The Morning Dispatch: Vaccine Blame Game

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Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

• At least 32 people are dead and dozens more injured after two suicide bombers blew up a market in Baghdad on Thursday morning. No group has yet taken credit for the attack—the first of its kind in Baghdad in several years—but Iraqi military officials are attributing it to the Islamic State.

• The House and Senate both approved a waiver on Thursday allowing former Army Gen. Lloyd Austin to serve as Defense Secretary, despite retiring from military service in 2016, less than the requisite seven years ago. Austin is expected to be confirmed to his post later today.

• Humanitarian groups who have finally been permitted access to parts of Ethiopia’s Tigray region, which was convulsed by civil war late last year when the federal government attacked the former local ruling party, say the conflict has created a severe humanitarian crisis. “Every time we reach a new area, we find food, water, health services depleted, and a lot of fear among the population,” an official with Doctors Without Borders told Reuters. “Everybody is asking for food.” The region has been a black hole of information since the government shut down internet and phone access to the area in early November.

• The Biden administration is reportedly seeking a five-year extension of the New START nuclear arsenal treaty with Russia, which governs how many nuclear-armed submarines, bombers, and missiles each country can deploy. The treaty is set to expire on February 5.

• Former President Donald Trump has reportedly chosen South Carolina attorney Butch Bowers to represent him in his upcoming impeachment trial. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell on Thursday proposed beginning the Senate impeachment trial in mid-February to give both Democrats and Trump time to prepare arguments.

• U.S. District Judge Barbara Rothstein on Thursday rejected a lawsuit from Parler, the laissez-faire social media platform, demanding that Amazon Web Services restore Parler’s cloud hosting ability. Amazon had revoked it in the wake of the Capitol siege earlier this month. “This was not a case about free speech. It was about a customer that consistently violated our terms of service,” an Amazon spokesperson said.

• The United States confirmed 185,315 new cases of COVID-19 yesterday per the Johns Hopkins University COVID-19 Dashboard, with 9.9 percent of the 1,881,360 tests reported coming back positive. An additional 3,876 deaths were attributed to the virus on Thursday, bringing the pandemic’s American death toll to 409,877. According to the COVID Tracking Project, 119,927 Americans are currently hospitalized with COVID-19. According to the Centers for Disease Control, 37,960,000 COVID-19 vaccine doses have been distributed nationwide, and 17,546,374 have been administered.

Team Biden’s Vaccine Blame Game

Are we well on our way to distributing and administering enough COVID-19 vaccine to get the pandemic under control, or is the federal effort to facilitate that distribution in shambles? The fledgling Biden administration staked out both positions at different points in the day Thursday.

It began with a CNN story, sourced to anonymous figures within the Biden transition team, that made a striking claim yesterday morning: The Trump administration, obsessed with overturning the results of the election to the exclusion of all else, let its vaccine distribution strategy fall into such sorry disrepair that Biden’s team was essentially starting from “square one.”

“There is nothing for us to rework,” one source said. “We are going to have to build everything from scratch.”

Then, on Thursday afternoon, a reporter asked President Biden whether his goal of administering 100 million vaccines in his first 100 days in office is ambitious enough. The new president bristled: “When I announced it, you all said it’s not possible. Come on, give me a break, man. It’s a good start.”

But here’s the rub: A pace of 1 million vaccines a day is only marginally higher than the pace reached during the first month of vaccine ramp-up during the Trump administration. According to a Bloomberg compilation of state vaccination data, the rate of inoculations—which has been gradually accelerating since late December—averaged 912,497 per day during the final week of the Trump administration. 

There are two things going on here. The first is simple spin. Donald Trump’s strategic messaging typically consisted of wildly overpromising and then changing the subject; Team Biden is performing the more classic Washington maneuver of lowering expectations by aiming for a conservative target while bemoaning how poor of shape the last guy left things in. 

As spin goes, it wasn’t very artfully done—particularly after Dr. Anthony Fauci, whom Biden has tapped as his chief medical adviser, disputed the characterization during an afternoon briefing. “We’re certainly not starting from scratch, because there is activity going on in the distribution,” Fauci said. “With the previous administration, you can’t say it was absolutely not usable at all. … So we are continuing, but you’re going to see a real ramping up of it.” By that point, however, the initial story had already rocketed around social media and been mentioned dozens of times on cable air.

At the same time, there’s an ideological component to this too. Jeff Zients, Biden’s coronavirus czar, also complained about the Trump administration’s distribution plan on a call with reporters Thursday, saying that “what we’re inheriting is so much worse than we could have imagined.” Zients, however, was more specific about what was lacking: Not the distribution networks themselves, but the federal government’s ability to track what was going on in those networks.

“Allocation and supply are critical areas that we did not, unfortunately, have much visibility into,” Zients said, “and we’re focusing on that immediately.”

Reading between the lines here, it isn’t hard to see the baseline disagreement Biden’s team has with its predecessors: While the Trump administration’s efforts focused mainly on procuring supply and getting it into the hands of the states to distribute as they saw fit, the Biden administration intends for the federal government to play a more direct and involved logistical role in distribution around the country.

