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US ends federal mask mandate; COVID protection is personal responsibility
Jon Lieber, head of Eurasia Group's coverage of political and policy developments in Washington, discusses the end of federal mask mandates:
What are the implications of the end of the federal mask mandate?
A federal judge in Florida this week ruled that President Biden's order requiring masks, facial coverings on federally regulated forms of transportation, including planes, buses, and trains is unlawful and should not be enforced. The mask mandate was the most visible and impactful mandate handed down by President Biden, who campaigned in 2020 on doing more than his predecessor, Donald Trump to stop the spread of the virus, but was really limited by the limited authorities the federal government has to take drastic measures to control public safety, most of which are controlled by the states. This is the latest setback to Biden's pandemic policies. Earlier this year, a federal judge said that he did not have the ability to impose a vaccine mandate for large employers. And at this point, Biden lacks both the policy tools and the political standing to do much else.
Polling indicates that Americans are done with the pandemic. The pandemic has dropped precipitously as a number one concern for voters who now say, they're more worried about things like inflation, immigration, crime, and more broadly healthcare. Air travel's hovering at about 90% of where it was from pre-pandemic levels and mobility data suggests that people are largely returning to their pre-pandemic routines.
One thing that has not happened, however, is a return to office: data from the largest cities shows that fewer than half of workers nationwide are returning to their pre-pandemic commuting patterns, which could end up being one of the more enduring shifts on public behavior coming out of the pandemic.
When it comes to masks, there's massive partisan splits in the polling, as there is many things, with Democrats and the vaccinated generally saying they support mask mandates when you're out and about with other people, and Republicans and the unvaccinated saying that they're largely against them.
Regardless, the Biden administration is unlikely to appeal this ruling and the mask mandates on planes is unlikely to come back. Case counts are low. The new variants are relatively mild. Biden has bigger political fights to fight. And the benefits of universal indoor masking are too tenuous to make this worth his while. The US has now firmly pivoted to the view that protection from the virus is a personal responsibility, which is why you're going to see vulnerable people and people who worried about the virus continue to mask and social distance. And the rest of the population will continue to try to return their lives as normal. The US is still on track to record its one millionth death from COVID sometimes soon and most of these deaths, sadly will have come under President Biden, despite his campaign promise to get the virus under control.
COVID's lessons on humanity for Annabelle Santos, small business owner
Inspiration struck Annabelle Santos when she struggled to find any products that could help soothe her baby girl’s eczema. Having grown up around plants and flowers, and with a background in biochemistry, Santos set out to make her own formula to help her daughter. Now she brings her mixtures of fruits, olive oils, and herbs to customers through her company, Spadét, which she founded in 2014. For years, she worked on her products from her home kitchen in New York City. Then, just before the pandemic hit, she got her big break: product placement in the whole northeast region of Whole Foods. In fact, her products shipped out to the stores just a week before lockdown. The pandemic was really tough on her business, but grants helped her keep afloat, and she’s looking forward to meeting with and healing customers now that restrictions have lifted.
Watch more from our conversation on how small businesses can thrive after COVID, which was recorded live on March 22, 2022.
Biden administration's COVID response likely to impact midterms
Jon Lieber, head of Eurasia Group's coverage of political and policy developments in Washington, discusses the Biden administration's response to the omicron variant:
How is the Biden administration's response to omicron?
Well, it hasn't been great. It started with the travel ban from affected countries that was already probably behind the curve given how widespread the variant was and the administration admitted they did not see this new variant coming. They were caught flat-footed on the surge in demand for testing over the holidays. And while they first promised to make tests reimbursable by insurance, which is, of course, a real pleasure for Americans who love to deal with their insurance companies, they then said they were going to make 500 million tests available for free, but this isn't even enough to have two tests for every American. And news came out that they were instead of investing in increased manufacturing capacity, what they were doing was going to purchase surplus tests, which could exacerbate private sector shortages. But probably, more importantly, it means that the new free tests were going to arrive probably after the current surge in cases is over.
The CDC changed its guidance last month to say that instead of isolating for 10 days, people should isolate for only five. And this was done in order to minimize economic disruptions instead of for public health reasons, which led to criticisms of the administration that they were no longer following the "science" as they promised to at the beginning of the administration.
The administration's top infectious disease specialist, Anthony Fauci, this week made headlines for sparring with Republican Senators at a congressional hearing and not for his public health advice. And the CDC Director seems to only get attention for her missteps and misstatements at this point. The administration's strategy seems to boil down to hope that this thing goes away quickly. Their vaccine mandate looks like it could be overturned by the courts any day now and it's unclear if the mandate's even worth doing given how many vaccinated people are catching the omicron variant and then being forced to isolate anyway. The US is probably running up against its natural limit of who's willing to get vaccinated at this point and it's unclear how many more people are going to get their first shot.
