Presented by
With Daniel Lippman
BUSINESS GROUPS CAUGHT FLAT-FOOTED BY CDC MASK GUIDANCE: The Biden administration’s announcement Thursday that fully vaccinated Americans can ditch their masks in most situations is undoubtedly a major milestone in the country’s fight against Covid-19. But trade groups representing the businesses, and a union representing the workers who will now be tasked with enforcing mask-wearing for unvaccinated people, are now scrambling to parse what the guidance means for their members.
Larry Lynch, who as senior vice president of science and industry for the National Restaurant Association handles its Covid operating guidance, said in an interview that the new recommendations may be the industry’s biggest challenge yet. “We don t know how to be the vaccine police,” he said. “CDC didn t do us didn t do the industry, any big favors,” he added, though “it certainly helped consumers.”
The clock is ticking on President Joe Biden’s goal of getting congressional Republicans to back some, if not all, of his wide-ranging infrastructure proposal.
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With Nicholas Wu and Andrew Desiderio.
THE RIPPLE EFFECT: Tremors from the Jan. 6 attack and subsequent impeachment vote continue to reverberate in the Republican party, showing how a strong appetite for Donald Trump means little patience for vocal anti-Trumpers.
In the time it takes you to read this story, Senator John Cornyn will probably have posted another tweet.
Matt McClain/Getty
Twitter launched in 2006, but didn’t really find its footing as a social media platform until March 2007, when it became the talk of that year’s South by Southwest festival. The site quickly transformed from a widely derided showcase for irrelevant narcissism in 140-character bits an easy refrain at the time was that Twitter existed for users to tell the world what they had for lunch to something more expressive, expansive, and often downright weird. (Eventually, Twitter would be credited with a key role in world events such as the Arab Spring.) In February 2008, right around the time he celebrated his fifty-sixth birthday, Texas’s then–junior senator John Cornyn signed up. In the years since, he has taken to the platform like a man born to it.
A new study confirms that liberal blue states like New York and New Jersey had by far the worst pandemic record in terms of keeping people healthy and minimizing economic damage. The consulting firm Hamilton Place Strategies tells us just who did best on both measures.
As a nation, 13 jobs were lost for every person who died from COVID-19 in the past year. The study finds that New York had the worst overall outcome, with both high excess deaths and high job losses. The Empire State, under Governor Andrew Cuomoâs leadership, instituted severe lockdowns and suffered catastrophic loss of life. Its unemployment was the nationâs second highest â behind Hawaii. Cuomoâs lockdown destroyed much of his local economy while his decision to send COVID-19 patients into nursing homes increased the number of deaths in them. How the media celebrated this Master of Disaster for as long as they did shows just how flawed their coverage of the pandemic has been.