Neera Tanden in February. She wrote: ‘I do not want continued consideration of my nomination to be a distraction from your other priorities.’ Photograph: Andrew Harnik/AP
Neera Tanden in February. She wrote: ‘I do not want continued consideration of my nomination to be a distraction from your other priorities.’ Photograph: Andrew Harnik/AP
Joe Biden announced the US is on track to have enough coronavirus vaccines for all American adults by the end of May. The president had previously said the country would hit that crucial benchmark by the end of July. Biden’s announcement came hours after the White House said Merck would partner with Johnson & Johnson to expand production of Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine, which was approved for emergency use over the weekend.
The Republican governors of Texas and Mississippi announced they are rescinding mask mandates, despite concerns about a potential “fourth surge” in coronavirus cases. The director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr Rochelle Walensky, said yesterday, “Now is not the time to relax the critical safeguards that we know can stop the spread of Covid-19 in our communities, not when we are so close.”
Christopher Wray, the FBI director, said the bureau views the 6 January insurrection as a clear act of domestic terrorism. Testifying before the Senate judiciary committee, Wray said, “That attack, that siege, was criminal behavior, plain and simple, and it’s behavior that we, the FBI, view as domestic terrorism.”
Neera Tanden has withdrawn her nomination to direct the Office of Management and Budget. “Unfortunately, it now seems clear that there is no path forward to gain confirmation,” she said in a letter to Biden.
The Senate confirmed Gina Raimondo as the new secretary of commerce, in a vote of 84 to 15. Raimondo, who has served as the governor of Rhode Island since 2015, has pledged to make reinvigorating the US manufacturing sector a key focus of her tenure.
The Senate confirmed Cecilia Rouse to chair the White House Council of Economic Advisers. She will be the first Black chair in the council in its 75-year history. The Senate voted 95-4, with 45 Republicans including Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley and Mitch McConnell joining all Democrats in voting “yes”.
The Biden administration approved sanctions against several Russian officials in connection to the poisoning of opposition leader Alexei Navalny. The announcement comes a month after Navalny was sentenced to two years and eight months in a prison colony, sparking international condemnation and protests across Russia.
The Senate has confirmed Cecilia Rouse to chair the White House Council of Economic Advisers. She will be the first Black chair in the council in its 75-year history.
Rouse was confirmed 95-4. Photograph: Leah Millis/Reuters
The Senate voted 95-4, with 45 Republicans including Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley and Mitch McConnell joining all Democrats in voting “yes”.
Rouse, 57, is a labor economist and former dean at Princeton. She served in the Obama and Clinton administrations.
Vowing to address wealth disparities, Rouse said more federal spending was needed to avoid a “downward spiral”.
Tanden’s letter to Biden requesting her withdrawal said:
Dear President Biden,
I am writing to you to withdraw my nomination for Director of the Office of Management and Budget. It has been an honor of a lifetime to be considered for this role and for the faith placed in me.
I appreciate how hard you and your team at the White House has worked to win my confirmation. Unfortunately, it now seems clear that there is no path forward to gain confirmation, and I do not want continued consideration of my nomination to be a distraction from your other priorities.
I am incredibly grateful for your leadership on behalf of the American people and for your agenda that will make such a transformative difference in people’s lives.
The withdrawal marks the first cabinet nominee by Biden to fail to get confirmation.
“I have accepted Neera Tanden’s request to withdraw her name from nomination for Director of the Office of Management and Budget,” Biden said in a statement. “I have the utmost respect for her record of accomplishment, her experience and her counsel, and I look forward to having her serve in a role in my Administration. She will bring valuable perspective and insight to our work.”
Tanden faced increasingly steep odds toward confirmation. Republican senators opposed her nomination citing past tweets. Last week Senator Joe Manchin, a conservative Democrat, announced he would oppose her nomination citing those tweets as well. That left Tanden short of the majority of votes needed on the Senate floor and in the committees hearing her candidacy.
Tanden was an unexpected choice to run Biden’s budget team. She is a longtime ally of Hillary Clinton and oftentimes vocally criticized both Republicans and Democrats, especially supporters of Senator Bernie Sanders. Tanden has said in her confirmation hearings that she regretted the past statements but that wasn’t enough to sway the required number of senators.
Neera Tanden withdraws from her nomination to direct budget office
Tanden has withdrawn her nomination to direct the Office of Management and Budget.
“I appreciate how hard you and your team at the White House has worked to win my confirmation,” she said in a letter to Joe Biden. “Unfortunately, it now seems clear that there is no path forward to gain confirmation, and I do not want continued consideration of my nomination to be a distraction from your other priorities.”
The White House said it has accepted her withdrawal.
Tanden testifies during a Senate Committee on the Budget hearing on February 10, 2021. Photograph: Anna Moneymaker/AFP/Getty Images
Miguel Cardona was sworn in as education secretary after the Senate confirmed his nomination yesterday.
Cardona, 45, is a former public school teacher. He’ll play a key role in helping schools reopen – sharing best practices and recommendations as school districts across the country debate how to resume in-person learning amid the pandemic.
As Connecticut’s education chief, Cardona made school reopenings in the state a priority and said at his confirmation hearing that there are “great examples throughout our country of schools that have been able to reopen safely.”
Teachers unions, however, have been wary of reopening before teachers have the vaccine.
The archdiocese of New Orleans, as well as Roman Catholic leaders in St Louis, Missouri, have told local Catholics to avoid the Johnson & Johnson’s single-shot Covid-19 vaccine, because its early development used “morally compromised cell lines created from two abortions”.
