BY JOANNE KENEN
With help from Renuka Rayasam and Myah Ward
LONG HAULER — As bad as the coronavirus was when Joe Biden clinched the nomination last June, as dangerous as it was when he won the election in November, it’s worse now.
Much worse.
On Election Day alone, there were about 1,600 deaths from Covid-19 in the United States. On Wednesday, there were 3,848. Some days the toll surpasses 4,000. Most days, more than 200,000 new cases are confirmed — well over a million a week.
As a country, we’ve gotten inured to that. The numbers are just too big to comprehend.
Biden tonight outlined a $2 trillion plan for containing the virus and getting the economy back on track. More details of Biden’s plans will become clear in the next few days. For now, he’s let it be known that he wants to make a big $20 billion push on vaccination. He’s going to set up community vaccination sites and mobile vaccination vans in all kinds of communities, partnering with states and localities. He’s making health equity a priority — reaching the communities that have been hardest hit. He’ll aim to create a new, 100,000-strong public health force, reminiscent of Franklin Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps or the Works Progress Administration. He promises to do more testing, more contact tracing, and fix the supply lines. He’ll spend money on treatment, and says he will do what it takes to get a “majority” of American schools open within the first 100 days.
He is facing a task he did not imagine when he began his trek to the presidency.
Hospitals are at a breaking point. Medical staff are depleted. The immunization drive has had a troubled start — everything from having less vaccine available than the Trump administration anticipated to all sorts of logjams and resistance to getting it in people’s arms.
Much of that was anticipated; little of it has been addressed.
The next vaccine in the pipeline, from Johnson & Johnson, may be approved in a few weeks. It’s only one shot, not two, and it’s easier to transport and store. But getting the manufacturing off the ground has hit problems, and production is lagging by a good two months. Hopes for another 100 million doses within four months very likely need to be recalibrated.
A new variant of the virus has emerged. It’s much more contagious although, thankfully, not more lethal. The early research shows that it’s still responsive to the vaccines. But it’s making more people sick. So more will die.
And of course, 20,000 members of the National Guard, sleeping on the hard marble floors of the Capitol, testify to just how fractured the country that Biden pledged to unite is. Huge numbers of Americans still believe the virus is a “hoax.” “Please wear a mask” are fighting words. There is more than one kind of healing to be done; there’s no vaccine for a broken polity.
Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Willie Nelson got the shot! Nightly will be off Monday, Jan. 18. We’ll be back and better than ever Tuesday. Reach out at jkenen@politico.com and rrayasam@politico.com or on Twitter at @JoanneKenen or @renurayasam.
A NEW YEAR, A NEW CONGRESS, A NEW HUDDLE: It was an ugly and heartbreaking week inside the Capitol, particularly for all of those who work on the Hill. How are lawmakers planning to move forward? How will security change? How will a new Senate majority impact the legislative agenda? With so much at stake, our new Huddle author Olivia Beavers brings you the most important news and critical insight from Capitol Hill with help from POLITICO's deeply sourced Congress team. Subscribe to Huddle, the essential guide to understanding Congress. It has never been more important. SUBSCRIBE NOW.
| FROM THE HEALTH DESK |
AFTER THE RIOT — Biden has another superspreader event on his hands: the Capitol riots. Not just among members of Congress. Across the entire United States. With the potential to spread a whole lot of virus — and our current public health response doesn’t have the capacity to track its path, Joanne writes.
The rioters inside the Capitol, for the most part, didn’t wear masks. They were crushed together, chanting and shouting — which spreads the airborne virus even more. The ones beating up cops and smashing windows were breathing hard, further spreading germs.
The indoors riots were the biggest risk. The larger outdoor Trump rally, as well as the throngs that gathered outside the Capitol but did not take part in the breach, were also packed closely together and mostly mask-free, but being outdoors is a lot safer. However some of the people who rallied outdoors also gathered indoors — traveling in shared vehicles, taking planes, eating and drinking with friends. Some shared hotels or other lodgings. Lots of opportunity to give — or receive the virus. To take it home as a nice souvenir. And spread it around.
But given that the virus is already surging just about everywhere in the country, fueled in some part by the more contagious British variant, it’s really hard to tease out how many of the millions of Covid-19 cases that will be detected in the coming weeks will be related to the unrest in Washington.
“It was a superspreader event,” said Ali Mokdad, a disease modeler at the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. “We’ll see the signs of it — but we won’t get a handle on it.”
And that, he said, is because we aren’t doing our job.
There are two ways to get a handle on it. The U.S. isn’t doing either one — yet.
One is contact tracing. If someone gets sick, contact tracers should interview them and ask where they’ve been. If they say “at the U.S. Capitol” — and Mokdad noted that not everyone would admit it, given that rioters are being arrested — that’s a pretty big epidemiological clue. But most cities and counties haven’t put enough money or effort in contact tracing — one reason the virus got so out of control in the first place. And the more widespread infection is, the harder it is to trace.
The second way is genomic testing — and that’s not happening either, said Bronwyn MacInnis, director of pathogen genomic surveillance in the Broad Institute’s Infectious Disease and Microbiome Program. She’s part of the team that tracked how the virus spread far and wide from a biotech conference in Boston last February. But the country hasn’t invested in that either — which is one reason there isn’t a good sense now of how far the British variant has spread.
She would love to use her genetic sleuthing tools to trace the spread of the virus from the Capitol. “There’s definitely something to watch here,” she said. If there are multiple infections across the country “with the same genetic fingerprint that’s powerful evidence” that it stemmed from the riots and rallies.
“I don’t know of any coordinated effort right now to do that,“ she said. She’s gotten sadly accustomed to missed opportunities. She and her colleagues wanted to study the White House Rose Garden superspreader event. But “the administration wasn’t interested in doing any kind of contact tracing.”
