With help from Myah Ward
PLAY THE BALONES – On Wednesday, Biden’s crusade formalized what had been obvious for some time: the candidate conference in Milwaukee dead. Joe Biden will settle for the Democratic presidential nomination in a speech broadcast from Delaware. Accredited hounds, myself included, were told to stay home. Delegates had not yet planned to attend and are voting on party affairs via an electronic form.
Given that Biden’s entire crusade boils down to the question of how President Donald Trump treated the pandemic, it was unexpected that he waited so long to finish the rally, which is scheduled to begin on August 17 to be nearly performative in his commitment to practice. . For example, journalists, who would be tested daily for the virus, were informed that, unlike previous years, they would not have been allowed a percentage of their credentials with their colleagues, as the exchange of towers in the neck can cause contagion.
“Then I sought to give an example of how we respond separately to this crisis,” Biden said at a fundraiser after the announcement.
POLITICO’s Holly Otterbein and I have been talking to Democratic officials, convention planners, and network producers about what the switch from real to virtual means. (Can you have a balloon drop in the basement? How do you have an applause line if there is no applause?) But one consistent question raised by the death of the conventions is whether they will or should ever return in their pre-2020 form.
Conventions have long ceased to be deliberative bodies that elect presidential and vice-presidential candidates. Howard Dean, the former head of the DNC, told me that a new rule that replaces this year even gives Biden the exclusive authority to appoint his vice president. (Previously, delegates still had the right to vote, however, it had been pro forma for a long time and has now been abolished altogether.)
Policy conflicts over platform language were once serious business, but they no longer matter as much. As far back as 1996 Bob Dole, the Republican presidential nominee, dismissed the relevance of the platform when he shrugged, “I haven’t read it.” This year, Republicans simply adopted the entire 2016 platform verbatim. The Democrats have had a more robust debate but they already worked out their platform before the convention starts.
Conventions are justified as a means of fundraising, highlighting the next generation of skill capacity and, more importantly, talking without intermediaries to the electorate for 4 nights of prime-time speeches. This year’s virtual conferences will go unless prime-time programming, which is actually the biggest occasion anyway, and can be done without putting thousands of other people in a narrow conference center.
They will provide the parties with delight in what really matters. And as with many of our changes, the pandemic (childcare routines, painting habits, vacation plans, social life), either party and the media would possibly locate that many of the features of those replaced meetings are no longer needed.
Welcome to POLITICO Nightly: Coronavirus Special Edition. Contact [email protected] or Twitter at @renurayasam.
U.S. biopharmaceutical corporations share their production functions so that once a remedy or vaccine is ready, they can temporarily deliver it to millions of people. And there’s no slowdown. American biopharmaceutical corporations will continue to paint day and night until they defeat the coronavirus. More.
COMEBACK SLOWDOWN — The U.S. job market recovery appears to be starting to stall, threatening Trump’s narrative of a rapid American comeback and a quickly declining unemployment rate headed toward the November election, chief economic correspondent Ben White writes. The July jobs report due out on Friday morning is expected to show a gain of about 1.5 million, an impressive number in ordinary times but well below the 4.8 million created in June. A measure of private payrolls this week showed a gain of just 167,000 jobs in July, dramatically below the expected 1.2 million.
New task programs fell last week after two weeks of increases, but remain above 1 million consistent with the week, taking the previous record of 695,000 in 1982. And if Trump promised a “large” number of tasks on Friday, the unemployment rate is likely to remain above 10%, a daunting figure for any outgoing president and in line with the worst moment of the Great Recession of 2008 and 2009.
The Covid crisis that hit the United States in March and closed much of the economy has destroyed tens of millions of jobs, erasing the profits of the decade that later and digging a gap that can take years to escape. And the speed of hiring has slowed in recent weeks with an increase in Covid instances in many states and deep uncertainty among employers about whether to bring laid-off workers back or leave them and when to do so. “The economy has been largely replaced since mid-June, as the re-intensification of the virus has forced a portion of the country’s states to backtrack or suspend the reopening of their businesses,” said Mark Zandi, a leading economist at Moody’s Analytics. “It is imperative that lawmakers agree on some other really extensive budget bailout before Congress departs for its August recess so that the fragile economy falls back into recession.”
