Something Of A Revelation

My heartiest congratulations go out to all those typically stoopid Republicans for their typically stoopid policies - this one centering around Immigration.

Republicans took a giant shit on the people who come here to help us, while doing nothing to stop the people they claim are trying to come here to hurt us.

Add it to the big steaming pile of "Gee - I wonder how that happened".

CATO Institute tries to spin it as even-steven - a win and a loss - it isn't. It's a FUBAR wrapped in a SNAFU with big bold labels - CLUSTER FUCK - on every side of the package.

President Trump entered the White House with the goal of reducing legal immigration by 63 percent. Trump was wildly successful in reducing legal immigration. By November 2020, the Trump administration reduced the number of green cards issued to people abroad by at least 418,453 and the number of non‐​immigrant visas by at least 11,178,668 during his first term through November 2020. President Trump also entered the White House with the goal of eliminating illegal immigration but Trump oversaw a virtual collapse in interior immigration enforcement and the stabilization of the illegal immigrant population. Thus, Trump succeeded in reducing legal immigration and failed to eliminate illegal immigration.

BTW, if 45* had understood anything but his need to fondle himself, he could've peddled his stoopid immigration shit in terms of COVID-19, which would've given him a real chance.

But he didn't, because it was never about immigration. And it was only "about the economics" in the sense that he always does whatever is necessary to put money in his pocket.

We have to stop thinking "a little common sense is all we need". We have to get back to where we know it's more complicated than it seems it should be, but we're going to need qualified professionals to run this place because it is, in fact, pretty fucking complicated.

Can we try that for a while - again?

COVID-19 Update

World

New Cases:   575,798 (⬆︎ .58%)
New Deaths:    13,888 (⬆︎ .66%)

USA

New Cases:   172,913 (⬆︎ .68%)
New Deaths:      3,427 (⬆︎ .81%)

Vaccination Scorecard

Total Vaccinations:          17.4 million
Total Priority Population: 15.2%
Total Population:               5.2%

While there's plenty of news regarding COVID-19 and the ongoing problems of the pandemic as a whole and of the lingering effects the disease can have on individual patients, the Press Poodles have shifted their focus back to the narrative they were deprived of 4 years ago. ie: those impish rascally Republicans and the hapless lovable loser Democrats.

So fuckin' sick of that shit.

Buried more than halfway down the page, requiring extra navigation, and behind the pay wall, NYT teases a few stories about a contagion that's killed more Americans in a year than were killed in almost 4 years of WW2:

Here’s what you need to know: (pay wall)

• ‘An incredible scale of tragedy’: The U.S. records 25 million virus cases.
• Thousands of vaccine appointments are canceled as hospitals run out of doses.
• How many lives will Covid claim? Projecting virus deaths in the U.S. has proved to be difficult.
• The virus is surging through the many overcrowded homes in Los Angeles.
• The University of Michigan suspends athletic activities after finding cases of the variant first detected in the U.K.
• Major businesses are offering to help the U.S. government with the vaccination rollout.
• The Wuhan virus outbreak was a tragedy — until Beijing changed the narrative.
• Hong Kong and Madrid tighten lockdowns amid concerns over the new variant.

This is the story. It's the COVID, stupid. We don't solve this one, we don't get to do anything else.

So:

Joe Manchin is not playing hardball as he tries to thread that West Virginia needle.

McConnell is not being shrewd or maybe a little recalcitrant.

The Press Poodles are not calling balls and strikes and just trying to report the facts.

All of those assholes are contributing to thousands of Americans dying every day from a disease that should be at the top of every news site and every broadcast every fucking day.

Press coverage should be focused on whether or not politicians and businesses and individuals are helping or hindering the overall effort to get a handle on the one thing that's dominating everything we do.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but...

If we're going to let the science guide us thru this thing, then 

LET THE FUCKING SCIENCE GUIDE US

THRU THIS FUCKING THING.

COVID-19 Update

World

New Cases: 653,102 (⬆︎ .67%)
New Deaths:  16,016 (⬆︎ .76%)

USA

New Cases:   192,065 (⬆︎ .76%)
New Deaths:      3,886 (⬆︎ .92%)

Vaccination Scorecard

Total Vaccinations:          16.2 million
Total Priority Population: 14.2%
Total Population:               4.9%

Two stories at NYT, illustrating the obvious - that maybe corporations are people after all, because some of them are real assholes.

