. I believed in working in institutions,” says Kaplan. “Living a life very much on the margins didn’t appeal to me. I really wanted to have kids. I really wanted to be part of the Jewish community. I really wanted to have a career. All of this would have been unavailable in the world I grew up in.”

She has all of that — the marriage, a son (Jacob, now 14), a goldendoodle. On Sunday mornings, she participates in a Talmud discussion group with her rabbi and Lithwick.

“Also, I knew when I met Rachel there was no way I was going to be able to be in the closet and be with Rachel,” Kaplan says. “Those two things were completely incompatible.” Everyone in the New York gay rights movement knew Lavine. Politics, civic engagement and intellectual rigor were part of the attraction. On an early date in a romantic Chelsea bistro, the two argued at length over the comparative power of the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks during the Russian Revolution.

Although known for her fresh legal arguments, Kaplan was comfortable working in a large firm. She seemed unlikely to go out on her own. In many ways, it’s the boldest professional move she’s made.

“What makes a good litigator and lawyer is being a pessimist and risk averse because you need to be looking at problems around the next corner,” says Karlan, who helped prepare Kaplan for the Supreme Court argument. “Robbie has been as successful as she is because she doesn’t appear to be that kind of thinker. She’s an optimist.”

The firm’s high-profile cases have attracted top legal talent, like Joshua Matz, who briefly left the firm last year to help the House Judiciary Committee draft articles of impeachment.

“We’ve learned that in presenting options to Robbie, she will presumptively favor the most aggressive option,” Matz says. “She is jaw-droppingly strategic and savvy on the one hand, and extremely bold on the other.”

It’s also a menschy practice. “What’s unusual is the sheer amount of contact she has with her clients,” Karlan says. Kaplan celebrated Passover with Windsor, who died in 2017. She’s available at all hours for phone consultations. Gifts of food are constant. She sent Heard a box of chicken soup, lox and bagels.

Citing logistical challenges that were better served by local counsel, Kaplan’s firm no longer represents Heard in the defamation case that is scheduled for trial in May.

Yet Kaplan continues to offer Heard legal advice on the case and other legal matters. They speak regularly, sometimes daily. “She is the bravest lawyer I have ever met. She doesn’t get intimidated or scare easily,” Heard says. “The well-behaved woman never interested me. There’s a rebellious part of Robbie. I think of her as my Jewish mother.”

Kaplan’s close friend Sharon Nelles, head of litigation at Sullivan & Cromwell, says: “If you can come at the world the way she does, you are not reined in by whether there are social constructs or boundaries. You can create your own mold. Lawyers for the most part react. Robbie acts.”

Nelles recalls a time when Kaplan called to consult on a case. “She’s yapping at me on the phone and then lets out a little screech.”

Nelles asked what was wrong. “Oh, I’m having a medical procedure,” Kaplan said. “Let me call you back when I get off the doctor’s table.”

Mary Trump hired Kaplan to sue President Trump, his sister Maryanne Trump Barry and the estate of his late brother Robert Trump “because I want justice for my daughter, and for me, and for my dad. If Donald Trump is not going to be held accountable for other things, he needs to be held accountable for this,” she says, adding: “Maybe that will start the dominoes to fall. Maybe other people will feel that they, too, have options and will come forward.” Kaplan’s firm regularly fields inquiries from potential clients who wish to sue Trump.

Carroll cannot wait for her day in court with Trump. She’s already picked out her outfit. Black. Armani.

She also views her lawsuit as symbolic, saying, “It’s for all the women in the country who have been harassed or assaulted by powerful men, and feel helpless to do anything about it.”

So Carroll’s doing something about it.

“I don’t have to be brave,” she says. “Because Robbie Kaplan is brave for me.”

New Thinking

Like most everybody else, I've been wondering how billionaires got so much more billionare-y and the stock market kept rollin' in the midst of a pandemic that basically shot large holes in the economy and pushed the deficit to places that make us all more than a little cranky.

If I take this lady at her word, I can wonder no more and start to understand that Bernie and AOC and the other "crazy lefties" may actually have it just about right.

And that in itself is pretty fuckin' scary for a hard-core(ish) capitalist like your favorite blogger.

Anyway, here's Stephanie Kelton, PhD, trying to lay it out for me in a way that doesn't make my head hurt as badly as would normally be the case for me.

The big easy take-away for me is her concept of balance - ie: a deficit on the government side always equals a surplus on the private side, and vice versa. That's the Zero-Sum Game that matters.

And it works the same on the macro scale as well. A trade deficit in USAmerica Inc is always in balance with a surplus somewhere else.

The 2nd point is that, yes, it seems wildly counter-intuitive and unwise and crazy and stoopid just to create whatever money we need by pushing a few buttons on a computer keyboard in Steve Mnuchin's office, but it really doesn't matter how much "funny money" we conjure up out of thin air as long as most of us maintain a sufficient level of confidence in the system, and - muy importante - as long inflation is under the magic 5% mark, which according to Dr Kelton is about the only real constraint we have to worry about.