Now, at the same time, the fiscal response is starting to slow as some of the extraordinary pandemic measures start to run off and it doesn't look like the Biden administration's going to be able to push a lot of new spending through Congress with the Build Back Better agenda stalled. Biden's approval has dragged all year because of COVID and right now he's in the low 40s and high 30s, which is right around where President Trump was, even though he started last year at about 55% approval. So this has been a real problem for him but at this point the pandemic response comes down to individual caution and states, who have been doing a much better job getting out free tests to individuals but are saying they are not going to impose any new lockdown measures because of the political unpopularity of this. Rough time for President Biden, probably going to affect the Democrats in the midterm elections.
Were the Aussies right to ban Djokovic?
You’ve probably read this week that Novak Djokovic, the world’s number-one ranked tennis player, was caught in an awkward standoff with Australian border police.
A quick catch up: Upon arriving in Melbourne for the Australian Open, one of the world’s four Grand Slam tennis tournaments, the unvaccinated Serbian tennis star was denied entry by federal authorities who said he did not meet the criteria for a vaccine exemption and so does not satisfy entry requirements.
Djokovic explained that he was previously granted a vaccine exemption by Tennis Australia and the Victorian state government. The feds were unmoved.
Djokovic is no stranger to whacky health and conspiracy theories. He is a proponent of holistic healing (nothing wrong with that), but he has also said that you can make toxic water drinkable simply by using “the power of your mind.”
If you are pro-science – and/or a person who has missed out on family milestones over the past 24 months by honoring travel rules – it’s easy to criticize Djokovic, who seems to think his trophy case entitles him to special consideration. But this flare-up isn’t really about the tennis star’s predilections for natural (or unnatural) remedies.
As the highly transmissible omicron sweeps the globe, perhaps redefining the trajectory of the pandemic, many argue that vaccine mandates for cross-border travel are superfluous. Others say these requirements remain crucial to protect public health.
Here are some good arguments on both sides.
The pro-mandate camp
Preliminary data suggest that omicron is much less likely to hospitalize or kill the infected, thanks in part to the most effective vaccines. Still, the variant’s unprecedented rate of transmission means that even if a smaller percentage of infected people need medical care, the overall larger number of infected people can still fill a city’s hospital beds.
In the US and parts of Europe where vaccination rates remain sluggish, mandates would prevent non-vaccinated foreigners coming in who might place even more burden on already-swamped healthcare systems. Vaccine mandates for border crossers aren’t foolproof. But they are the best protection we’ve got in speeding the shift to endemicity.
Moreover, some vaccines still offer some protection against the antibody-evading omicron strain. This is particularly true for those who have been fully vaccinated and boosted with an mRNA shot. Indeed, the more people that get vaccinated, the less opportunity the virus will have to spread and mutate, threatening those who are vulnerable to severe illness. Requiring vaccines for all international travel will force many fence-sitters and skeptics to get the shot. Consider this: If Djokovic was told from the get-go that exemptions weren’t an option, would he still have resisted the mandate and given up his spot in four Grand Slams this year?
The anti-mandate camp
A majority of the world’s vaccinated people has received a non-mRNA shot from Johnson & Johnson, Oxford-AstraZeneca, Russia’s Sputnik V or China’s Sinopharm or Sinovac. These vaccines don’t appear to block omicron as effectively as mRNA vaccines. Sinopharm and Sinovac, which account for roughly half of all shots delivered globally, provide no protection against infection at all (though they still appear to provide some protection against severe illness). Vaccine mandates for travel become obsolete when even vaccinated people have a high chance of turning up a positive result.
Some have argued that to give Djokovic a special tennis pass when Australian citizens living abroad weren’t able to return home for close to two years is a slap in the face to those who respect rules. But public health policy should be based on science-based reasoning and logic – not driven by political principle.
Additionally, there have been some studies that show that virus acquired immunity provides broader protection from reinfection than vaccination immunity. If so, exposure to omicron, which comes at low personal risk, coupled with vaccination – a concept known as hybrid immunity – could be the fastest way to reach herd immunity (and end the pandemic), a sentiment supported by Israel’s health minister.
Ramanan Laxminarayan, an epidemiologist, told the New York Times that “the combination of vaccination and exposure to the virus seems to be stronger than only having the vaccine,” adding that India and Brazil may therefore be better positioned to deal with the omicron wave than countries that have experienced lower infection rates.
So, were the Aussies right to ban the unvaccinated Novak Djokovic? Let us know what you think.
