Health News at Your Fingertips

“If we wear masks between now and the end of April we can save 50,000 lives,” Biden said about curbing the spread of coronavirus, just now at the White House.

The president said the government is racing towards its initial goal to get a million Americans vaccinated per day and would like to increase to getting 1.5m shots into arms across the US daily.

Jonathan Reiner, professor of medicine and surgery at George Washington University School of Medicine & Health Sciences thinks the vaccinations could and should double from one to two million shots administered every day.

The White House event with the president has just ended.

Joe Biden is still talking at the White House, now taking press questions. He has complained that the division in government has actually led to less heated discussion on Capitol Hill, not more – at least in terms of lawmakers talking to each other across the aisle.

“There were very few debates on the Senate floor last year on any issue”, Biden said, turning to his vice president, Kamala Harris, standing close by, for affirmation.

Harris, who until she became veep was a Democratic Senator for California, nodded in agreement.

Biden continued: “I’m optimistic that. It may take some time, but if we treat each other with respect…we are going to argue like hell, but I think we can do it in a way where we can get things done for the American people.”

“The middle class built this country and the unions built the middle class, so let’s invest in them again,” US president Joe Biden just said.

He’s now signing an executive order to push the government to buy American. Now he’s going to Q&A from the press.

The first question concerns Chicago teachers who are refusing to return to in-person teaching in the classroom because they are at risk from coronavirus, while the vaccination program is behind.

Biden said: “We should make our school classrooms safe and secure” for teachers and children. He wants better ventilation, better sanitization, more testing, plastic dividers between desks and some other measures.

“They just want to work in a safe environment, and we can do that, and we should be able to open up these schools if we do this,” Biden said.

The president is creating a new role in the White House Office of Management and Budget, the director of Made in America, to oversee the administration’s efforts to maximize the US government buying American when it spends money.

One of the jobs will be to stop federal agencies waiving rules on the government buying American made goods “with impunity”, Biden just said.

The US government is the world’s biggest single buyer of goods and services. Biden just said, for example, that the government is a huge purchaser of vehicles and he wants those vehicles to become electric vehicles that are made in the US.

Joe Biden is back in front of the cameras at the White House, this time to promote his Made in America initiative to, according to officials, harness the purchasing power of the US government, the world’s biggest single buyer of goods and services, to strengthen domestic manufacturing and union jobs and create markets for new technologies.

Biden will sign an executive order aimed at closing loopholes in existing “Buy American” provisions.

Here’s some more detail and context on the Justice Department’s internal watchdog launching an investigation on whether current or former department officials made an “improper attempt” to seek to alter the results of the 2020 presidential election.

The announcement by Inspector General Michael Horowitz came after the New York Times first reported that Jeffrey Clark, then the department’s acting assistant attorney general for the Civil Division, had plotted with Donald Trump in a failed attempt to oust then-Attorney General Jeff Rosen so that he could launch a probe of alleged voter fraud in Georgia.

Clark, Reuters reports this afternoon, was sympathetic to Trump’s so-called “Stop the Steal” campaign to overturn his defeat by Joe Biden.

Clark met with Congressman Scott Perry of Pennsylvania to discuss a plan to have the department launch election fraud investigations to help achieve Trump’s goal of overturning Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election.

Perry has since confirmed that he introduced Clark to Trump.

“Throughout the past four years, I worked with Assistant Attorney General Clark on various legislative matters. When President Trump asked if I would make an introduction, I obliged,” Perry said in a statement.

The plan to oust Rosen and replace him with Clark so that the department could pursue investigations of Trump’s baseless voter fraud claims collapsed after senior department leaders pledged to resign in protest, current and former Justice Department officials told Reuters.

The reports about Clark and Trump’s failed plan “raise deeply troubling questions regarding the Justice Department’s role in Trump’s scheme to overturn the election,” wrote nine Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee.

According to current and former officials, Clark tried to pressure Rosen and former acting Deputy Attorney General Rich Donoghue to hold a press conference to announce they were pursuing allegations of election fraud. They said he also advocated for them to send a letter he had penned to Georgia state officials announcing they were launching a probe.
Rosen and Donoghue rejected both requests.

Clark has left the Justice Department and has not responded to multiple requests for comment.

Tim Ryan, who briefly ran for the Democratic nomination for president in the 2020 election, says he’s “looking seriously” at running for Senate in 2022 to represent Ohio, after Republican Senator announced his retirement earlier today.

