Viewpoints: Lessons On Getting Vaccines Into Americans’ Arms; Pros, Cons Of Biden’s Covid Plans

Los Angeles Times: COVID Vaccine Messaging A Failure By All Levels Of Government 
Some confusion about COVID-19 vaccinations — how to get one, where to sign up, etc. — was inevitable, given the speed of the rollout and uncertainty about how many doses might be available from week to week. It’s the largest inoculation campaign in U.S. history, and data about availability change by the day if not the hour. But the chaos sowed at every level of government has made the confusion worse. Operation Warp Speed was politicized from Day 1, as President Trump used the vaccine initiative as a reelection gambit, contradicting time estimates set by the experts and exaggerating the speed with which vaccine doses could be produced and distributed. Once the first vaccines were available, the number of doses ready to be shipped to each state has been changing weekly, making it hard to plan for dispersal. (1/20)

The New York Times: Get The Covid-19 Vaccine To 100 Million Americans In 100 Days
Faced with a slow, chaotic vaccine rollout and ever-rising Covid-19 cases, President-elect Joe Biden has an ambitious plan: to administer 100 million doses of the coronavirus vaccine in his first 100 days in office. Since the vaccines became publicly available in mid-December, 12.3 million shots have made their way into the arms of Americans, an average of 384,000 doses per day. Mr. Biden’s goal of tripling this rate can be achieved if the United States implements a vaccination campaign that treats Covid-19 more like an act of bioterrorism and less like the seasonal flu. (Thomas J. Bollyky, Jennifer B. Nuzzo and Prasith Baccam, 1/20)

The Wall Street Journal: Covid Control Will Make Or Break Biden
Describing his plan to get the Covid-19 pandemic under control, Joe Biden was blunt. “You have my word,” the president-elect declared last week. “We will manage the hell out of this operation.” He had better. Anything less would be a body blow to his administration and the country. When there is widespread agreement on a course of action, leaders are judged on how well they carry it out. In her 2016 book, “Why Presidents Fail,” my Brookings Institution colleague Elaine Kamarck shows how management failures can make or break presidencies. Jimmy Carter never recovered from the failed mission to rescue American hostages in Iran, nor did George W. Bush from his botched response to Hurricane Katrina. The implosion of the Affordable Care Act’s website significantly weakened the Obama presidency. ...You never get a second chance to make a first impression, and managing the pandemic will be the first impression President Biden makes. (William A. Galston, 1/19)

The New York Times: Biden’s Stimulus Plan Will Bring Relief, But There’s One Flaw
Joe Biden will take the oath of office as the 46th president of the United States on Wednesday in the center of a city fortified against some of his own countrymen, and in the midst of a pandemic that is killing several thousand Americans every day and that has pushed millions more into poverty. He faces a momentous and urgent set of challenges: leading the nation up from the pandemic, reviving the economy, repairing America’s tarnished reputation on the global stage. Mr. Biden’s first step, a fiscal plan that he introduced last week to address the pandemic and its economic consequences, shows that the incoming president and his advisers have taken some valuable lessons from recent history. (1/19)

The Wall Street Journal: Biden’s Stimulus Hits All The Right Notes 
I now have an inkling of how the French must have felt when Allied troops liberated Paris in August 1944. Things were terrible; there was wreckage all around, and yet a sense of optimism must have been pervasive. One part of our long national nightmare ends Wednesday as Donald Trump slinks off to Mar-a-Lago in disgrace, and Joe Biden takes over as president. Yet Mr. Trump leaves behind a second national nightmare: a raging pandemic and, largely for that reason, a sputtering economy. When it comes to handling the pandemic, Mr. Trump has set the bar very low. Doing a better job than his predecessor will be a piece of cake for Mr. Biden. But “better” is not nearly good enough when record numbers of Americans are falling ill and dying. Mr. Biden must do vastly better. His comprehensive plans suggest that he will. (Alan S. Blinder, 1/19)

Fox News: COVID And Biden – Top 7 Things New President And His Team Must Do
As Joe Biden becomes president this week Americans everywhere are frightened by the growing numbers of coronavirus infections and death. They are looking for direction from the new president and his team. With a new year just beginning it’s important to remember what I wrote in my latest book "COVID: the Politics of Fear and the Power of Science." Fear mushrooms from inconsistencies, pseudo-science and dogma, whereas consistency and perspective reassure us. Here are the top things our new president must do. First and foremost, President-elect Biden must resist the temptation to fear monger, to place blame, to make sweeping cure-all statements or to pursue obsessive masking or lockdowns with an almost religious fervor without regard to scientific evidence that’s accumulated since the coronavirus first arrived in the U.S. almost a year ago. (Dr. Marc Siegel, 1/19)

Stat: Welcome Back To The Global Health Stage, America 
The last four years have seen a devastating erosion of American leadership on global health. From severely restricting access to reproductive choice for women around the world with an expanded global gag rule, to initiating the U.S. withdrawal from the World Health Organization during a global pandemic, to sowing seeds of doubt about science, the Trump administration retreated from global cooperation at every opportunity. (Kate Dodson, 1/20)

Bloomberg: Covid-19 Vaccine Passports Are A Ticket To Nowhere
Every identity document brings its own dystopia. Austrian author Stefan Zweig, who saw the modern passport change international travel after the First World War, wrote: “Formerly man had only a body and soul. Now he needs a passport as well, for without it he will not be treated like a human being.” More recently, after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the U.S., the spread of biometric passports raised concerns over security and privacy. “With the old passport, we knew where we stood,” the BBC reported in 2006. Today, it’s the prospect of a Covid-19 vaccine certificate that’s conjuring up digital-dictatorship fears. The idea is being pushed by the travel industry as a leap towards normality after the worst year on record for international tourism and by technology firms eager for lucrative government contracts and a gold mine of data. Yes, it’s nice to daydream about being able to travel freely again, but critics say it would introduce an unequal society in which an inoculated elite get the freedom to fly long-haul, attend concerts or dine in restaurants. Do we really want to be divided between the jabs and the jab-nots? (Lionel Laurent, 1/20)

USA Today: As COVID-19 Deaths Reach 400,000, It's Time To Mourn Those We've Lost
When the 117th Congress was sworn in on Jan. 3, America had lost 352,000 souls to COVID-19; by Wednesday, when President-elect Joe Biden takes office, the country will have lost more than 400,000. The higher the death toll, the harder it is to fathom. Nearly one out of every 750 Americans has now died, an entire city’s worth of grief and pain. We are among the few people privileged to know the living, breathing, beautiful value of such numbers. We were once the mayors of Anaheim, Calif., (population 350,000) and Minneapolis (population 429,000); to us, the unfathomable looks a lot like home, like the histories and dreams, the entire worlds, that are nurtured and built across a city’s grid. (Betsy Hodges and Tom Tait, 1/19)

Stat: 'Sunset Rule' Will Bring A Dangerous New Dawn For Health Regulation 
Alex Azar, secretary of the federal Department of Health and Human Services, spent his final days in office under fire for misleading states about the number of coronavirus vaccine doses they would receive this month. Unfortunately, the criticism didn’t deter Azar from closing out his tenure by making yet another promise his department can’t keep, one that puts thousands of existing health and safety protections at risk of automatic repeal. (Jack Lienke, 1/20)

The New York Times: President Donald J. Trump: The End 
Folks, we just survived something really crazy awful: four years of a president without shame, backed by a party without spine, amplified by a network without integrity, each pumping out conspiracy theories without truth, brought directly to our brains by social networks without ethics — all heated up by a pandemic without mercy. (Thomas L. Friedman, 1/19)