It’s possible that strategy will end up being more fruitful, but it isn’t self-evidently true that it will—particularly given that, again, the vaccination pace the Biden administration is targeting is only marginally faster than the pace the Trump administration was presiding over at the changing of the guard.

It’s important to keep in mind that there’s an enormous amount of logistical fog of war to contend with here. Getting a vaccination operation of this scale off the ground isn’t easy to pull off without a hitch.

Accordingly, part of the reason vaccine administration has lagged behind vaccine distribution is not because of actual supply issues, but simply vaccine administrators’ unease about potential future supply issues. According to Yale health policy professor Dr. Howard Forman, many hospitals are holding some of their own vaccine allotments in reserve out of fear of future disruption, not because they’ve experienced disruption already.

“We have a tremendous amount of the most valuable drug sitting within the supply chain, not being used at any given point in time,” Forman said. “And that strikes me as the biggest mistake. We should have almost no inventory sitting out there. In an ideal world, every day every center would run out of vaccine.”

Biden’s Moves on Climate

Throughout both the Democratic primary and the general elections, Joe Biden pitched combating climate change as one of the key pillars of his policy agenda. It makes sense, then, that environmental action was heavily featured in the flurry of executive orders and memorandums the president signed on Wednesday afternoon, just hours after taking the oath of office. 

One order both revoked the permit President Trump granted for the construction and operation of the Keystone XL gas pipeline across the U.S.-Canada border and temporarily halted natural gas leasing in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge while the Secretary of the Interior “conduct[s] a new, comprehensive analysis of the potential environmental impacts of the oil and gas program.” Biden also recommitted the United States to the Paris Climate Agreement, which President Trump announced the country would leave back in 2017.

“We’re going to combat climate change in a way we have not before,” Biden said Wednesday. But he added that what he was signing were “just executive actions. They are important, but we’re going to need legislation for a lot of the things we’re going to do.”

As long as the filibuster remains intact in the Senate, requiring a 60-vote threshold for passage of most bills, Biden will need more than a handful of Senate Republicans to pass much of that legislation—and yesterday was an ominous sign for those expecting bipartisan movement. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell on Thursday lambasted the Paris Climate Agreement—which President Barack Obama first entered the United States into back in 2015—as a “terrible bargain.”

Reentering the agreement “would set us up to self-inflict major economic pain on working American families with no assurance that China or Russia would honor their commitments,” McConnell said. “In fact, the U.S. has already been reducing carbon emissions while China and other nations in the agreement have kept increasing theirs. Rejoining will just set us up to kill American jobs while our competitors continue to roar on by.”

The overarching goal of the agreement, as written, is to hold the increase in global temperatures “to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels.” But it’s much more vague on the how, only stipulating that countries in the agreement “aim to reach global peaking of greenhouse gas emissions as soon as possible.”

As McConnell pointed out, the agreement also does not include any enforcement mechanisms. “Parties recognize that some Parties choose to pursue voluntary cooperation in the implementation of their nationally determined contributions,” one section says.

“The Paris climate accord is literally an absurdity,” said Benjamin Zycher, a resident scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. In his calculation, there’s no cost-benefit analysis that justifies rejoining the agreement, which, if actually adhered to, he estimates would cost 2 percent of global GDP every year. 

But for the growing group of (mostly younger) conservatives who are focused on reframing environmental issues on the right, reentering the Agreement should be viewed as a starting point. “Paris is a baseline,” said Quill Robinson, vice president of government affairs of the American Conservation Coalition (ACC), a nonprofit organization dedicated to mobilizing young people around environmental action through market-based ideals. “I think it’s important because it shows the rest of the world that we now have a president who accepts the scientific consensus on climate change, but in terms of reducing greenhouse gas emissions—doesn’t do a whole lot there in terms of the global problem.” 

Chris Barnard, ACC’s national policy director, recently wrote that rejoining the agreement is “little more than an exercise in rhetorical diplomacy.”

In justifying his rescission of the Keystone XL permit, Biden cited a 2015 State Department analysis, in which then-Secretary John Kerry determined that “the national interest of the United States would be best served by denying TransCanada a presidential permit for the Keystone XL pipeline.”

That determination, however, was based less on specific environmental concerns than it was on public perception of the pipeline, which, if completed, would have pumped 800,000 barrels of crude per day from the Western Canadian Sedimentary Basin in Alberta, Canada to oil refineries and distribution centers in Texas, Oklahoma, and Illinois. 

“While it would facilitate the transportation to the United States of one of the dirtiest sources of fuel on the planet, the proposed project by itself is unlikely to significantly impact the level of crude extraction or the continued demand for heavy crude oil at refineries in the United States,” Kerry wrote at the time. “The critical factor in my determination was this: moving forward with this project would significantly undermine our ability to continue leading the world in combatting climate change.”

The pipeline is supported not only by Republicans here in the U.S., but by Liberals in Canada as well. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said on Wednesday that he was “disappointed” Biden killed the project. “Canada is the single-largest supplier of energy to the United States,” Trudeau added, “contributing to U.S. energy security and economic competitiveness, and supporting thousands of jobs on both sides of the border.”