What remains for me to figure out: 

The people "in charge" have to know about all this, but they keep acting like they don't know what's going on, so what are those fuckers up to behind our backs as they're doing the shit that's going on?

COVID-19 Update

World

New Cases:   532,907 (⬆︎ .56%)

New Deaths:      9,192 (⬆︎ .45%)

USA

New Cases:   175,560 (⬆︎ .72%)

New Deaths:      1,846 (⬆︎ .56%)

No change reported in vaccination numbers

10.6 million total vaccinated

9.6% of the Priority Population

3.2 % of the Total Population

WaPo:

With covid-19 ravaging the nation at record rates, many Department of Veterans Affairs employees say they lack the support needed to fight the disease.

A survey conducted by the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), which represents VA workers, indicates most staffers were not informed when colleagues contracted the coronavirus, about half were not told patients had covid-19 before health-care providers served them, and some workers did not have adequate personal protective equipment to shield against the infection.

VA, the nation’s largest health-care system, disputed the survey findings, saying it had performed well in combating covid.

Here are the toplines from 1,786 responses to the survey that was sent to union members in December:

• Sixty percent of respondents reported their facility did not alert them when fellow staff members contracted covid-19.
• Nearly 50 percent said they were not notified before working with covid-positive patients.
• Almost 40 percent reported not receiving adequate PPE.
• More than 88 percent said they knew of an employee at their facility who had contracted covid-19.
• Susan Carter, director of VA’s media relations office in Washington, listed a number of covid-related accomplishments in an email. She said “union bosses should be praising this success rather than trying to sow division.” According to VA:
• The department’s current employee infection rate is less than 1 percent — “much lower than other health-care systems.”
• All VA medical centers have adequate capacity, PPE and supplies to meet current demand.
• VA has given 203,459 employees and 129,322 veterans at least one dose of a vaccine as of Thursday.
• As part of VA’s covid response, it has hired more than 72,000 health-care workers since late March.

The picture VA’s media relations office paints is not what many employees in the trenches see.

Staffers are not told in advance when working with infected colleagues, said Teri James, a registered VA nurse in Indianapolis and president of the union’s local affiliate there. Instead, they learn about it by word-of-mouth. “We are also NOT informed when a patient with whom we have been directly providing care to, turns covid positive, again we find out from other co-workers,” she wrote in an email.

Regarding protective equipment, the record is mixed.

“We have adequate PPE but not always the ‘right’ type,” James wrote. “Management continues to provide staff who work directly with covid and non-covid patients NON MEDICAL face masks” when employees are working with patients outside of covid rooms. “These masks are clearly marked ‘not for medical use.’”

When health-care providers enter the room of a covid-positive patient, they are provided the N95 masks needed for protection, she said.

Despite the additional health-care hiring since March, “there is a shortage of RN staff to provide inpatient care,” according to James. “Patient workload is heavy.”

Duties for covid nurses in her facility are much greater than those in other wards, she said. Those additional duties include housekeeping, drawing blood, doing electrocardiograms, escorting patients, meal service, stocking PPEs outside of isolation rooms and other aspects of patient care.

“Management is not following its own COVID-19 Response Plan,” according to James. “By not following this Standard Operating Procedure, the medical center has placed multiple staff in harm’s way by not limiting the number of services or staff into the covid isolation areas. Management was given a list of their own violations of the Standard Operating Procedure that they wrote. NO corrections have been made to ensure a safe working condition.”

Richard Griffith, an Indianapolis VA Medical Center spokesperson, said he needed specifics, including dates, times, locations and employee names, before responding to James’s operating procedure complaints. About her other points, he said that “these allegations are ridiculous.”

“The Indianapolis VA Medical Center follows all laws and policies regarding access to patient and employee information, including cases involving COVID-19,” he wrote in an email, and “has always followed masking guidelines provided by VA Central Office and the Centers for Disease Control. Additionally, sufficient PPE exists to meet the needs of employees and patients.”

At the national level, the union has complained since March that VA’s “mismanagement of the pandemic response and lack of transparency put front-line workers, their families and veterans at risk,” AFGE President Everett B. Kelley said by phone. “Mishandling of the pandemic has contributed to the spread of the virus throughout the facilities at an alarming rate.”

VA reported 191,608 cumulative cases of covid, including VA patients and employees, as of Sunday evening, according to the department’s database. There were 7,909 deaths, including 3,001 among inpatients and 114 employees, which included five staffers in Indianapolis, more than any other VA location except one.

In the midst of pessimistic numbers like these, Kelley finds a ray of optimism — his expectation that VA’s management and transparency will improve as soon as President Trump is gone.