The leadership in New Orleans said two other vaccines in use in the US, made by Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna, were acceptable despite having been developed with “some lab testing that utilised the abortion-derived cell line”. The archdiocese made the announcement on Friday.
The statement put the archdiocese at odds with Pope Francis. In December, the Vatican said it was “morally acceptable to receive Covid-19 vaccines that have used cell lines from aborted foetuses in their research and production process”, as the use of such vaccines “does not constitute formal cooperation with the abortion from which the cells used in production of the vaccines derive”.
The archdiocese of St Louis on Tuesday, meanwhile, encouraged Catholics to seek out the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines and avoid the Johnson & Johnson version if possible. Like the New Orleans archdiocese statement, the St Louis statement called the Johnson & Johnson vaccine “morally compromised”.
However, the St Louis statement stressed that Catholics can get that vaccine “in good conscience if no other alternative is available”.
Cells derived from an elective abortion in the Netherlands in the 1970s are commonly used in medical research. Last October, it was widely reported that an experimental Covid-19 therapy given to Donald Trump, Regeneron, was developed using such cells.
Like most Republicans, the then president had courted anti-abortion groups and moved to restrict use of fetal tissue in research. Fetal tissue research has led to a number of important medical advances, especially in vaccine development.
Cell lines derived from aborted tissue were used in the development of the polio, chickenpox, hepatitis A and shingles vaccines. Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine subsidiary Janssen used PER.C6 cells, a proprietary cell line derived from aborted tissue in 1985.
Dolly Parton, who helped fund the development of the Moderna vaccine for Covid-19, was pleased to get “a dose of her own medicine”.
Parton, 75, had donated $1m to Vanderbilt University to help find a coronavirus cure. after getting her jab, the country music icon sang, to the tune of “Jolene”: “Vaccine, vaccine, vaccine, vaccine... I’m begging of you please don’t hesitate.”
Joe Biden said Vernon Jordan “knew the soul of America, in all of its goodness and all of its unfulfilled promise”.
“He liked to say that we had torn down what Dr. King called ‘sagging walls of segregation,’ but we still had to deal with ‘the rubble’—with systemic racism, with inequity, with the injustice still faced by so many Black Americans,” Biden said. To honor the civil rights leader, who died at 85, “we must continue to do the same”.
“Jill and I extend our deepest condolences to Ann, Vickee, and the entire Jordan family,” Biden said.
That’s it from me today. My west coast colleague, Maanvi Singh, will cover the blog for the next couple of hours.
Here’s where the day stands so far:
Joe Biden announced the US is on track to have enough coronavirus vaccines for all American adults by the end of May. The president had previously said the country would hit that crucial benchmark by the end of July. Biden’s announcement came hours after the White House said Merck would partner with Johnson & Johnson to expand production of Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine, which was approved for emergency use over the weekend.
The Republican governors of Texas and Mississippi announced they are rescinding mask mandates, despite concerns about a potential “fourth surge” in coronavirus cases. The director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr Rochelle Walensky, said yesterday, “Now is not the time to relax the critical safeguards that we know can stop the spread of Covid-19 in our communities, not when we are so close.”
FBI Director Christopher Wray said the bureau views the January 6 insurrection as a clear act of domestic terrorism. Testifying before the Senate judiciary committee, Wray said, “That attack, that siege, was criminal behavior, plain and simple, and it’s behavior that we, the FBI, view as domestic terrorism.”
The Senate confirmed Gina Raimondo as the new secretary of commerce, in a vote of 84 to 15. Raimondo, who has served as the governor of Rhode Island since 2015, has pledged to make reinvigorating the US manufacturing sector a key focus of her tenure.
The Biden administration approved sanctions against several Russian officials in connection to the poisoning of opposition leader Alexei Navalny. The announcement comes a month after Navalny was sentenced to two years and eight months in a prison colony, sparking international condemnation and protests across Russia.
After concluding his remarks, Joe Biden answered a couple of questions that reporters shouted at him.
The president was asked once again when he expected things to get back to normal in the US. “I’ve been cautioned not to give an answer to that because we don’t know for sure,” Biden said.
The president previously said he expected the country to be mostly back to normal by Christmas. Today, Biden told reporters, “My hope is, by this time next year, we’re going to be back to normal, and before that.”
Biden emphasized that the timeline for relaxing restrictions largely depended on people being “smart” about limiting their risk of contracting coronavirus over the coming months.
Joe Biden encouraged all Americans to continue wearing masks to limit the spread of coronavirus, saying that “now is not the time to let up”.
“There is light at the end of the tunnel,” the president said. “It’s not over yet.”
The president’s comments came hours after the Republican governors of Texas and Mississippi announced plans to abandon mask mandates, despite health experts’ concerns about a potential “fourth surge” in coronavirus cases.
Joe Biden added that he wants every educator and school employee to get at least the first dose of a vaccine by the end of this month.
The president, who has faced criticism over the continued closure of many schools, said the country needed to treat in-person learning like the “essential service that it is”.
Criticizing the Trump administration’s response to the pandemic, Biden said, “We’re making progress from the mess we inherited.”
US is on track to have vaccines for all Americans by end of May, Biden says
President Joe Biden is now delivering remarks on the distribution of coronavirus vaccines, after his administration announced Merck would team up with Johnson & Johnson to expand production of Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine.
The president described the partnership between the two companies as a “major step forward” in expanding vaccine access to every American.
“This is the type of collaboration we saw between companies during World War II,” Biden said.
With the planned partnership between Merck and Johnson & Johnson, Biden said the US will now “have enough vaccine supply for every adult in America by the end of May”.
Biden had previously said the country would have enough vaccines for all Americans by July, and he credited his administration’s diligent efforts with moving up that timeline.