(pay wall)

New Pandemic Plight: Hospitals Are Running Out of Vaccines

Health officials are frustrated that available doses are going unused while the virus is killing thousands of people each day. Many vaccine appointments have been canceled.

As the coronavirus tears across much of Texas, Dr. Esmaeil Porsa is grappling with one of the most formidable challenges he has faced: The Houston hospital system he operates is running out of vaccines.

Dr. Porsa, the chief executive of Harris Health System, which treats thousands of mostly uninsured patients, warned on Friday that its entire vaccine supply could be depleted by midday Saturday. The problem is not one of capability — the vaccination centers Dr. Porsa oversees have easily been administering as many as 2,000 vaccines a day — but of availability.

“All of a sudden the distribution of vaccines stopped,” Dr. Porsa said. “It’s perplexing and frustrating because I keep hearing that there are high percentages of vaccines that have been distributed but not administered.”

In the midst of one of the deadliest phases of the pandemic in the United States, health officials in Texas and around the country are growing desperate, unable to get clear answers as to why the long-anticipated vaccines are suddenly in short supply. Inoculation sites are canceling thousands of appointments in one state after another as the nation’s vaccines roll out through a bewildering patchwork of distribution networks, with local officials uncertain about what supplies they will have in hand.

- and -

Pfizer Will Ship Fewer Vaccine Vials to Account for ‘Extra’ Doses

After the surprise discovery of an extra dose in every vial, Pfizer executives successfully lobbied the F.D.A. to change the vaccine’s formal authorization language. The company charges by the dose.

In December, pharmacists made the happy discovery that they could squeeze an extra vaccine dose out of Pfizer vials that were supposed to contain only five.

Now, it appears, the bill is due. Pfizer plans to count the surprise sixth dose toward its previous commitment of 200 million doses of Covid vaccine by the end of July and therefore will be providing fewer vials than once expected for the United States.

And yet, pharmacists at some vaccination sites say they are still struggling to reliably extract the extra doses, which require the use of a specialty syringe.

“Now there’s more pressure to make sure that you get that sixth dose out,” said Michael Ganio, the senior director for pharmacy practice and quality at the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists.

So the people who're doing the real work - the ones at the broken end of the bottle every fucking day - they've figured out how to "do more with less", which is what they've been told to do for 30 years, and the bean-counters get wind of this, and they decide to punish all of us by cutting the supply, which, in effect, raises the price.

Because of course.

Because that's life here in USAmerica Inc.

Because I guess corporations are people after all, because some of them behave like real assholes.

A View From Abroad

Jonathan Pie - Trump's Last Day

So Much To Do

POTUS Joe Swiffer is kinda hitting the ground running.

One of the priorities is to restore some kind of decency in the mechanisms for getting some honest information about us out to the world.

You could say VOA has always been something of a propaganda thing, but there have been long stretches of it being very straightforward as well. Trump was in the process of taking a giant shit on that one - same as everything else - and that's over now.

WaPo: (pay wall)

At Voice of America, a sweeping ouster of Trump officials on Biden’s first full day

President Biden moved swiftly to oust top managers loyal to former president Donald Trump who had been blamed for recent turmoil at the federal government’s array of international news organizations, including the biggest and most influential one, the Voice of America.

Only hours after he was inaugurated, Biden forced out Michael Pack, the controversial head of the agency that oversees VOA and four other networks that broadcast news to millions of people abroad. This was followed, domino-like, on Thursday by the removal of VOA’s director and deputy director after only a few weeks on the job.

In doing so, Biden appears to be putting the brakes on what critics said was an effort by the Trump administration to turn the news agencies into mouthpieces for Trump’s views and policies.

The federal government spends $637 million annually to support the five news networks — VOA, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Middle East Broadcasting, the Office of Cuba Broadcasting and Radio Free Asia. The agencies were established by Congress as an extension of American “soft power,” although the news and commentary they produce is by regulation independent of government or political control.

Voice of America alone broadcasts in 47 different languages, primarily in countries where press freedom is limited or nonexistent.

One of Biden’s first moves Wednesday was to seek the resignation of Pack, a Trump appointee who created a trail of scandal, lawsuits and acrimony in the eight months since he became chief executive of the news organizations’ parent, the U.S. Agency for Global Media.

