It's certainly great news that Pfizer's vaccine is starting to roll out across the country, with the combined effort of the private sector, namely UPS and FedEx, handling the transportation. However, for all intent and purpose, the vaccine doesn't exist in practical terms. In other words, for the time being we have to continue to live life as though there isn't one.
Francis Collins, the Director of the National Institute of Health, explained that to eliminate the virus and move back to a sense of normal we need 70 to 80 percent of the population immunized. He also expressed great concern, as have many other health professionals, that roughly 50 percent of the population for one reason or another, some valid and some not so much, isn't on board with getting vaccinated.
Frankly, it's surprising that we've gotten this far considering one of the main reasons, of course, which is... wait for it... the politics surrounding every step of the way. When you hear that White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows threatened the FDA director with his job if he didn't approve emergency use of the vaccine and consider the speed in which it was developed, it drives skepticism on both sides of the political aisle.
In the mean time, the lack of empathy along with the tone deafness that goes with it from the president and the Senate majority leader on the toll that the pandemic is taking on the economic welfare of working Americans has compounded the misery. There is a $908 billion relief bipartisan package going through the Senate and Mitch McConnell will not bring it to a vote. Senator Chris Coons (D-DE) said he was frustrated and embarrassed by Mr. McConnell's blocking of a second relief package, laying the blame squarely at his feet. The fruit of Senator McConnell's work has manifested itself in 850,000 new unemployment claims last week.
Mitch McConnell looks at the dollar numbers and doesn't like them. He looks at Americans as simply numbers and doesn't like us either. Speaking of numbers, it may go without saying that Donald Trump doesn't like us either because he really doesn't like the numbers.
After the Supreme Court flatly rejected the lawsuit brought by Texas' Attorney General in which 17 other states' Attorneys General signed onto, 9-0 by the way, to nullify hundreds of thousands of votes in others, not their own, the president vowed to fight on.
The thinking can only be that since numbers don't lie, they shouldn't even be considered in the first place.
But here are some numbers to consider:
3,100+ deaths per day (equivalent of 9/11) everyday for the next 30 to 60 days.
This is what the Director of the CDC predicted this week;
297,000+ deaths in the U.S.; 16.1 million infections
According the the New York Times Covid-19 tracker; and
more than 100,000 small businesses have closed permanently.
But these numbers mean nothing to the Senate majority leader or the president. Kristen Welker noted that the president has commented on the election 62 percent of the time this week while only referencing the pandemic 7 percent. As we said before, the president is checked out completely from any sort of governing as all his efforts have been focused on overturning a free and fair election. (Mr. Trump is so completely checked out from governing, it makes one wonder that if he could overturn the election, how would he ever be able to check back in?)
And speaking of free and fair elections, lastly we leave you with this number, 126. This is how many Republican members of the U.S. House of Representatives signed onto the aforementioned lawsuit to nullify the election results, subvert the democratic process, and act in direct defiance of the U.S. Constitution.
OK...
We don't know who has already called for this, but without hyperbole it's important to get on the record that this column is calling for resignation letters of these Congress people. Not out of malice, but because in a moment of expedient political posturing, they did not uphold their oaths to the office in which they sit.
Panel: Kristen Welker, NBC News; Matt Bai, The Washington Post; Lanhee Chen, Stanford University
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