The Morning Dispatch: Vaccine Supply Hiccups

Plus: Russia’s unconscionable arrest of opposition leader Alexei Navalny.

(Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images.)

Happy Monday! To paraphrase Chicago Bears wide receiver Allen Robinson and directly quote Trump administration Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller: “I cannot wait to leave this job, believe me.”

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

  • The National Rifle Association announced on Friday it is declaring bankruptcy, and will leave New York to reincorporate in Texas. The organization is currently under investigation by New York Attorney General Letitia James. The FBI said last week it processed a record 39.7 million firearm background checks in 2020, 10 million more than the next highest year on record.
  • The 2021 March for Life will be held virtually this year, organizers announced on Friday, citing “heightened pressures that law enforcement officers … are currently facing in and around the Capitol” and the coronavirus pandemic.
  • Yoweri Museveni—who has led Uganda since 1986—was declared the victor of the country’s recent presidential election, which international observers have widely criticized as being unfair. Museveni ordered an internet blackout in advance of the voting, and his government’s security forces repeatedly arrested and beat his main opponent, Bobi Wine, throughout the campaign.
  • Russian opposition leader Alexi Navalny—who was nearly killed by poison last year—returned to Moscow yesterday, and was immediately detained for allegedly violating probation.
  • Politico reports that President-elect Biden will rescind the Keystone XL pipeline’s cross-border permit on his first day in office. In an effort to curry favor with the Biden administration, Canada’s TC Energy Corp. had pledged the pipeline—which began construction in Montana, Nebraska, and South Dakota last fall—would rely on a union workforce and eliminate greenhouse emissions by 2030.
  • The Biden transition team announced a slew of additional political appointees over the weekend. David Kessler—who served as FDA Commissioner in the George H.W. Bush and Clinton administrations—will oversee the Biden administration’s vaccine distribution program. David Cohen will serve as deputy director of the CIA, the same role he occupied in the Obama administration. Biden intends to nominate Rohit Chopra—currently an FTC commissioner—as director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
  • Pew Research Center found President Trump’s approval rating to be bottoming out at just 29 percent as he is set to leave office, with the sharp decline being driven largely by Republicans, whose support of Trump dropped 17 percentage points since late last year. An average of approval polls finds Trump’s support dropping less precipitously to 38.7 percent.
  • The United States confirmed 174,328 new cases of COVID-19 yesterday per the Johns Hopkins University COVID-19 Dashboard, with 9.7 percent of the 1,793,648 tests reported coming back positive. An additional 1,747 deaths were attributed to the virus on Sunday, bringing the pandemic’s American death toll to 397,532. According to the COVID Tracking Project, 124,387 Americans are currently hospitalized with COVID-19. According to the Centers for Disease Control, 31,161,075 COVID-19 vaccine doses have been distributed nationwide, and 12,279,180 have been administered.

More Hiccups in COVID-19 Vaccine Distribution

In the five weeks since the U.S. began rolling out COVID-19 vaccines, the biggest issue has not been supply—it’s been getting doses into people’s arms. That dynamic appears to be changing, however, with the federal government’s vaccine stockpile dwindling in recent weeks as states ramp up the pace of their inoculation efforts.

The Washington Post reported on Friday that—despite Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar announcing earlier in the week a shift toward “ship[ping] all of the doses that had been held in physical reserve”—no such reserve exists, and states should not expect to see the dramatic uptick in allocations they were hoping to receive.

“Last night, I received disturbing news, confirmed to me directly by General [Gus] Perna of Operation Warp Speed: States will not be receiving increased shipments of vaccines from the national stockpile next week, because there is no federal reserve of doses,” Oregon Gov. Kate Brown, a Democrat, said Friday. “I am shocked and appalled that they have set an expectation on which they could not deliver, with such grave consequences.”

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said Friday he expects the city to run out of doses this week, and some hospitals and health systems began canceling scheduled vaccine appointments as a result.

“Operation Warp Speed has been monitoring manufacturing closely, and always intended to transition from holding second doses in reserve as manufacturing stabilizes and we gained confidence in the ability for a consistent flow of vaccines,” a spokesman for Operation Warp Speed said.

In a speech delivered on Friday, President-elect Biden called the U.S. vaccine rollout thus far a “dismal failure,” and outlined his plan to improve it. “If we’re getting more people vaccinated, then we need more vaccination sites,” he said. “That’s why we will harness the full resources of the federal government to establish thousands of community vaccination centers. On my first day in office, I will instruct the Federal Emergency Management Agency, FEMA, to begin setting up the first of these centers.”

