Biden vows to vaccinate 300m in the US by end of summer or early fall - as it happened

Marjorie Taylor Greene, the freshman Republican representative of Georgia, indicated support for executing Democratic politicians, according to a CNN analysis of her Facebook activity.

Greene, a backer of QAnon, liked posts including one that said “a bullet to the head would be quicker” to remove House speaker Nancy Pelosi, CNN reports. In response to a Facebook commenter on her page asking, “Now do we get to hang them ?? Meaning H & O ???” referring to Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, she responded: “Stage is being set. Players are being put in place. We must be patient. This must be done perfectly or liberal judges would let them off.”

Greene said she had a team managing her Facebook page. “Many posts have been liked. Many posts have been shared,” she said in a statement, accusing CNN of being out to get her because she is a “conservative Republican”.

Screenshots posted by Media Matters for America last week showed that Greene also agreed with Facebook comments falsely claiming that the school shooting in Parkland, Florida was staged. She was suspended from Twitter for spreading election misinformation.

After receiving her second dose of the Covid-19 vaccine today, Kamala Harris spoke to employees at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, about what the institution meant to her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, a biomedical scientist.

“Growing up ... we always knew that Mommy was going to this place called ‘Bethesda’,” Harris recalled. “She was in the biochemical endocrinology study section. She was a peer-reviewer. And my mother had two goals in her life: to raise her two daughters and end breast cancer.

“I grew up then around science in a way that was taught to me by someone who was so profoundly passionate about a gift – which is the gift that scientists give to us – in that their whole reason for being is to see what can be unburdened by what has been,” she said.

A key point here – Biden said the additional doses are “not in hand yet, but ordered”.

Here’s a clip of the Biden briefing:

The justice department has rescinded a Trump administration memo establishing a “zero tolerance” policy for migrants at the US-Mexico border.

The AP reports:

Acting Attorney General Monty Wilkinson issued the new memo to federal prosecutors across the nation, saying the department would return to its longstanding previous policy and instructing prosecutors to act on the merits of individual cases.

“Consistent with this longstanding principle of making individualized assessments in criminal cases, I am rescinding – effective immediately – the policy directive,” Wilkinson wrote.

Wilkinson said the department’s principles have “long emphasized that decisions about bringing criminal charges should involve not only a determination that a federal offense has been committed and that the admissible evidence will probably be sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction, but should also take into account other individualized factors, including personal circumstances and criminal history, the seriousness of the offense, and the probable sentence or other consequences that would result from a conviction.”

The “zero tolerance” policy meant that any adult caught crossing the border illegally would be prosecuted for illegal entry. Because children cannot be jailed with their family members, families were separated and children were taken into custody by Health and Human Services, which manages unaccompanied children at the border.

Read more here.

“When we arrived, the vaccine program was in worse shape than we expected or anticipated,” Biden said.

The administration has been sending a similar message over the past week. Part of that is messaging: it’s advantageous for Biden to lower expectations and buy himself some time as he ramps up a coronavirus response.

But a few new policies, including Biden’s vow to help states, tribes and territories plan for the future by giving them a three-week forecast of how many vaccines are incoming will be a massive help to jurisdictions that have been unsure of how to ration their doses.

The New York Times recently reported on the supply issues:

Inoculation sites are canceling thousands of appointments in one state after another as the nation’s vaccines roll out through a bewildering patchwork of distribution networks, with local officials uncertain about what supplies they will have in hand.

In South Carolina, one hospital in the city of Beaufort had to cancel 6,000 vaccine appointments after it received only 450 of the doses it expected. In Hawaii, a Maui hospital canceled 5,000 first-dose appointments and put 15,000 additional requests for appointments on hold.

In San Francisco, the public health department had at one point expected to run out of vaccines this week because the city’s allocation dropped sharply from a week ago and California officials temporarily had to put thousands of doses on hold after a higher than usual number of possible allergic reactions were reported. In New York State, officials in Erie county have canceled thousands of vaccine appointments in recent days after a sharp decline in allocations from the state.

The situation is especially dire in Texas, which is averaging about 20,000 new coronavirus cases a day, fueling concerns over whether officials will be able to curb the spread when they cannot get their hands on the vaccines they desperately need to do so.

Biden ended the press conference without taking questions.

More details will be revealed during subsequent, regular briefings with public health officials, he signaled.

There will be enough vaccine to inoculate 300 million Americans by the end of summer or early fall, Biden said.

He’d rather have a problem of “too much vaccine” leftover this summer than not enough, he said. Vaccines will be distributed through pharmacies, as well as the Federal Emergency Management Agency vaccine centers.

“That will enormously expand our reach,” he said.

National Guard troops will help set up vaccination centers and administer shots.