| | | |  | BY RENUKA RAYASAM | Presented by |  |
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With help from Myah Ward DEVELOPING — The CDC will soon issue new guidance cutting the quarantine time for people exposed to Covid-19 from 14 days to 10 days — and just seven days if the person has tested negative, an administration official told POLITICO. THE END OF THE BEGINNING — The first phase of the global pandemic will be over by New Year’s Eve. It’s looking increasingly likely that the FDA will issue emergency use authorizations of Pfizer’s and Moderna’s Covid vaccines after meetings scheduled for Dec. 10 and Dec. 17. Operation Warp Speed officials say they’re ready to start vaccinating health care workers within a day or two of the FDA’s official nod. That’s when the second phase of the global pandemic will start: the year of transition. It took more than two decades after the polio vaccine was approved before the United States eradicated the disease. Covid-19 may be with us in some form or another for years, even if vaccines are very effective and the rollout is perfectly smooth. Still, 2021 should be a year of small victories, each one inching us back toward pre-pandemic life. Nightly spoke with two vaccine experts, Mark Slifka at the Oregon National Primate Research Center and Peter Hotez at the Baylor College of Medicine, to get their take on how the year may play out. January: The Moderna and Pfizer vaccines each require two doses, taken three or four weeks apart. The first dose isn’t likely to confer immunity, so the first batch of health care workers won’t be fully vaccinated until early next year.
— Signs of normalcy: None. Holiday gatherings from December and early January will continue to accelerate the outbreak, leading to elevated hospitalizations and deaths. February: Vaccine supplies will still be limited. The CDC recommended today that long-term care residents should be prioritized along with health care workers.
— Signs of normalcy : The Super Bowl will likely continue as scheduled on Feb. 7 in Tampa, but the Biden administration and state health officials will probably warn people against throwing watch parties at their homes. March: States are charged with distributing still-limited supplies of the vaccines and determining which adults get high priority. Those over the age of 65 are expected to be at the top of the list. More data about the safety and efficacy of vaccines should be available from people who got the vaccine in December and January, including whether either vaccine causes major side effects in adults, Slifka said.
— Signs of normalcy: March Madness, the college basketball tournament that was canceled in 2020, will get under way in a bubble in Indianapolis. But most of us will be watching Eddie Murphy in Coming 2 America at home rather than venturing out to theaters. April: By now two additional vaccine candidates, from AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson, could get emergency use authorization from the FDA. Public health experts also expect to see additional therapies get EUA from the FDA, further reducing Covid deaths.
— Signs of normalcy: Major League Baseball has scheduled opening day for April 1, and the season could go smoothly if the vaccine proves to be effective, Hotez said. May: Anthony Fauci has said that most adult Americans could get a Covid vaccine by this month. States should have worked out distribution problems by now, though there are risks that a rollout could be botched. A bad batch of the polio vaccine ended up paralyzing about 200 kids and killing 10 in 1955.
— Signs of normalcy: High school and college graduations could be back on — though they will still be socially distanced and masked. June, July and August: We should start to learn how well vaccines work to not just keep people from getting Covid, but also whether they keep people from spreading Covid.
— Signs of normalcy: The paralyzing terror of not knowing whether you or a family member will end up in an intensive care unit from a shopping trip or a dinner party will start to lift. Air travel will pick up. September: By next fall, drugmakers will have a year of safety data on Covid vaccinations. This data will help answer a key question: whether a vaccine confers longer-term immunity. With several companies producing vaccines, there’ll also be more information on which vaccines are most effective for different groups such as the elderly, those with certain conditions and kids.
— Signs of normalcy: Fauci has said that NFL stadiums could be full by next September. October: Happy Halloween? Goldman Sachs analysts are predicting that vaccinations will be available to kids by next October. Right now drug companies have not yet tested Covid vaccines on children under the age of 12 (or pregnant women), saying they want to wait until there’s more safety data available for adults.
— Signs of normalcy: Schools will close because of snow storms and not Covid outbreaks and kids can go trick or treating. November and December: If everything goes as planned — the vaccines are safe, they provide lasting immunity, there are enough doses and they get distributed properly — the second phase of the global pandemic will end a year from now. Yet even in 2022, Covid won’t be a distant memory. Fauci has said that vaccines won’t completely eradicate the virus. People in high-risk groups might still wear masks or avoid crowded gatherings.
— Signs of normalcy: Twenty-pound turkeys will sell out at Thanksgiving and wine — and regret — will flow at company holiday parties. Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. We may have lost Big Game on a blocked extra point this year, but a Cal alum will be running amok in the Biden White House. Reach out at rrayasam@politico.com, or on Twitter at @renurayasam.
