In recent days, top members of the Biden administration have made a startling admission: Millions of doses of the COVID-19 vaccine were lost somewhere in the system.
So now, the race is on to track down all of the vials. “The No. 1 priority within the Biden administration right now is finding doses and making sure they don't go to waste before they start to ramp up supply through other means,” Erin Banco, The Daily Beast’s lead reporter on the COVID beat, tells Molly Jong-Fast on The New Abnormal.
“Their rhetoric right now has been, ‘We have only been here for X amount of days, please give us time. This is not easy.’ I think they’re only going to be able to use that excuse for so long. Like, look, you’re in government. This is your job. Yeah, these things take time—especially coordinating them across all the states and territories when everyone has a different distribution plan. It’s a slog. But from what I hear, the CDC should have a better idea of where things stand this week,” Banco adds.
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And while the scramble to find the doses continues, the aftermath of the Jan. 6 insurrection still lingers—especially for those who were there in the Capitol as the MAGA mob raged. Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-MI) tells Molly about her harrowing experience.
“There's pounding at the doors. Officers are yelling at people and saying, ‘Make sure those doors are secured,’” Dingell recounts. “My colleagues were taking benches and chairs and helping secure the doors. And we were told to sit in our chairs, pull out our escape hoods, which are the gas masks. And that if we were told to kneel, we needed to do so right away, because there could be some shooting. It still seems surreal.”
Finally, Rick Wilson addresses the revelation that John Weaver, one of his fellow co-founders of the Lincoln Project, sent unwanted, sexually explicit messages to people as young as 14.
“If we had been aware of this, if I had been aware of this, I would not for a second have hesitated to report John Weaver to law enforcement. I would have done it in a hot minute,” Wilson says.
“I am sickened at his behavior and I’m sickened that we fell for a deception of this scope and scale. And I’m sickened by the fact that a predatory person tried to use our organization and our mission to exploit it for personal reasons,” Wilson adds. “It’s a group that shares, we share a very firm belief in accountability, OK. And I think John should be held accountable.”
Listen to The New Abnormal on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Stitcher.