Biden named Kelu Chao, a journalist who has worked at VOA for nearly 40 years, as Pack’s interim replacement. (The Senate must confirm the agency’s permanent chief executive.) And Chao, in turn, dismissed VOA’s director and deputy director, Robert Reilly and Elizabeth Robbins on Thursday, both of whom had been appointed by Pack only last month. Chao named Yolanda Lopez, another longtime VOA journalist, as acting director.

It's always an easy target for asshole Republicans - "Gubmint Media".

And here's another good example of Both Sides Don't.

Under the Dems particularly, things like NPR and PBS and VOA et al were more or less evenhanded - mostly on the level.

But over the years, the "conservatives" have been relentlessly attacking them, making mostly false accusations about their integrity and their attempts to tell the world the truth. They've slandered good people with bullshit about being lefty-librul or straight up Stalinist and totalitarian.

Along comes Trump and we get a very clear picture of what they've been aiming at, which comports almost perfectly with Daddy State Awareness, Rule 1 and Rule 3.

They accuse VOA of being nothing but government propaganda and then try to turn it into exactly that.

COVID-19 Update

World
New Cases: 665,009 (⬆︎ .68%)
New Deaths:  16,649 (⬆︎ .80%)

USA
New Cases:   193,758 (⬆︎   .78%)
New Deaths:      4,363 (⬆︎ 1.05%)

Vaccination Scorecard
Total Vaccinations:          15.1 million
Total Priority Population: 13.2%
Total Population:               4.5 %

It was, in a word, refreshing. In more than two words, it was like that first breath of fresh air after a very long wrestling practice.

NYT:

Banished by Trump but Brought Back by Biden, Fauci Aims to ‘Let the Science Speak’

Using the kind of blunt language that so often infuriated the former president, Dr. Anthony Fauci said the health threat from the virus was still “very serious.”

Most of the times Dr. Anthony S. Fauci made an appearance in the White House briefing room in 2020 — before eventually being banished from public view for his grim assessments of the coronavirus pandemic — he had President Donald J. Trump glowering over his shoulder.

On Thursday, Dr. Fauci, the nation’s foremost infectious disease specialist, was back, this time with no one telling him what to say. And he made no effort to hide how he felt about it.

“The idea that you can get up here and talk about what you know — what the evidence, what the science is — and know that’s it, let the science speak,” Dr. Fauci said, pausing for a second. “It is somewhat of a liberating feeling.”

Dr. Fauci’s presence in the room where Mr. Trump and other administration officials repeatedly spread misleading and false information about the virus was part of a daylong effort by the Biden administration to show a willingness to level with the public about how severe the pandemic is and what can be done to slow its spread.

Using the kind of blunt language that had so often infuriated Mr. Trump, Dr. Fauci said that the health threat from the virus was still “a very serious situation” and called the pandemic “historic, in the very bad sense.”

He told reporters that the government was keeping a close eye on variations of the virus that had mutated in South Africa, Brazil and Britain, in some cases showing signs of being more contagious than the predominant strain circulating in the United States.

The good news, Dr. Fauci said, is that the current vaccines appear to be effective, though maybe slightly less so, against the new variants. The bad news, he conceded, is that a virus that is more easily transmitted can ultimately lead to more sickness and death without concerted efforts like mask-wearing and social distancing.

“We are paying very close attention to it,” he assured those watching the briefing.

But what he said about the virus on Thursday may have been less important than the mere fact that he was able to say it without the possibility that Mr. Trump or his aides would undercut him, challenge him or try to silence him.

As director of the government’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Dr. Fauci has spent decades fighting the worst of the world’s diseases. He became something of a national celebrity as he sought to navigate the need to level with the public about the raging pandemic while dealing with Mr. Trump’s insistence that the threat was overblown and would “disappear” overnight.

Dr. Fauci recalled on Thursday how frustrating those days became.

“I don’t want to be going back over history, but it’s very clear that there were things that were said, be it regarding things like hydroxychloroquine and other things like that, that really was uncomfortable because they were not based on scientific fact,” he said, referring to Mr. Trump’s embrace of an unproven and untested drug for use as a treatment for the coronavirus.

Despite the president’s enthusiasm, hydroxychloroquine was eventually shown not to be an effective treatment, as Dr. Fauci often tried to suggest.

After Dr. Fauci noted on Thursday that his efforts to challenge Mr. Trump’s assertions often meant that he “got into trouble sometimes,” he was asked to elaborate.

“You said I was joking about it. I was very serious,” he said. “I can tell you I take no pleasure at all in being in a situation contradicting the president, so it was really something that you didn’t feel that you could actually say something, and there wouldn’t be any repercussions.”

