For all of President Trump’s bullishness on the coronavirus vaccine, his administration declined to order additional rounds of Pfizer’s vaccine when offered the opportunity months ago, leaving the United States to wait behind other countries that made deals.

The F.D.A. could approve the Pfizer vaccine, created in collaboration with the German firm BioNTech, within the week. But the United States has reserved only 100 million doses of the vaccine, enough to cover 50 million people, or fewer than one in six Americans.

The president plans to issue an executive order today pledging “to ensure that United States government prioritizes getting the vaccine to American citizens before sending it to other nations,” according to a draft statement. But it’s not obvious what this means in terms of substantive action.

Asked if the Trump administration had missed a chance to snap up more doses for Americans, a spokeswoman for the Department of Health and Human Services noted that other vaccine candidates were also in development.

Georgia’s secretary of state recertified the presidential election results there yesterday after yet another recount showed Joe Biden ahead by about 12,000 votes — the latest in a volley of blows to the Trump campaign’s effort to discredit Biden’s win.

“We have now counted legally cast ballots three times, and the results remain unchanged,” Brad Raffensperger, the Republican secretary of state, said.

Officials in Cobb County, Ga., announced that for the Senate runoff elections in January they would be opening fewer than half of the early voting locations that they used in November’s general election. Cobb is the third largest county in the state, and so far among the only ones to close such a high percentage of polling places.

The county’s lead elections official blamed the closures on staffing shortages after a grueling election year, but Democrats pointed out that the closed locations were largely located in Democratic areas, and argued that politics were in play in the decision.

Biden is expected to nominate retired Gen. Lloyd J. Austin III, a former commander of the American military effort in Iraq, to become secretary of defense, according to two people with knowledge of the selection. If confirmed by the Senate, Austin would be the first African-American to hold the position.

He was previously the first Black American to run the U.S. Central Command, the military’s marquee combat command, with responsibility for places like Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen and Syria.

In choosing Austin, Biden skipped over Michèle Flournoy, a former Obama Defense Department official who had drawn fierce opposition from voices on the left.

Source: New York Times

Powered by NewsAPI.org