I understand that you have to be a little careful not to over-manage from the top - each unit needs some autonomy - but when there's no coherent strategy, there can be no tactical coordination, and you can expect some pretty shitty results, which is exactly what we've been getting thru this whole sorry fucked up mess.

Your Wake Up Call

Matthew Cooke - Wake Up Call For Republicans

Today's Today

We are bound together.

Shed A Little Light - James Taylor

Today's Parody

Had to get this one in before Trump fever breaks and these idiots start to fade back into the slime.

South Park Parody

COVID-19 Update

World

New Cases:   645,841 (⬆︎ .68%)

New Deaths:    13,070 (⬆︎ .65%)

USA

New Cases:   202,767 (⬆︎ .84%)

New Deaths:      3,377 (⬆︎ .84%)

It's good to see the usual holiday weekend slump, but I always try to remind myself that the monster takes no time off - any kind of "respite" that seems to manifest itself lies only in the reporting.

The vaccination numbers haven't changed - prob'ly because of the same reporting slump over the weekends.

10.6 million vaccinated

9.6% of the priority population

3.2% of the total population

It took 12 weeks to go from 200,000 dead to 300,000.

It took 5 weeks to go from 300,000 dead to 400,000.

So, while we should be able to hope for good improvement as the program begins to pick up steam, the way things are - politically, and due to the lag between treatment and outcome - we could be looking at 500,000 dead by Valentine's Day and 600,000 by Spring - at which time I'm sure it'll just disappear, like a miracle or something.

What kind of asshole "president" would lie to us about stockpiles of vaccine?

The Hill:

Governors are accusing the Trump administration of lying about the availability of additional coronavirus vaccines, following an announcement from top officials that doses will no longer be held in reserve.

Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said this week the administration would no longer be holding back the second of two doses, and encouraged states to open vaccination eligibility to more people.

But governors say there is no reserve and their limited supply of vaccines will not increase. Instead of being able to dramatically expand access to millions more people, states will have to continue to manage at their current levels.

The situation adds to growing frustration with the Trump administration's Operation Warp Speed. State officials have complained about a lack of clear communication from federal officials, and that the administration has continually changed the allocation numbers.

Oregon Gov. Kate Brown (D) on Friday said she learned there were no reserves after speaking to Gen. Gustave Perna of Operation Warp Speed on Thursday.

"This is a deception on a national scale. Oregon’s seniors, teachers, all of us, were depending on the promise of Oregon’s share of the federal reserve of vaccines being released to us," Brown tweeted.

The Trump administration had been holding back half of the available doses to ensure there is enough supply for everyone who is getting a first dose to later get a second as well.

Earlier this week, Azar and other officials said they had enough confidence in the supply chain so they could stop holding doses in reserve.

They also changed federal recommendations to prioritize everyone 65 and older, as well as people 16 and older with one high-risk medical condition — an extra 150 million Americans.

During a call with reporters announcing the change, Azar did not say the original policy had already been phased out, or that there was no longer a reserve.

"We are releasing the entire supply we have for order by states, rather than holding second doses in physical reserve," he said.

A spokesperson for Operation Warp Speed did not return a request for comment.

The Washington Post first reported the issue earlier Friday, and noted that some state health officials were still in the dark.

According to the paper, Operation Warp Speed stopped stockpiling second doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine at the end of last year. The last shots held in reserve of Moderna’s vaccine supply were shipped to states last weekend.

Brown's statement comes just days after the state expanded eligibility to allow everyone 65 and older, as well as child care providers and early learning and K-12 educators and staff, to get a shot.

Oregon Health Authority Director Pat Allen sent a letter to Azar demanding an explanation.

"While releasing second doses to be used as first doses entails considerable risk, we were encouraged by your assurances that production is accelerating at a rate sufficient to meet future demand," Allen wrote.

But he said Perna informed state officials on a call Thursday night there were no reserves, and the allocation of vaccines would not be increasing.

"If true, this is extremely disturbing, and puts our plans to expand eligibility at grave risk," Allen wrote.

"Those plans were made on the basis of reliance on your statement about 'releasing the entire supply' you have in reserve. If this information is accurate, we will be unable to begin vaccinating our vulnerable seniors on January 23rd as planned," he added.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) on Friday said the state's allocation actually decreased this week, from 300,000 doses down to 250,000.

"The Trump administration said they would expedite the second dose. It turns out that was not true, they had already sent out everything they had, so there was no increase in supply. In the meantime there was a dramatic increase in eligibility," Cuomo said.

"What they did was like opening the floodgates of eligibility, and that entire flood has to go through a syringe. That's the situation the federal government created," he added.

The frustration goes beyond blue states.

There is absolutely nothing in my heart that bears any resemblance to forgiveness for the Qult45 assholes who continue to stand by quietly allowing this to happen - and in some cases, actually facilitating it.

Today's Word

I don't remember seeing this one in 30 Days To A More Powerful Vocabulary.