Despite the change of administrations, Dr. Fauci remains at the center of the worst health crisis to hit the United States in more than a century. And the country remains deeply divided about the right way to respond. Some health care workers have refused to take the vaccine, worried about its safety. A large number of Mr. Trump’s voters continue to be angry about shutdowns that have closed businesses and put people out of work, and are still not convinced of the coronavirus’s lethality.

That means Dr. Fauci will still be addressing the tension between medicine and politics as President Biden struggles to balance competing interests.

But the initial evidence suggests that Dr. Fauci and his colleagues in the nation’s leading health agencies will be given far more leeway to operate without specific orders from the White House.

On Thursday morning, just hours after Mr. Biden’s inauguration, Dr. Fauci spoke to the executive board of the World Health Organization, telling the body that the United States would not be following through with Mr. Trump’s demand to leave the group in the middle of a pandemic.

“The United States stands ready to work in partnership and solidarity to support the international Covid-19 response, mitigate its impact on the world, strengthen our institutions, advance epidemic preparedness for the future and improve the health and well-being of all people throughout the world,” Dr. Fauci said in a video appearance.

During the Trump administration, Dr. Fauci’s appearances in the White House briefing room were often preceded by rambling, contentious meetings in the Oval Office with Mr. Trump and his aides, many of whom pushed rosy scenarios or misleading data.

On Thursday, Dr. Fauci described a different scene.

“One of the things that was very clear as recently as about 15 minutes ago when I was with the president is that one of the things that we’re going to do is to be completely transparent open and honest,” he said. “If things go wrong, not point fingers but to correct them and to make everything we do be based on science and evidence.”

Dr. Fauci paused, as if to marvel at what he had just said.

“I mean, that was literally a conversation I had 15 minutes ago,” he said. “And he has said that multiple times.”

A reporter noted that Dr. Fauci — who had last appeared in the briefing room in November — had largely disappeared from public view at the end of last year after angering Mr. Trump one too many times.

Are you back now, he was asked.

He smiled and glanced at Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary.

“I think so,” he said.

How We Got Here

Joe Biden is one of those guys who sees the shit that goes on and tries to do something about it.

If he can be faulted for anything, it's that his sense of indignation-spurring-immediacy has made him a little over-reactive in the past.

I think his instincts are good, especially those for peace-making, but he can come off as a little impetuous, and as a painter of blue skies and rainbows.

And if he manages to stay out of the trap where you end up totally uncool for having tried to be cool, then he's got a real shot.

The really good news so far is that he's able to choose his gang from a huge talent pool of qualified professionals who're eager to jump in and serve.

We'll see.

NYT: (pay wall)

Susan Bro recognized the palpable anger and open bigotry on display in the mob that attacked the United States Capitol this month. It reminded her of the outpouring of hate that killed her daughter, Heather Heyer.

That was in 2017, when white supremacists, self-avowed neo-Nazis and right-wing militias marched on Charlottesville in the name of intolerance — and former President Donald Trump — and one of them drove a car into a crowd, fatally injuring Ms. Heyer. More than three years later, Ms. Bro and other Charlottesville residents say they have a message for the nation after the latest episode of white violence in Washington, and for President Biden, who is emphasizing themes of healing and unity in the face of right-wing extremism.

Healing requires holding perpetrators accountable, Ms. Bro said. Unity follows justice.

“Look at the lessons learned from Charlottesville,” she said. “The rush to hug each other and sing ‘Kumbaya’ is not an effective strategy.”

The Capitol attack and Mr. Trump’s handling of it felt eerily familiar to many residents of Charlottesville, where the 2017 Unite the Right rally not only forever tied the former president to violence committed by white extremists, but also inspired Mr. Biden to run for president and undertake “a battle for the soul of this nation.”

After the rally and Ms. Heyer’s death, Mr. Trump declared that there were “very fine people on both sides” of the conflict and defended the actions of the right-wing mob. It was all a harbinger of things to come: the mix of misinformation and prejudice that Mr. Trump had inspired among a segment of Republicans; the reliance on false equivalency with progressive protesters; the willingness to use the bully pulpit of the presidency to inflame tensions; and the continued episodes of violence.