Some analysts even suspect that July may also show little or no gain in the task. Others say that the true good luck of Covid’s most recent outbreaks would probably not seem until employment figures are published from August to early September. In any case, economic knowledge recommends that the procurement be slowed down.
CIEGO POINT – California County fitness officials say they don’t know if their Covid-19 instances are expanding or shrinking due to an ongoing state knowledge problem, so they’re almost more likely to be making progress in pandemic control, California fitness reporter Victoria Writes Colliver.
Sara Cody, a leading Santa Clara County public fitness officer and Silicon Valley officer who coordinated the first regional pandemic closure in March, compared to the expected under-record of cases in the early days of the crisis, when lack of testing blinded workers’ ability to assess the spread of the new virus. “Right now we feel blind again,” Cody said at a news conference on Wednesday. “We don’t know what’s going on in the epidemic. It’s not just embarrassing. This lack of knowledge does not allow us to know where the epidemic is headed, how fast it is approaching, or not.”
The outage appears to have occurred between California-based laboratories dealing with coronavirus testing and the state knowledge system, the California Reportable Disease Information Exchange, also known as CalREDIE. California Secretary of Health and Human Services Mark Ghaly, the state’s most sensible fitness officer, said this week that it’s where knowledge is blocked, but he didn’t explain why it happened or when the challenge would be solved. Cody said Wednesday that the challenge could happen in mid-July, when the state began closings in dozens of counties in an effort to change course.
California is at a crucial moment in its adventure opposite coronaviruses, hoping that a mask and the closure of indoor gyms, bars and restaurants have been enough to prevent a summer wave from getting out of control. After controlling the virus in the spring, California experienced a dramatic increase in the number of cases after reopening areas, surpassing New York as the state with the highest case in the United States: more than a share of a million. The knowledge challenge came when California officials began to feel more confident about the path of coronavirus in the state. On Monday, Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom predicted that the seven-day daily average for positive verification purposes had fallen 21% from the previous week.
DeWine tests positive: Republican Gov. Mike DeWine of Ohio tested positive for coronavirus, hours before Trump could land in the state and meet him.
DeWine said in a virtual news conference this evening that he felt “fine” aside from a headache and called the diagnosis a “big surprise,” given the extensive measures he and his wife had taken to avoid catching the virus.
Fleeing a storm, locate a pandemic: According to the Union of Worried Scientists, only two of the 16 counties at risk of hurricane have sent citizens data on how to evacuate during the pandemic. The counties studied are those that have expanding instances of Covid and those that are likely to be most affected by a five Catepassry hurricane. But Maximum hasn’t told citizens where to go if a hurricane arrives and how to avoid hiring Covid in the evacuation process.
MAGASINER LOCAL – Trump today signed an executive order asking federal agencies to purchase “essential drugs” and medical materials manufactured in the United States, than to foreign corporations that now source most of those materials.
The order aims to protect against shortages of critical medicines and materials due to disruptions in the global chain of origin, a fear that has been exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic. “We rely dangerously on foreign countries for medicines, medical materials such as masks, gloves, glasses, etc.,” said Peter Navarro, Trump’s most sensible industrial adviser, in a press call.
Trump’s management does not without delay specify which drugs or materials will be manufactured in the United States, but orders the FDA to make that decision. The order appears to authorize broad exemptions based on cost, availability and “public interest.” Navarro argued that countries such as China and India had an “unfair competitive merit due to their lack of regulatory environment” and that other countries such as Ireland had brought tax incentives “designed to attract pharmaceutical production at sea and within their borders.” Navarro did not imply that the administration would make new investments or advocate new tax incentives to bring the manufacture of drugs to land: the order, he said, “is not a appropriations bill” and aims to identify the government’s call for American products.
PEGAJOSA SITUATION: Moncef Slaoui designed vaccines for the big pharma, one of the reasons Trump chose him to lead “Operation Warp Speed.” But Slaoui’s deep ties to the pharmaceutical industry have also made him a target for guard dogs. In POLITICO’s most recent message, fitness journalist Dan Diamond explores Slaoui’s sensitive position and how close we are (or not) to a vaccine.
Nightly asks you: What concerns you the most about the November election? Let us know your thoughts, and we’ll include select answers in our Friday edition.