Navalny’s Got Guts

In the Russian government’s latest affront to international norms, prison service officials promptly arrested President Vladimir Putin’s foremost political opponent—Alexei Navalny—upon his return in Moscow yesterday. Navalny had spent the last five months in Germany, recovering from a Soviet-era nerve agent attack believed to be the work of Russian operatives.

Officials attributed Navalny’s arrest to violations of parole under the terms of his suspended prison sentence, which he received in 2014 on charges of embezzlement. The European Court of Human Rights in 2018 ruled that those charges were politically motivated and intended “to bring the opposition under control.”

Russia’s prison service issued a warrant for Navalny’s arrest last week in an effort to deter him from returning home and campaigning against Putin’s ruling United Russia Party. The move may have backfired, however, as the anti-corruption advocate flew to Moscow of his own free will in a show of solidarity with his supporters.

To upend the planned media gathering awaiting Navalny’s arrival, Russian officials diverted his flight from Vnukovo Airport to Sheremetyevo Airport—40 kilometers away. Supporters from St. Petersburg—where Navalny’s opposition party has garnered a significant following—were reportedly removed from Moscow-bound trains and flights. Security teams barred journalists and supporters who made their way to Sheremetyevo from entering the terminal and immediately took Navalny into custody.

On a flight from Siberia to Moscow last August, the opposition leader fell into a coma. He initially received treatment in Russia—where doctors reported no poison in his system—before being transferred to a hospital in Berlin. While there, independent labs from Germany and NATO confirmed that there was “proof beyond doubt” that Navalny had been exposed to Novichok nerve agent. The rare toxin was developed by the Soviet Union in the 1970s, and has since been at the center of a number of high-profile assassinations and attempted assassinations by suspected Russian officials.

Worth Your Time

  • There’s never a bad time to re-read Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail, but if you have the day off of work or school today, it’s the least you can do. King was arrested on April 12, 1963 for disobeying a judge’s injunction against “parading, demonstrating, boycotting, trespassing and picketing,” and a group of white clergymen issued a statement calling the peaceful protests “unwise and untimely,” adding that “when rights are consistently denied, a cause should be pressed in the courts and in negotiations among local leaders, and not in the streets.” King took issue with their words. “I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws,” he wrote. “Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that ‘an unjust law is no law at all.’”
  • It’s frequently said (particularly by journalists!) that journalists are in the business of writing the first draft of history—but in the case of foundational watershed events like the occupation of the Capitol, journalists get a crack at the second and third drafts as well. That’s why, despite all the reporting on January 6 we’ve already sent your way over the past few weeks—including our own—this Washington Post piece by Peter Hermann, which includes new perspectives from a number of D.C. police officers who were on the scene that day, is still absolutely worth a read. “The zealotry of these people is absolutely unreal,” said officer Daniel Hodges. “There were points where I thought it was possible I could either die or become seriously disfigured.”
  • Or say you’re sick to death of reading about January 6, and just want something else to occupy your brain: Well, you’d be hard pressed to do better than Ben Lindbergh’s latest at The Ringer about the people who spend vast quantities of time fighting over miniscule editing decisions on Wikipedia. (One day we will finally have an answer to the question: Is it confusing to describe a picture of economist Guy Standing in a chair as “Guy Standing sitting”?)

Presented Without Comment

Toeing the Company Line

  • Freshman GOP Rep. Peter Meijer—who holds Justin Amash’s old seat—joined Friday’s episode of the Dispatch Podcast to discuss what it was like certifying the Electoral College vote, evacuating the House chamber on January 6 amid the Capitol siege, and voting to impeach President Trump just days after being sworn into office.
  • Dispatch readers got two doses of the French Press this weekend. On Saturday, David urged GOP senators (🔒) to quit at long last passing the buck and convict President Trump in his impeachment trial. On Sunday, he turned his attention to white evangelicalism in America, and how it is increasingly taking on the cultural character of the South—particularly a uniquely Southern flavor of shame/honor culture that leads people to view criticism of their communities as intolerable violence against their own persons.
  • In Friday’s G-File, Jonah strikes a doleful note about the current state of popular media both left and right, along with some advice for how to chart a better path forward. “When we get fed only what we want to hear, it becomes a contest for who can sell the purest junk,” he writes. “It’s become a cliché to say we live in two Americas. If that’s true, the people running the media of each nation have an obligation to do more than just live off demonization of the other nation.” And Jonah, a Fox News contributor, has some particularly hard truths for the network that employs him. Jonah discusses all this and more on the latest episode of The Ruminant.

Reporting by Declan Garvey (@declanpgarvey), Andrew Egger (@EggerDC), Haley Byrd Wilt (@byrdinator), Audrey Fahlberg (@FahlOutBerg), Charlotte Lawson (@charlotteUVA), and Steve Hayes (@stephenfhayes).