In many ways, the pipeline itself is safer than the alternative. “Without [the Keystone XL Pipeline], you wind up shipping Alberta’s oil material on rail,” said Patrick Michaels, senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. “And the reason the Canadians want Keystone rather than shipping by rail can be attributed to the Lac-Mégantic train wreck, which set fire to an entire town in Eastern Canada with a lot of fatalities.”

“They don’t want to take that risk,” Michaels added. “I think Joe Biden did not get off on the right foot with Justin Trudeau and our neighbors to the north.” 

Biden plans to speak with Trudeau later today, which will mark his first call with a foreign leader as president.

Robinson expressed some frustration with Biden’s decision because it will “reinforce the idea for a lot of folks in Middle America that climate action means that they have to suffer.” TC Energy Corp., the Canadian company behind the pipeline, laid off 1,000 workers following Biden’s order. “A majority of the 1,000 are unioned workers who have been constructing on both sides of the border,” a spokesperson said.

“I want to work with the Biden administration to address the most pressing challenges facing our country,” Sen. Rob Portman said Wednesday. “It’s unfortunate that one of the Biden administration’s first actions will cost American jobs and hurt our economy. The pipeline is creating thousands of good-paying union jobs, boosting our manufacturing sector, and strengthening our energy security in cooperation with Canada, one of our closest allies.”

Worth Your Time

• Edelman’s annual trust barometer found that Americans’ trust in traditional news media is at an all-time low, with nearly six in 10 respondents believing “Journalists and reporters are purposely trying to mislead people by saying things they know are false or gross exaggerations.” This is a deep-seated problem with numerous, complex roots—but commentary on President Biden’s inauguration by various cable news hosts this week certainly didn’t help. “CNN glowed almost as brightly about the event as a state media would have,” Politico media critic Jack Shafer wrote. “It accentuated all of Biden’s leading attributes—his modesty; the length of his Capitol experience, where he outlasted some of the building’s marble columns; his Catholic faith; his bounce-back from personal tragedies; his love of country; and so on.” This has real-world consequences, Shafer continues. “In an era when large portions of Americans think mainstream media is a tool of the left, a tad less bootlicking could help build trust among media skeptics.”

• This Arthur Brooks column on personal happiness hit a little close to home for some of your more Type-A Morning Dispatchers. “Every cultural message we get is that happiness can be read off a scorecard of money, education, experiences, relationships, and prestige,” he writes. “Want the happiest life? Check the boxes of success and adventure, and do it as early as possible! Then move on to the next set of boxes. She who dies with the most checked boxes wins, right?” Wrong, Brooks argues. “Relying on external rewards lowers satisfaction. You will like your job less if your primary motivation is prestige or money. You will appreciate your relationships less if you choose your friends and partners based on their social standing. You will relish your vacation less if you choose the destination for how it will look on social media.”

Presented Without Comment

Toeing the Company Line

• On the latest episode of Advisory Opinions, Sarah and David talk about how the past four years have shaped how they think about and engage with politics. “I have substantively changed since 2012 to 2014,” Sarah said. “And the change has been for the good. … How many people have stepped back over the last four years or last 24 hours, and said ‘You know what? I’m going to keep [criticism of political opponents] really substantive from now on … instead of assuming bad faith?” The two then dive into the status of the NRA’s bankruptcy case, and take a closer look at President Biden’s flurry of Day One executive orders—and whether they’ll stand up to any legal challenges.

• Democratic strategist and friend of The Dispatch Mo Elleithee made his return to The Remnant yesterday, talking with Jonah about the early days of the Biden administration and the coming political realignment. Would Democrats relish the thought of a “Patriot Party” rising up in opposition to the GOP, or would they reel in horror? Are Americans cautiously optimistic about the incoming administration’s “unity” message, and if so, are they right to be?

• In this morning’s edition of Uphill, Haley takes a look at the effort to push House GOP Conference Chair Liz Cheney out of her leadership role after she sided against former President Donald Trump in the wake of the attack on the Capitol. “When Rep. Liz Cheney voted to impeach President Donald Trump last week, some suggested her decision was aimed at political gain,” Haley writes. “But that idea presupposes the existence of a future, Trump-free Republican Party in which Cheney’s impeachment vote will enhance her standing among primary voters and her colleagues, which is …questionable. Cheney’s move, at least for now, is anything but beneficial to her position in the GOP.”

Let Us Know

We and others aboard the Dispatch mothership have written a lot in recent days about the intersection between politics and the ideas of unity, civility, disagreement, decency, honor, etc.

What do you see as the role of a center-right morning newsletter and media company in an era of unified Democratic control in Washington? 

Reporting by Declan Garvey (@declanpgarvey), Andrew Egger (@EggerDC), Haley Byrd Wilt (@byrdinator), Audrey Fahlberg (@FahlOutBerg), Charlotte Lawson (@charlotteUVA), and Steve Hayes (@stephenfhayes).