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A message from AARP: More than 94,000 residents and staff of nursing homes and long-term care facilities have died from COVID-19. With cases spiking across the country once again, desperate families demand that Congress take immediate action to save lives. aarp.org/nursinghomes | | | | 
President-elect Joe Biden, wearing a walking boot due to hairline fractures after he strained his ankle playing with his dog, Major, arrives at the Queen Theater in Wilmington, Del., to name his economic team. | Getty Images | | | THE FUTURE OF THE TRUMP ORGANIZATION — After he leaves the White House, President Donald Trump is expected to do something no president before him has done: cut multi-million dollar deals with foreign governments and companies for his own private business, White House correspondent Anita Kumar writes. Trump’s namesake company plans to resume foreign real estate projects, likely luxury hotels, as it grapples with a tarnished brand in the U.S. and the need to pay off hundreds of millions of dollars of debt, according to three people familiar with the plans, not to mention past public statements from Trump’s children. Company officials have already vowed to look into more developments in India and will be expected to give a second look to projects they had considered in China, Turkey, Colombia and Brazil before Trump entered office. The arrangement is already being criticized as one that could be used to pay back Trump for his policies as president or to influence U.S. policy through a former president — and possibly a future presidential candidate. Trump’s return to overseas dealmaking as a private businessman raises a new set of ethical issues no ex-president has ever confronted. Trump’s company, the Trump Organization, is sprawling and extensive — it comprises more than 500 businesses, including hotels, resorts and golf clubs around the globe. And since it’s not a charity or publicly held, it has fewer financial disclosure requirements. To cap it off, few American financial firms are still willing to lend Trump money, meaning he increasingly has had to go abroad to seek financing.
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| | TRACK THE TRANSITION: President-elect Biden has started to form a Cabinet and announce his senior White House staff. The appointments and staffing decisions made in the coming days send clear-cut signals about Biden's priorities. Transition Playbook is the definitive guide to one of the most consequential transfers of power in American history. Written for political insiders, it tracks the appointments, people, and the emerging power centers of the new administration. Track the transition and the first 100 days of the incoming Biden administration. Subscribe today. | | | | | | | THE DAM BREAKS — A bipartisan congressional group struck a broad coronavirus compromise today, a significant breakthrough after months of failed negotiations. And Speaker Nancy Pelosi restarted her talks with Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin after they fell apart before the November election. But congressional leaders remain on very different paths with just days to strike an agreement, write Burgess Everett and Heather Caygle. Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer made a private offer to Republican leaders Monday night. But Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell revived his own targeted relief bill today, even though it has yet to win Democratic support. Two Republican senators, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine, pushed back on McConnell’s legislation and said their $908 billion bipartisan proposal stands a far better shot at becoming law during a GOP conference call today. The bicameral, bipartisan compromise would provide $908 billion in aid and also shield businesses from coronavirus lawsuits for a few months to allow states to develop their own liability reforms. It falls between McConnell’s previous $500 billion proposal and Democratic legislation of about $2 trillion and includes $160 billion in state and local aid, $180 billion in additional unemployment insurance and $288 billion for small businesses. It also has $82 billion for schools as well as $45 billion for transportation, according to a draft, and it includes money for health care. |
DUCK GETTING LAMER — Between averting a government shutdown and trying to find a path to more Covid stimulus, the end of the year has brought a full holiday plate for Congress. In the latest 2020 Check-In, Eugene Daniels looks at what’s left to work through on the Hill and who has the upper hand.
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| | | BARR’S CHRISTMAS PRESENT FOR BIDEN — Attorney General William Barr has appointed U.S. attorney John Durham as a special counsel to investigate the origins of the FBI’s probe of Russian interference in the 2016 election. The appointment formalizes Durham’s ongoing probe, but more significantly, would give Durham latitude to continue the politically explosive investigation after Biden takes office in January, Kyle Cheney and Josh Gerstein write. Democrats have long viewed Durham’s efforts as political payback by Trump and his allies, seeking to deflect from evidence that the Trump campaign capitalized on the Kremlin’s efforts. By saddling the incoming Biden administration with a special counsel, it ensures that Biden will have less flexibility to attempt to scuttle any ongoing investigation and could hamstring his choice for attorney general. Barr, one of Trump’s most loyal allies, also clashed with the president’s legal team today, affirming that there was no evidence of large-scale fraud during this year’s election. “To date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have affected a different outcome in the election,” Barr said, according to the AP.
