Pfizer skips Trump vaccine 'summit'

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Tuesday, December 8

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PFIZER PASSES ON WHITE HOUSE 'SUMMIT' Pfizer and Moderna, pharma companies that have developed promising COVID-19 vaccines, will not participate in a White House “vaccine summit” today that promoted the participation of private sector executives. Pfizer said in a statement that it had informed the White House that it would not attend, but offered no other details. Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla has previously vowed to keep Pfizer’s vaccine “out of politics.” Meanwhile, Trump's administration blew a chance to secure more of Pfizer's vaccine for Americans. [HuffPost]

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'V DAY' FOR BRITAIN It’s been dubbed “V-Day” in Britain. A week after the U.K. became the first Western country to authorize widespread use of a vaccine against COVID-19, it began administering the shots. Margaret Keenan, 90, a former jewelry shop assistant, was the first. The initial 800,000 doses will go to people over 80 who are either hospitalized or already have outpatient appointments scheduled, along with nursing home workers. [AP]

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LLOYD AUSTIN TAPPED FOR BIDEN PENTAGON President-elect Joe Biden has reportedly chosen retired Gen. Lloyd Austin to lead the Defense Department in what seems to be his latest Cabinet pick. National security experts have expressed wariness about choosing Austin, stressing that he has not been out of the military for the required seven years and would therefore need a waiver from Congress to lead the Pentagon. [HuffPost]

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BIDEN WINS GEORGIA, AGAIN Georgia’s top elections official recertified the state’s election results after a recount requested by Trump confirmed once again that Biden won the state, and the governor then recertified the state’s 16 presidential electors. “We have now counted legally cast ballots three times, and the results remain unchanged,” Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said during a news conference at the state Capitol before the results were recertified. [AP]

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TRUMP ASKED TOP GOP-ER TO OVERTURN ELECTION Trump personally called the speaker of Pennsylvania’s House of Representatives to ask him to help overturn the results of the election in the state, Trump’s latest effort to deny his loss. Trump called Bryan Cutler twice in the past week, asking if Cutler could use the body’s legislative power to intervene in the race more than a month after Election Day. [HuffPost]

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DACA PROTECTIONS RESTORED AFTER RULING The Trump administration fully restored the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program that shields hundreds of thousands of young people from deportation, complying with a federal judge’s order. The Department of Homeland Security posted on its website that it is accepting new applications, petitions for two-year renewals and requests for permission to temporarily leave the U.S. [AP]

WHAT'S BREWING

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FLORIDA POLICE RAID HOUSE OF COVID-19 WHISTLEBLOWER

Rebekah Jones, the former Florida Department of Health official who says she was ousted from her job managing the state’s COVID-19 data for refusing to censor and alter case information, said armed officers raided her Tallahassee home and took all of her tech hardware. After her ouster in May, Jones made public allegations that her superiors had told her to put misleading and false information on the public-facing COVID-19 dashboard. [HuffPost]

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1,500 ATTORNEYS CONDEMN GIULIANI In an open letter, 1,500 attorneys slammed the Trump campaign for seeking to overturn the will of U.S. voters and called on bar associations to investigate lawyers who filed lawsuits on Trump’s behalf. The letter’s signatories include law professors, judges and local officials. They accuse Rudy Giuliani and other Trump campaign lawyers of violating their code of conduct by lying and filing baseless legal actions, calling their behavior a “disgrace.” [HuffPost]

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WHICH ESSENTIAL WORKERS SHOULD GET A VACCINE FIRST? When the pandemic started, John Costa, president of the Amalgamated Transit Union, lost sleep wondering if the bus drivers that his union represents should be pulled off the job. Nine months later, with vaccines on the horizon, a different question keeps Costa awake: When can his members get vaccinated? “Each state is going to have a slightly different take on what is an essential worker,” said Josh Michaud, associate director for global health policy at the Kaiser Family Foundation. [HuffPost]

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CHUCK YEAGER, FIRST TO BREAK SOUND BARRIER, DIES AT 97 Chuck Yeager, the first human to fly faster than the speed of sound and an ace pilot who fought in World War II, died Monday night. He was 97. “It is w/ profound sorrow, I must tell you that my life love General Chuck Yeager passed just before 9pm ET,” Yeager’s wife, Victoria, announced on Twitter. “An incredible life well lived, America’s greatest Pilot, & a legacy of strength, adventure, & patriotism will be remembered forever.” [HuffPost]

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THE MARINES AND THE RACIST PORN ACTOR WHO TRIED TO START A 'MODERN SS' In 2016, Liam Collins, then just a teenager living in New Jersey, had a very specific vision for his life. He was going to join the U.S. Marines, get the training he needed, and then form a fascist paramilitary group that would use violence and terror to create a whites-only ethnostate. “It takes a man’s willpower and heart to make a commitment like this,” Collins wrote at the time on a since-shuttered neo-Nazi web forum called Iron March. [HuffPost]

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