Charlottesville also showed the electoral backlash that Mr. Trump’s actions inspired, and how a movement to affirm multiracial democracy has grown in response to threats. Locally, a surge of activism helped elect the city’s first Black female mayor, Nikuyah Walker, and changes have been instituted like the creation of a civilian review police board.

Mr. Biden regularly invoked Charlottesville during a campaign in which he reclaimed five states that Mr. Trump had won in 2016. And though Mr. Biden nodded to the violence here and at the Capitol during his inaugural address on Wednesday, he framed the solutions in the sort of terms that Ms. Bro questioned, demonstrating a belief that kindness and compassion could overcome systemic discrimination.

“I know speaking of unity can sound to some like a foolish fantasy these days,” Mr. Biden said. “I know the forces that divide us are deep and they are real. But I also know they are not new. Our history has been a constant struggle between the American ideal that we all are created equal, and the harsh, ugly reality that racism, nativism, fear and demonization have long torn us apart.”

Mr. Biden’s tone was echoed by several other inaugural speakers, who delivered a clear and unified message: Democracy was tested in Mr. Trump’s administration, through events like the mob violence in Charlottesville and Washington. They argued that Mr. Biden had been elected to directly confront it — and that he knew the gravity of the challenge.

“We can join forces, stop the shouting, and lower the temperature,” Mr. Biden said. “For without unity, there is no peace — only bitterness and fury.”

But in interviews this week, Charlottesville activists, religious leaders and civil rights groups who endured the events of 2017 urged Mr. Biden and the Democratic Party to go beyond seeing unity as the ultimate political goal and prioritize a sense of justice that uplifts the historically marginalized. When Mr. Biden called Ms. Bro on the day he entered the presidential race in 2019, she pressed him on his policy commitments to correcting racial inequities. She declined to endorse him, she said, focused more on supporting the antiracism movement than any individual candidate.

Local leaders say this is the legacy of the “Summer of Hate,” as the white supremacist actions and violence of 2017 are known in Charlottesville. When the election of Mr. Trump and the violence that followed punctured the myth of a post-racial America, particularly among white liberals, these leaders committed themselves to the long arc of insulating democracy from white supremacy and misinformation.

Today's Tweet

Get out the way, bitch.

And that’s that. pic.twitter.com/PKwLPv1Sxf

— Jimmy Kimmel (@jimmykimmel) January 20, 2021

It Starts Today

The one thing Trump had to do to get his stoopid sorry ass re-elected was to meet the pandemic head on and get something - anything - in place that just looked a little bit like a plan to help us get through it.

He didn't. Because of course he didn't. Trump's ego always makes things worse for Trump.

And one of the truly stoopid points of debate I think we can look forward to will be whether or not it was worth the lives of 400,000 Americans to get rid of that prick.

But y'know what? Fuck that guy. He's gone, and this new guy seems like a decent fellow, so let's get on with it - cuz, you know - it is what it is, right?

Anyway.

NYT: (pay wall)

Biden Unveils a National Pandemic Response That Trump Resisted

President Biden has a 21-page strategy to bolster production of vaccines, treatments and medical-grade protective gear while reaching out to communities of color.

President Biden will use his first full day in office on Thursday to go on the offensive against the coronavirus, with a 21-page national strategy that includes aggressive use of executive authority to protect workers, advance racial equity and ramp up the manufacturing of test kits, vaccines and supplies.

The “National Strategy for the Covid-19 Response and Pandemic Preparedness,” previewed on Wednesday evening by Mr. Biden’s advisers, outlines the kind of muscular and highly coordinated federal response that Democrats have long demanded and President Donald J. Trump refused. Instead, Mr. Trump insisted that state governments take the lead.

One day after Mr. Biden was inaugurated at a ceremony full of pomp and ritual but robbed by the pandemic of the usual crowds, he and his team hope to signal to the public that their approach will be far more assertive.

The new president intends to make expansive use of his executive authority to sign a dozen executive orders or actions related to Covid-19 — including one requiring mask-wearing “in airports, on certain modes of public transportation, including many trains, airplanes, maritime vessels, and intercity buses,” according to a fact sheet issued by the Biden administration.

With its nominees for top health positions not yet confirmed by Congress, the Biden team has asked Mr. Trump’s surgeon general, Dr. Jerome Adams, to stay on as an adviser and to help with the transition. But Mr. Biden’s advisers were not shy about taking aim at the former president, whose vaccine rollout has been the subject of intense criticism.