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| | | | | Welcome to Bidenology, Nightly’s look at the president-elect and what to expect in his administration. Tonight, education reporter Nicole Gaudiano examines Biden’s work on gun policy and schools: After the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, which left 20 children and six adults dead, Biden took ownership of the Obama administration’s work on gun policy. Biden was a former Senate Judiciary chair and a longtime advocate of stricter gun control. He helped write the 1994 crime bill that temporarily banned assault weapons and included the Violence Against Women Act. As someone who had experienced the death of a child, he could empathize with the Sandy Hook families. But four months after the shooting, the administration’s main legislative response — expanded background check requirements for gun purchases — died on the Senate floor. Biden presided as it failed by six votes. He later called Mark Barden, who lost his son Daniel in the attack, to apologize for not being able to do more, recalled Barden, co-founder of Sandy Hook Promise. Now Barden and other gun control advocates expect Biden to address gun violence. “I know that it is a priority issue for Biden and for the new administration,” Barden said. The Democrats who voted against the legislation in 2013 aren’t in office anymore, said Everytown for Gun Safety President John Feinblatt. The party has moved to the left on the issue since then. And if Republicans retain control of the Senate, Biden could take executive action to, say, clarify which gun sellers need to perform a background check, he said. “By defining that, you could make a huge step forward in closing the gun show loophole, you could make a huge step forward in curtailing online sales, or at least requiring that they have a background check,” he said.
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| | NEXT WEEK - DON'T MISS THE MILKEN INSTITUTE FUTURE OF HEALTH SUMMIT 2020: POLITICO will feature a special edition Future Pulse newsletter at the Milken Institute Future of Health Summit. The newsletter takes readers inside one of the most influential gatherings of global health industry leaders and innovators determined to confront and conquer the most significant health challenges. Covid-19 has exposed weaknesses across our health systems, particularly in the treatment of our most vulnerable communities, driving the focus of the 2020 conference on the converging crises of public health, economic insecurity, and social justice. Sign up today to receive exclusive coverage from December 7–9. | | | | | | | ‘WE ARE THE LAST RESPONDERS’ — El Paso County reported nine new deaths from Covid today, bringing the county’s virus death toll to 933. El Paso, in the far Western tip of Texas, had struggled with a fragile health care system before the pandemic hit earlier this year. Now as cases mount, deaths follow. Nightly’s Renuka Rayasam talked to an El Paso funeral home owner about how he is handling the fast-growing number of virus victims.
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| | | AS THE WORLD TURNS — When he ran for president in 2016, Trump promised he would revisit America’s role in NATO and the World Health Organization, as well as the Iran nuclear deal. And true to his word, he rattled the world’s biggest organizations — often pulling the U.S. from its ranks. In the latest POLITICO Dispatch, foreign affairs correspondent Nahal Toosi reports on how Trump reshaped U.S. relations in the Middle East and shook up global alliances — and what challenges Biden faces.
| | | | NORMAL FOOTBALL, NEVERMORE — Nightly’s Tyler Weyant writes from chilly Northern Maryland: The Baltimore area, already struggling like the rest of the country with Covid, has gathered on Sundays with equal parts hope and dread, to watch our beloved Baltimore Ravens. Little did we know the team and the year’s biggest global story would coalesce in bizarre fashion. To recap: The Ravens and Pittsburgh Steelers were scheduled to play Thanksgiving night in Western Pennsylvania. But one of the largest Covid outbreaks in professional sports — 22 players either testing positive or quarantining — intervened, leading to three postponements and culminating (we think) in a 3:40 p.m. ET kickoff Wednesday on NBC. The afternoon timing is thanks to the peacock network’s commitment to televising the Rockefeller Center tree lighting. On the ground, the mood is one of dejection, gallows humor and acceptance. The team’s season was disappointing well before this latest turn of events. But for the NFL at large, the Wednesday game — only the third since 1948 — seems to be a last-ditch attempt to avoid a turning point. The league has desperately tried to ward off extreme measures like additional weeks of play or team forfeits, even in the face of potential wildcat strikes by players. The nation’s most popular sport, like the country this winter, appears to be wobbling on the tightrope. Talking to fellow Ravens fans this week, there’s a lingering sense that Wednesday’s mid-afternoon oddity still might not happen, that illness and concerns about player safety might overwhelm the NFL’s desires to keep the nothing-to-see-here gears moving. But if the game does go on, a note to my colleagues: I might be a touch harder to reach from around 3:40 p.m. to 7:40 p.m. The distraction will be like so many things in 2020: I won’t be with fellow fans at a bar, or at a family watch party. Instead, I’ll be working from home while shouting alone about the inadequate Ravens offense. But, as we seem to have decided as a nation, football is football, and we’ll take it anyway we can.
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A message from AARP: SENIORS DEMAND ACTION
It is an outrage that more than 94,000 residents and staff of nursing homes and other long-term care facilities have died from COVID-19, representing 40% of all COVID-19 deaths nationwide, even though nursing home residents make up less than one percent of the U.S. population. Cases are spiking across the country once again and Congress must act now to help save lives in these facilities.
Congress must ensure residents and staff have regular and prioritized testing and personal protective equipment (PPE), that facilities are adequately staffed and that residents have access to virtual visits with their loved ones. Additionally, Congress must make sure taxpayer dollars going to nursing homes are spent only on items directly related to resident care, COVID-19 prevention and treatment.
Tell Congress to act now to protect the residents and staff of nursing homes and other long-term care facilities. aarp.org/nursinghomes | | | Did someone forward this email to you? Sign up here. | |
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