It’s not too late to track the spread from the riots, she said. Another thing on the lap of the new Biden administration.
| FIRST IN NIGHTLY |
FADE OUT — Many of America’s most influential companies spent the past week swiftly issuing statements of condemnation and pausing campaign contributions after the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol. Now they’re trying to quietly fade into the background with an impeachment trial looming and warnings proliferating of further turmoil across the nation, chief economic correspondent Ben White writes.
In interviews, top executives at leading companies indicated their desire to keep their firms out of the next leg of Washington’s political fight over impeachment and simply move on to the Biden era. Many executives also acknowledged they expect to start re-engaging in campaign contributions to Republicans once the latest political crisis passes, perhaps by the spring.
“It’s not our job to decide if the president should be impeached and convicted. As CEOs and leaders, this is how you get in trouble,” the chief executive of one large Wall Street bank said on condition that they not be identified. “The thing that really bothers me is the erosion in civility in everything we are doing. We have so much serious stuff to do and we absolutely have to get on with it right now.”
“We need to get vaccines distributed,” the CEO added. “We need to turn the services economy back on. This is an enormous distraction.”
SAME BUT DIFFERENT — Quick flashback: 12 years ago, when Barack Obama was inaugurated as president, the country was shedding hundreds of thousands of jobs a month. Just four months earlier Lehman Brothers had collapsed. Other major financial institutions were on the brink of failure. Housing prices had plummeted nationwide for the first time in decades, and millions of homeowners were underwater on their mortgages.
On Wednesday Biden will inherit another collapsing economy: one that is also bleeding jobs. But this time is different, Ben told Renu today. The country’s economic woes during the past year stem from an outside menace, not an existential threat to the foundation of finance like the one Obama faced in 2008.
Watch to see if Ben can hash out the differences between the two economic crises in three minutes or less.
| TRANSITION 2021 |
MIND IF WE STAY AWHILE? Trump’s impeachment trial is set to collide directly with Biden’s inauguration. And there may be little anyone can do about it, Burgess Everett and Andrew Desiderio write. Absent the consent of all 100 senators, Trump’s trial for “incitement of insurrection” will start at 1 p.m. on Jan. 20 — just an hour after Biden is sworn into office and Trump becomes a former president. And only the same consent from the entire Senate will allow the chamber to create two tracks: One to confirm Biden’s Cabinet and pass his legislative agenda, and another for Trump’s impeachment trial.
“We certainly stand ready to do both at the same time,” Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) said on CNN today, though she emphasized that standing up Biden’s government should be the top priority.
Biden and Democrats say it’s critical to cut a deal that does both, but one single senator could disrupt any effort to multitask.
Biden-Harris inauguration merchandise is displayed at a store in Union Station in Washington. | Getty Images
RIOTS AND COVID AND IMPEACHMENT, OH MY! As the nation reels from a violent insurrection and a devastating pandemic, Trump has become the first president in U.S. history to be impeached twice. How did we get here? In the latest Dispatch, Dan Diamond explains how Trump’s early action as president on health care portended how his term would eventually end in a second impeachment.
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| ASK THE AUDIENCE |
Nightly asks you: What are you most hopeful about heading into 2021? Send us your answers through our form, and we’ll use select responses later this week.
KEEP UP WITH THE FIRST 100 DAYS OF THE BIDEN ADMINISTRATION WITH TRANSITION PLAYBOOK: It was a dark week in American history, and a new administration will have to pick up the pieces. Transition Playbook brings you inside the last days of this crucial transfer of power, tracking the latest from President-elect Biden and his growing administration. Written for political insiders, this scoop-filled newsletter breaks big news and analyzes 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 GLOBAL FIGHT |
BONNE NUIT — French Prime Minister Jean Castex today announced a nationwide 6 p.m. curfew as of Saturday and stricter measures at the country’s borders to limit the spread of coronavirus.
“The curfew will apply from 6 p.m. this Saturday and for at least 15 days,” said Castex during a press conference along with five ministers.
While a nationwide curfew was already enforced as early as 8 p.m., only 25 at-risk administrative districts had brought it forward to 6 p.m. until now, with the Paris region not among them.
| NIGHTLY NUMBER |
965,000 The number of people seeking unemployment aid last week, the most since late August and evidence that the resurgent virus has caused a spike in layoffs. |
| PARTING WORDS |
UNSETTLED — During the floor debate Wednesday over the second and possibly final impeachment of Trump, there were references to him being the worst president in American history. Could be. It is worth recalling, however, that there are many ways to be a bad president, and at least a few of his predecessors offer intense competition for the title.
At a minimum, Trump seems secure in his bid to be the worst character ever to inhabit the presidency, founding editor John Harris writes in his latest Altitude column.
He claims this in part by seeming not to have character at all in the classic sense — an internal compass that operates independently of his garish public performance. Even Richard Nixon had brooding, tormented dimensions to his personality, which suggested a conscience, which in turn led him to try to hide cynical and illegal behavior under a mask of righteous piety. By contrast, news and book revelations about outrageous behavior by Trump in private are not remotely in tension with how Trump presents himself in public. He acts as if self-absorption, self-delusion, bullying, bluster and disdain for rules or precedents or standards of propriety are all good things. Here is the uncomfortable truth, highlighted by yet another impeachment: These are good things, if the goal is to ensure that supporters and enemies alike are obsessing about you in the final hours of a defeated presidency, and even after that presidency ends, while a successor is wanly trying to command attention for a new one.
And they are good things if the goal is to be the emblematic figure of a generation guided by the ethos that the point of politics is not to illuminate and resolve big arguments — it is instead to continue the arguments endlessly, no matter the circumstances.
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