AP
... and how they were covered NEWS 5
What happened
President Biden this week stood outside the
White House amid 500 glimmering candles—
each representing 1,000 Americans lost to
Covid-19—and held a moment of silence for
the “grim, heartbreaking milestone” of half
a million coronavirus deaths. “That’s more
Americans who’ve died in one year,” Biden
said, “than in World War I, World War II, and
the Vietnam War combined.” (See Last Word,
p. 40.) While the number of new Covid deaths
remains high, at about 2,000 a day, that’s
down sharply from January, when up to 3,
Americans were dying daily of the disease. Some 55,000 patients are
hospitalized with Covid, the lowest number since November, and
new cases have fallen about 70 percent in a month to 68,000 a day.Extreme weather slowed the delivery of vaccines across the U.S.,
causing the number of doses administered to drop 20 percent last
week, to 1.3 million a day. But health experts are increasingly opti-
mistic that the U.S. will hit 3 million jabs a day by April as supplies
surge. Pfizer and Moderna together expect to deliver 140 million
more doses than planned over the next five weeks. Johnson & John-
son said it should deliver 20 million shots of its one-dose vaccine—
expected to receive FDA authorization in the coming days—by April.
That vaccine was 66 percent effective at preventing illness in clinical
trials and 100 percent effective against hospitalization and death.What the columnists said
Donald Trump is responsible for “the unnecessary deaths of hun-
dreds of thousands of Americans,” said Dr. Jonathan Reiner inCNN.com. On Feb. 7, 2020—before the first
U.S. Covid death was reported—the then-
president admitted privately to veteran jour-
nalist Bob Woodward that the new virus was
lethal, “more deadly” than “even your strenu-
ous flu.” Yet in public, Trump systematically
downplayed Covid, calling it a “regular flu,”
and dismissed the effectiveness of masks,
politicizing a lifesaving tool. That “big lie” set
us on the road to 500,000 deaths.What’s behind the massive drop in Covid
cases is something of a mystery, said Jennifer
Beam Dowd in Slate.com. Could it be vaccines? New research from
Israel suggests Pfizer’s vaccine is up to 90 percent effective in reducing
transmission of the disease. Other shots may be similarly effective.
But only 14 percent of Americans have been jabbed, so vaccines
can’t be solely responsible for the “dramatic drop.” It could be that
enough people have been infected with Covid—40 percent by some
estimates—that “population immunity is helping to slow transmis-
sion.” The fact that more people are wearing masks after the winter
surge may also have helped drive infections down to a surprising low.So why does Biden sound so pessimistic? asked Ross Douthat in The
New York Times. He says we shouldn’t expect life to return to normal
until Christmas, and his top infectious-disease expert, Dr. Anthony
Fauci, warns masks may still be needed next year. But “the combina-
tion of infections and vaccinations could deliver us into the herd-
immunity range by July.” An unforeseen setback, such as a vaccine-
proof variant, is always possible. But people who are struggling
“need a sense of hope,” and plunging cases should give them one.Mourning Covid’s victims at the White HouseU.S. coronavirus deaths top 500,
What happened
Attorney General nominee Judge Merrick Garland vowed at
his confirmation hearing this week to make fighting domestic
terrorism his “first priority,” beginning with the prosecutions of
the Jan. 6 Capitol Hill rioters. During a tense moment from a
mostly low-key hearing, Garland, 68, called the riot “the most
heinous attack on the democratic processes that I’ve ever seen.”
He said America is facing “a more dangerous period” than when
domestic terrorist Timothy McVeigh blew up a federal building
in Oklahoma City in 1995, killing 168 people—a prosecution he
oversaw as a Justice Department attorney. He said that in com-
bating extremism the DOJ must focus “on what is happening all
over the country and on where this could spread, and where this
came from.”Garland, who was denied a Supreme Court hearing in 2016 by
Senate Republicans, faced questioning by GOP senators about the
Justice Department’s Russia investigation and his plans for special
counsel John Durham’s inquiry. The D.C. federal appellate court
judge said he had “no reason” not to permit Durham to conclude
his work. Garland also said that the spate of police killings of
civilians and the summer’s subsequent wave of Black Lives Matter
protests had “created a moment” to “make dramatic changes”
to ensure equal justice. Garland promised he would root out civil
rights abuses with investigations of police department patterns
and practices. “Where they are necessary to assure accountability,
it’s very important that we use that tool,” he said.What the columnists said
While Garland was showing domestic extremists “there’s a new
sheriff in town,” said Dana Milbank in The Washington Post,
Republicans were busy going “back in time” to revive old GOP
talking points that played to the party’s base. Sen. John Cornyn
(R-Texas) wanted to know Garland’s thoughts about the Steele
dossier, while Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) even turned the page back
to 2010 to ask Garland about debunked claims that the IRS
targeted Tea Party groups.“The attack on the U.S. Capitol was a disgraceful incident without
any possible justification or excuse,” said WashingtonExaminer
.com in an editorial. But Garland is wrong to emphasize the threat
of right-wing extremism to the exclusion of that posed by leftist
mobs that ran roughshod over America during last summer’s
protests. “There must be one and only one standard for political
violence—that it is unjustifiable no matter who carries it out.”Garland did lay out a vision of an apolitical Justice Department
that operates “independently of the White House,” said David
Graham in TheAtlantic.com. But “politics will intrude, and
soon.” He will have to decide how to handle the tax investigation
of President Biden’s son, as well as whether to prosecute Trump,
his son Donald Jr., and Trump cronies like Rudy Giuliani for
their roles in inciting the Jan. 6 mob. As those questions come up,
Garland will face “demands to be more political” and will find it
harder to remain a “paragon of integrity and independence.”Garland warns of domestic terrorism threat