“The cooperation or lack of cooperation from the Trump administration has been an impediment,” said Jeff Zients, the new White House Covid-19 response coordinator, adding, “We don’t have the visibility that we would hope to have into supply and allocations.”

The Biden team said it had identified 12 “immediate supply shortfalls” that were critical to the pandemic response, including N95 surgical masks and isolation gowns, as well as swabs, reagents and pipettes used in testing — deficiencies that have dogged the nation for nearly a year. Jen Psaki, the new White House press secretary, told reporters on Wednesday evening that Mr. Biden “absolutely remains committed” to invoking the Defense Production Act, a Korean War-era law, to bolster supplies.

But the president, who has proposed a $1.9 trillion coronavirus aid package, will need the cooperation of Congress to carry out much of his ambitious plan, which also includes greatly expanding testing of asymptomatic people to reopen schools and businesses.

“On the asymptomatic screening side, we’re woefully undercapacity, so we need the money in order to really ramp up testing, which is so important to reopening schools and businesses,” Mr. Zients said. “We need the testing. We need the money from Congress to fund the national strategy that the president will lay out.”

Mr. Biden’s strategy is organized around seven goals, including restoring trust with the American people by conducting “regular expert-led, science-based briefings” and advancing equity “across racial, ethnic and rural/urban lines” — another departure from Mr. Trump’s approach.

“The federal government should be the source of truth for the public to make clear, accessible and scientifically accurate information about Covid-19,” Mr. Zients said, adding that the new administration would be “honest, transparent and straightforward with the American people to rebuild that trust.”

Mr. Biden intends to use his executive authority to create a new office for pandemic response within the White House, while also engaging various federal agencies in a more aggressive effort to combat the novel coronavirus.

To protect the health of workers, he will order the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to “immediately release clear guidance for employers.”

He also intends to direct the Departments of Education and Health and Human Services to issue new guidance on how to safely reopen schools — a major point of contention during the Trump administration, whose officials interfered with the school reopening guidance issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to press administrators to bring students back.

To “address the disproportionate and severe impact of Covid-19 on communities of color and other underserved populations,” Mr. Biden will create a Covid-19 Health Equity Task Force. Another executive order will establish a Pandemic Testing Board, an idea drawn from President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s War Production Board, to ramp up testing and direct studies, including large-scale randomized trials, to identify treatments for Covid-19.

And Mr. Biden will direct federal agencies to take any necessary action to “exercise all appropriate authorities,” including invoking the Defense Production Act, which allows the government to compel companies to prioritize the government’s orders over those of other clients, to increase the availability of essential supplies.

His advisers were not specific, though, about when or how the act would be used.

“Where we can produce more, we will, and if we need to use the Defense Production Act to help more be made, we’ll do that too,” said Tim Manning, Mr. Biden’s Covid supply chain commander. He added, “It’s time to fix America’s Covid supply response shortage problems.”

(quick - name Trump's COVID-19 supply chain commander)

Mr. Biden has repeatedly promised to “get 100 million Covid-19 shots into the arms of the American people” by his 100th day in office — a goal that Mr. Zients characterized as “ambitious but achievable.” The president has already directed the Federal Emergency Management Agency to begin standing up federally supported community vaccination centers, with the goal of having 100 centers in operation within the next month.

Some of Mr. Biden’s actions, though, echo those of Mr. Trump. For instance, Mr. Biden will issue an executive order requiring international travel travelers to produce a negative coronavirus test before departing for the United States — a requirement that is already in place. And he will move to expand eligibility for vaccination to people 65 and older, a step the Trump administration had already taken.

“We will encourage states to begin opening up eligibility to include folks over 65 and frontline essential workers like educators, teachers, first responders and grocery store workers,” said Dr. Bechera Choucair, a former Chicago public health commissioner who is now the Covid vaccine coordinator. “So, more people, more places, more supply.”

In addition to laying out the president’s strategy, Wednesday’s call was a chance for the new administration to introduce the leaders of its Covid-19 response team: Mr. Zients, Mr. Manning, Dr. Choucair, Carole Johnson, the testing coordinator, and Dr. Marcella Nunez-Smith, Mr. Biden’s top adviser on issues of race and health equity, who will lead the new equity task force.

Dr. Nunez-Smith said her task force would issue specific recommendations to the president to erase racial inequities in the Covid-19 response, but said it was too early to know whether recommendations for vaccination would be changed. The current recommendations, drafted by the C.D.C.’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, known as the ACIP, do not explicitly prioritize vaccination for people of color, who have been disproportionately harmed by the pandemic.