Top five US political moments of 2021
Well, I can think of five. The first and most important was probably January 6th. Historically important moment, rioters breached the Capitol building in order to stop the legal counting of the presidential election results, but also, it was an important moment because it created a dividing line for Republicans who had to decide if they were with President Trump, who had a role in instigating the riot, or if they were against him. A lot of Republicans ended up choosing to be with him creating various forms of apologies for the rioters over time, and even to some degree making martyrs out of some of them. This will be a really important defining moment, not just in American history, but also for the Republican party.
Second was the passage of the American Rescue Plan in the spring of this year. A $1.9 trillion bill that piled on top of the already $4 trillion in stimulus that Congress had passed in 2020 in order to help fight the coronavirus pandemic. Why was this significant? Because it wasn't necessary. What it ended up doing was overheating an economy that was already starting to recover from the pandemic providing households with $1,400 checks and continuing to pay people not to work and has contributed to the high pace of inflation that's been seen in the second half of 2021, which in turn has hurt the chances of President Biden's Build Back Better bill from passing into law. So this turned out to be a very significant moment even though it wasn't obvious at the time.
Third point, the withdrawal from Afghanistan. This is when you really started to see a steep decline in President Biden's approval ratings because the withdrawal got directly at the issue that he had built his campaign around, which is competence. The botch withdrawal, the headlines, the chaotic scenes at the airport really started to make it seem like perhaps the Biden administration didn't know what they were doing. That's been a drop from which they haven't recovered.
Also, something that happened over the summer I want to highlight was the CDC recommending masks indoors in response to the delta wave of the coronavirus. While I don't think this in and of itself was a politically significant moment, the return of the coronavirus in 2021 is going to be one of the defining things in Joe Biden's presidency. It's yet another reason that his approval ratings have been dragged so low and it's something that he just can't shake. This will be an ongoing storyline in 2022.
Finally, I think the fifth significant moment of the year gets at something else that's been hurting Joe Biden politically, which is inflation. He chose to renominate Jay Powell who was President Trump's fed chair because of the credibility Powell's built up as an inflation fighter helping the fed to pull out of the extraordinary measures they took during the pandemic and clear a path towards raising interest rates sometime next year. But his renomination is basically an endorsement of the fed's loose monetary policies and an endorsement of Powell's ability to keep inflation in check starting next year. This is going to be a huge story and it's a really big political priority for the Biden administration fighting inflation, and this is not the last you're going to hear about this.
India’s COVID crisis hits home
Delhi-based reporter Barkha Dutt's decades of journalism couldn't prepare her for the horrific experience of covering the death of one specific COVID-19 victim: her own father. In a conversation with Ian Bremmer, Dutt recounts her desperate struggle to find an ambulance to take her father through Delhi traffic to reach the hospital, only for him to die in the ICU. Their in-depth discussion looks at India's struggle with the world's worst COVID crisis in the upcoming episode of GZERO World begins airing on US public television Friday, May 7. Check local listings.
What We're Watching: Tanzania's new leader, big global economic recovery (for some), more bloodshed in Darfur
Tanzania's U-turn on COVID, press freedom: Tanzania's new President Samia Suluhu Hassan announced on Tuesday that she'll appoint a committee to determine whether the country should start responding to the pandemic, though she stopped short of implementing any sweeping changes. While it's late in the game more than a year since the pandemic was declared, it's still a big deal considering that her late predecessor John Magufuli, who she served under as deputy for six years, was a COVID denier who shunned masks and vaccines, refused to implement pandemic-related restrictions, and declared Tanzania virus-free thanks to prayers from its citizens. (Magufuli died last month, officially from heart complications but it's widely suspected he contracted COVID-19). Hassan, who has been criticized for embracing her former boss' authoritarian tendencies at times, also plans to lift Magufuli's bans on critical media outlets, another major shift for a nation where journalists are often prosecuted over social media posts critical of the government, and citizens are regularly denied access to independent sources of information. We're watching to see if Hassan delivers on her promise of change for Tanzania.
Global economy set to rebound big: The global economy is set to grow by 6 percent this year, the IMF now says, representing the biggest output surge since the 1970s. Much of this anticipated growth is attributed to big government stimulus packages pumped into developed economies like the US, the EU and Japan in recent months. In the United States, the world's largest economy, many economists estimate that the recently passed $1.9 trillion relief package will spur economic expansion by a whopping 6.4 percent in 2021, with the US set to join China as the only two economies to achieve GDP growth exceeding pre-pandemic levels. But the economic recovery will be vastly uneven. In some emerging market economies where governments don't have the means to pump huge amounts of cash into the economy, and a lack of travel has decimated tourism-reliant communities, the post-COVID economic rebound could take much longer, the IMF says. This trend is compounded by sluggish vaccine rollouts in many places because of vaccine hoarding by wealthy countries. Still, there is no hard-and-fast rule: In large economies where the virus continues to spread like wildfire, like in Brazil, the economy continues to teeter.