BAY STATE BLUNDER – Rep. Joe Kennedy III and Sen. Ed Markey oppose the clock-forward of their 1 September Democratic number one showdown in the Senate. The pandemic derailed their crusade plans this spring, and the two men returned to the socially remote hot track in recent weeks when the Bay State electorate won their ballots by mail, writes the Massachusetts playbook Stephanie Murray for Nightly.
Kennedy’s crusade held a press convention in Boston this afternoon, where a veterans organization explained why they supported Kennedy than Markey.
The accidental backdrop: a Covid-19 verification site. While Kennedy’s supporters spoke on a podium, a steady flow of patients was being touched through doctors dressed in non-public protective equipment, such as gowns and facial protectors. There are cases of coronavirus in Massachusetts. The state saw its largest accumulation of a single day in some cases since early June on Tuesday.
The glass roof of the price ticket: in 1984, a woman first gave the impression on a presidential price ticket, and many thought it would become a normal event, Geraldine Ferraro only joined through Sarah Palin in 2008 in the VP position. . In the latest edition of Backstory, the magazine’s deputy editor, Elizabeth Ralph, explains why women have not yet made their way into national elections and what has been repositioned in 2020.
VERROUILLAGE OF ITALY – The Italian government has rescised the recommendations of its clinical advisors for a smoother closure, according to recently published documents. In early March, with coronavirus endemic in parts of Italy, scientists begged to divide the country in two, with stricter regulations for the most affected North. But just 48 hours later, the government announced a national closure, with much more draconian restrictions than those ordered by its own advisers, Hannah Roberts writes.
The rules, which well confined all non-key personnel in their homes, were much stricter than those later implemented in other European countries such as Germany and the United Kingdom.
Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte, reporting to Parliament at the end of March, said decisions on the measures to be taken “have been based on the exact evidence of the technical-scientific committee.”
Conte has been criticized by opposition parties for iron-ruling the pandemic and cutting civil liberties without being held accountable to parliament. Parliament has expanded its emergency force to govern by decree until the end of October.
STURGIS RETENUE SON SOUFFLE – The first precautionary symptoms arrived in May, said Daniel Ainslie, city manager of Sturgis, S.D. Tourists began to invade the nearby Black Hills National Forest, telling Ainslie that even if city officials canceled their annual motorcycle collection due to the pandemic, motorcycle enthusiasts would still come. “Every time there was a blockade in a state, we saw those plates two days later,” Ainslie said. The demonstration is now prepared for the largest public gathering in the country since the beginning of the pandemic.
In a normal year, the city’s citizens were already divided on the fact that its city of 7,000 inhabitants was surpassed by the enthusiasts of the demonstrations for ten days each year. This year, according to the city’s surveys, more than 60% of the citizens of Sturgis opposed the festival, which attracts thousands of visitors each year. (In 2015, 750,000 more people arrived at the festival to celebrate its 75th anniversary.) But Ainslie said that as the summer progressed, the city was beginning to receive more and more messages from others who were tired of Covid’s restrictions, tired of being locked up in their home, in poor health because of the tension of the pandemic – they came here whether there was an official event or not. “They love it here,” Ainslie said. It is your ability to watch concerts, make long trips, modernize your bikes or see the newest bikes. “This is your annual retreat from the truth.”
Then the people prepared. Officials have canceled thousands of dollars in advertising in an attempt to keep the occasion to a minimum. They make masks for all visitors (state law prohibits them from prescribing masks) and expect the participants of the rally to wear them. They have installed hand washing and disinfection stations in the city and disinfect the sidewalks at night. They bought protective devices for local retailers. They require providers to screen their workers for Covid symptoms. They plan to mass-test citizens after the occasion to involve possible outbreaks. They are arriving at a municipal service that delivers food to citizens who do not need to leave their homes.
Ainslie’s nervous. You don’t know how many other people are really coming. At least the number of foreign travellers making up around 5-10% of the festival’s participants is expected to be minimized. Some others would also possibly give up traveling if they have lost their jobs or had their wages reduced. But he said the pandemic can also attract more visitors to the city “in love with freedom.”
“We’re involved about the number of other people who come here,” he said. “Many of them come from regions with significant restrictions and this is their ability to show their non-public freedom. There’s a higher chance they won’t wear masks.”
And there’s no slowing down. America’s biopharmaceutical companies will continue working day and night until they beat coronavirus. Because science is how we get back to normal.
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