Ryan ran as a moderate in the Democratic primary contest. The congressman was always a long-shot. When he ended his campaign in the fall of 2019, he said:

“I got into this race in April to really give voice to the forgotten people of our country: the workers who have been left behind, the businesses who have been left behind, the people who need health care or aren’t getting a quality education, or are saddled by tremendous debt.”

“I’m proud of this campaign because I believe we’ve done that. We’ve given voice to the forgotten communities and the forgotten people in the United States.”

Joe Biden came from behind to win the nomination and then the presidency in November 2020. Rob Portman announced earlier today that he won’t run for re-election.

More on the venerable Patrick Leahy, Democratic Senator from Vermont, on his upcoming role presiding over the Senate impeachment trial of Donald Trump.

A quick reminder of the timeline. The article of impeachment (charge against Donald Trump of incitement to insurrection) will be delivered from the House of Representatives across the halls of Congress to the Senate this evening.

Senators will be sworn tomorrow in as jurors. Then there’s a pause in the proceedings and the trial begins on Monday February 8. It’s not known yet how long the trial is expected to last, but it should be pretty swift, perhaps wrapping up that same week.

Here’s my colleague Lauren Gambino:

Another flashback to January 6 and the deadly insurrection at the US Capitol by pro-Trump supporters egged on by the-then president.

Just watched the video that George Conway tweeted. The footage is pretty brutal in reference to Mike Pence.

More on Harriet Tubman.

The redesigned $20 bill was initially due to be unveiled last year, but those efforts were halted by the Treasury after the former president, Donald Trump, called them an example of “pure political correctness”, whatever the heck that means in this context.

Here’s a depiction of what the new bill could look like.

As a presidential candidate, Trump suggested Tubman would be better-suited for the $2 bill, a note that is not widely circulated, Reuters further reports.

Former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin told lawmakers in May 2019 that he was focused on redesigning the bills to address counterfeiting issues, not making any changes to their imagery.

Tubman, who was born into slavery and grew up on a Maryland plantation before escaping in her late 20s, would replace Andrew Jackson, the seventh president of the United States, on the front of the $20 bill.

Tubman returned to the South many times to help hundreds of slaves to freedom and later worked as a Union spy during the Civil War. She died in 1913.

There have been no women depicted on US bills since former first lady Martha Washington, who was featured on the $1 silver certificate from 1891 to 1896, and Native American woman Pocahontas, who was included in a group image on the $20 bill from 1865 to 1869.

Other women, including Native American interpreter Sacagawea, suffragist Susan B. Anthony and author and activist Helen Keller have been featured on coins, Reuters reminds us.

In the redesign announced in 2016, Andrew Jackson would have remained on the back of the $20 bill.

Treasury officials had no immediate comment.

Here’s more on South Africa and coronavirus travel restrictions in relation to the US.

The White House confirmed Joe Biden is signing an order today imposing a ban on most non-US citizens entering the country who have recently been in South Africa, starting on Saturday.

Spokeswoman Jen Psaki also confirmed Biden will re-impose an entry ban on nearly all non-US-citizen travelers who have been in Brazil, the United Kingdom, Ireland and 26 countries in Europe that allow travel across open borders – a ban that was set to expire tomorrow.

“With the pandemic worsening and more contagious variants spreading, this isn’t the time to be lifting restrictions on international travel,” Psaki said at a news briefing, Reuters reports.

The briefing is just about to wrap up.

The Treasury Department is taking steps to put Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill, as was planned in the Obama administration.

Harriet Tubman was an American abolitionist and political activist who as a young age escaped slavery herself and subsequently made incredibly dangerous missions back to slaveholders’ estates to rescue enslaved people, using the network of activists and safe houses known as the Underground Railroad.

Barack Obama decided that Tubman should replace Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill, leading to celebrations that an escaped slave would be honored over a slaveowner president, as the Guardian put it at the time, 2016.

Donald Trump, who placed a portrait of “bloody, bloody” Andrew Jackson, murderous enemy of Native Americans, prominently in the Oval Office, squished that plan. Now it looks like Joe Biden has revived it (as well as replacing the Jackson portrait in the Oval with one of Benjamin Franklin).

Obama at one point nicknamed what he hoped would be the forthcoming new $20 bills as “Tubmans”.

As my colleague Amanda Holpuch wrote:

Among 200-year-old facts that will be new to many is that Tubman was the first woman in US history to plan and lead an armed expedition, liberating nearly 750 enslaved men and women in the process.

She also fought for decades to gain compensation for her work as a spy, scout and nurse during the US civil war and was an advocate for both women’s suffrage and proper care of the elderly.