State of emergency in West Darfur: Last fall, a peace treaty was signed between Sudan's transitional civilian-military government and some Darfur rebel groups, raising hopes of a new peaceful era after decades of bloodshed in Sudan. Then, the UN-African Union peacekeeping mission announced it would withdraw from West Darfur (the Sudanese enclave that borders Chad) after 13 years of occupation. But in recent months, violence has continued unabated there, prompting the Sudanese government to declare a state of emergency. Over the past few days, at least 50 people were killed in violent clashes between ethnic groups, with projectiles hitting a UN compound and a hospital. Disagreements between Arabs and non-Arab herders over farming rights and water access, coupled with other ethnic tensions and easy access to cheap weapons, have created a combustible situation in conflict-ridden Darfur. Since 2003, when Sudan's then-President Omar al-Bashir waged a deadly crackdown to quash an ethnic revolt, some 300,000 people have been killed and millions displaced. As violence surges, hopes of a long-sought peace diminish.How well is the vaccine drive really going?
The most ambitious global vaccination drive in history is in motion. Over the past three months, more than 213 million COVID-19 shots have been administered across 95 countries, and the vaccination rate is slowly increasing. At the current rate, around 6.11 million doses are being administered daily.
It's a rare bit of hopeful news after 15 months of collective misery. So where do things stand at the moment, and what's keeping the world from getting to herd immunity faster?
Vaccines for the neediest. The COVAX facility, formed last summer to ensure cash-strapped countries get their hands on vaccines, shipped the first batch of AstraZeneca vaccines to the West African country of Ghana on Wednesday. Neighboring Ivory Coast will be next in line, and could start vaccinating its 26 million people as soon as next week.
The COVAX rollout is a big deal given that so far, 75 percent of all shots worldwide have been administered in just 10 wealthy countries. But there are still massive shortfalls in the program. For one thing, the facility's commitment to provide 2 billion vaccines to 92 low-income countries covers shots for only 20 percent of the population in those states, far below the herd immunity threshold of about 70 percent. For another, the vaccines are arriving slowly: Ghana, for instance, has received only 600,000 doses, covering 1 percent of its population.
So far, COVAX's ability to reach its goal remains precarious, in part because of funding shortfalls as well as global supply issues — drugs simply aren't being made fast enough to cover people spanning the 54 countries waiting on jabs through the scheme.
Early stars of the vaccine show. Several countries are doing a top-notch job at getting needles into arms.
When South America became a COVID hotspot last summer, Chile emerged as an epicenter within an epicenter, recording one of the world's fastest growing caseloads. Now, Chile is overseeing one of the world's most efficient vaccine rollouts, having vaccinated over 16 percent of its population already, the fifth highest in the world. Santiago succeeded by diversifying its procurement efforts (buying doses from China's Sinovac, Pfizer-BioNTech, as well as through COVAX), and turning any public space into a mass vaccination site.
Israel has now vaccinated over 88 percent of its population of 9 million, leading the global vaccination race by a long shot. Analysts say that Israel's digitized universal health-care infrastructure has made it easier to monitor the vaccination drive and quickly identify groups of eligible people. But for all its successes, Israel has not ensured equitable access to Palestinians living in the occupied West Bank, many of whom regularly cross into Israel. At the same time, the government plans on sending up to 100,000 doses to far-flung places like Honduras, Chad, and the Czech Republic in exchange for their diplomatic backing.
Lastly, after the UK bungled its pandemic containment effort (it has one of the world's highest per capita death tolls) Prime Minister Boris Johnson reversed course to manage one of the most efficient vaccine drives in the world. Having inoculated a third of all British adults (with at least one dose), British authorities now say that all adults should get a first COVID shot by July 31, more than a month earlier than originally planned.
Queue jumping and inequality. Still, access to vaccines remains deeply unequal within many countries.
The World Bank this week threatened to cut off funding for cash-strapped Lebanon's vaccine program after Lebanese politicians bypassed eligibility rules to secure vaccines for themselves and their cronies. This took place mere weeks after the country experienced a surge in COVID cases, overwhelming hospitals. The revelation sparked outrage among many Lebanese already disillusioned by the corruption plaguing the country's ruling elite.
A similar scandal has gripped Peru, where some 500 former and current government officials admitted to skipping vaccine queues to snatch jabs intended for healthcare workers.
Lastly, inequality of access isn't just a problem at the global scale — it's happening even within some of the wealthier countries that have had easy access to vaccines — like the US. While America's piecemeal vaccine drive has ramped up after a shaky start, access for Black and Latino communities still lags in many parts of the country. California Governor Gavin Newsom came under fire when it emerged that of the 7.3 million doses administered in the state, only 2.9 percent have gone to Black residents, who make up 6.5 percent of the population, and 16 percent to Latinos (who account for 38 percent). Similar trends have been detected in New York.