But Dr. Nunez-Smith noted that they do prioritize frontline workers, many of whom are people of color. “I think there’s a rationale for why the recommendations don’t explicitly, at least for ACIP and C.D.C., name racial categories,” she said.

COVID-19 Update

World

New Cases:   671,575 (⬆︎ .69%)

New Deaths:    17,366 (⬆︎ .84%) 💥 New Record 🥇

USA

New Cases:   188,426 (⬆︎   .76%)

New Deaths:      4,374 (⬆︎ 1.06%)

Vaccination Scorecard

Total Vaccinations:          14.3 million

Total Priority Population: 12.5%

Total Population:               4.3%

As good-feelin' and downright joyful as it was to see 45* slink away while someone worthy of the job was installed as POTUS, there's still a monster stomping around out there, and we're reminded every day that everything we do has to be tempered with caution and a humble acknowledgement that for now, humans are not this planet's dominant species.

It's also good to be reminded that there are heroes out there - heroes doing battle with the monster on our behalf, fighting the best way they know how, often armed with little more than a paper mask and a willing heart.

NYT:

Patty Sakal, an American Sign Language interpreter who translated updates about the coronavirus for deaf Hawaiians, died on Friday of complications related to Covid-19. She was 62.

Ms. Sakal, who lived in Honolulu, died at Alvarado Hospital Medical Center in San Diego, where she had gone last month to visit one of her daughters, according to Ms. Sakal’s sister, Lorna Mouton Riff.

Ms. Sakal, who worked as an A.S.L. interpreter for nearly four decades in a variety of settings, had become a mainstay in coronavirus press briefings in Hawaii, working with both the former mayor of Honolulu, Kirk Caldwell, and Gov. David Y. Ige to interpret news for the deaf community.

In a statement, Isle Interpret, an organization of interpreters to which Ms. Sakal belonged, called Ms. Sakal “Hawaii interpreter ‘royalty.’”

This was in part because Ms. Sakal understood Hawaiian Sign Language, a version of American Sign Language developed by deaf elders to which she had been exposed while growing up.

“She was highly utilized and highly desired by the deaf in the community because they could understand her so well and she could understand them,” said Tamar Lani, the president of Isle Interpret.

Ms. Sakal was born on Feb. 24, 1958, in Honolulu to Hershel Mouton and Georgia Morikawa, who were both deaf. Her father was the first deaf teacher at the Hawaii School of the Deaf and Blind in Honolulu, and her mother was a prominent political activist on behalf of the deaf community, which included participating in the early drafting of the Americans With Disabilities Act, Ms. Riff said.

“We grew up at a time when there were no interpreters,” Ms. Riff said, “so if you were a child of deaf parents, you automatically became your parents’ interpreter.”

Ms. Sakal turned this experience into a career as a professional A.S.L. interpreter. In her time in the job, she interpreted in all kinds of settings, including theater, legal, medical and educational, according to Isle Interpret. She was a board member for a nonprofit group that aims to open a center for the deaf, the Georgia E. Morikawa Center, named after her mother.

Ms. Lani said that Ms. Sakal had also been committed to being a mentor to novice interpreters and had done so for her. Before her death, Ms. Sakal was working as a mentor in a yearlong national initiative meant to increase the number of interpreters in Hawaii, according to Isle Interpret.

“Patty was always so generous of her time and knowledge, and she was always so welcoming to new interpreters,” Ms. Lani said. “She just really sees the potential in everyone.”

In an interview with Hawaii News Now, Mr. Caldwell, whose second term as mayor of Honolulu ended this month, praised Ms. Sakal for “truly putting herself on the frontline.”

“Here it was, a pandemic and it was not safe to go, yet she went out and she helped do a job that was critical to people who needed this information,” Mr. Caldwell told Hawaii News Now. Neither he nor Mr. Ige could immediately be reached for comment on Wednesday.

Outside work, Ms. Riff said, her sister had a number of creative outlets. She wrote poetry and painted. She taught herself to play the guitar and the drums and was a singer.

In addition to her sister, Ms. Sakal is survived by three daughters, Aisha Sakal, Amanda Sakal and Andrea McFadden; a brother, Byron Morikawa; and two grandchildren.

Ms. Riff said her family was “always very proud of Patty because she picked up that torch, the legacy that our mom had, and has been carrying it.”