Sen. Mitch McConnell refuses to call out Trump on anniversary of Jan. 6 attack on Capitol
Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., marked the anniversary of the Jan. 6 storming of the Capitol on Thursday by refusing to blame former President Donald Trump and his right-wing supporters for carrying out the violent attack.
Even as he denounced “criminals,” McConnell did not even mention the obvious leading role that Trump and his MAGA loyalists played in the effort to violently prevent Congress from certifying President Biden’s election victory.
“January 6th, 2021 was a dark day for Congress and our country,” he said. "The United States Capitol, the seat of the first branch of our federal government, was stormed by criminals who brutalized police officers and used force to try to stop Congress from doing its job.”
Instead of denouncing Trump and his Republican acolytes, McConnell accused Democrats of seeking to “exploit this anniversary” by pushing for new protections for American democracy.
—New York Daily News
Ex-Biden advisers suggest new national strategy for fighting COVID-19
WASHINGTON — Several of President Joe Biden’s former advisers want the country take a new approach to its COVID-19 response.
The group, all of whom served on Biden’s transition team, penned three opinion pieces published Thursday, Jan. 6, in the Journal of the American Medical Association suggesting an overhaul of the country’s response — focusing around what they call a “new normal” instead of eliminating the coronavirus.
Their pieces include suggested improvements to the country’s testing, mitigation and surveillance strategies, and improvements to COVID-19 vaccines and therapeutics that they say are necessary for a new normal.
They come as the country is grappling with a surge in infections sparked by the omicron variant, which seems to be able to transmit and evade COVID-19 vaccines more easily than past strains. Some experts have said the variant could mark a shift in the pandemic.
“I do think that omicron represents a turning point in the pandemic because of its immune evasive potential and the sheer force of infection that it can produce,” Dr. Amesh Adalja, an infectious disease expert and senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security, told McClatchy News in an email. “It may be that this is the biggest (step) the virus takes towards endemicity and becoming a seasonal coronavirus.”
COVID-19 may eventually evolve into a seasonal illness — like common colds, a study predicts.
They also come after Biden in December announced new actions to fight the omicron variant. White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Jan. 6 that she has not had the chance to read the pieces.
—McClatchy Washington Bureau
Democrats propose California universal health care, funded by new income and business taxes
SACRAMENTO, Calif. — California would enact a sweeping, first-in-the-nation universal health care plan under a proposal unveiled Thursday by a group of state Democratic lawmakers, providing health services to every resident and financed by a broad array of new taxes on individuals and businesses.
Though some of the policy details of the ambitious plan were laid out last year, the way to fund it had not been determined. The proposal, now laid out in separate pieces of legislation, faces significant hurdles in the coming months — first at the state Capitol, with opposition from groups representing doctors and insurance companies, and then possibly at the ballot box, as voters would have to approve the taxes in an amendment to the California Constitution.
“There are countless studies that tell us a single-payer health care system is the fiscally sound thing to do, the smarter health care policy to follow, and a moral imperative if we care about human life,” Assemblyman Ash Kalra, a San Jose Democrat and the proposal’s author, said Thursday.
Efforts to create a single-payer health care system, in which medical expenses for all residents are covered by a government-run fund, have been widely discussed in California for years. Supporters say the cost of providing care to the state’s residents would go down without the administrative expenses of private insurance plans.
—Los Angeles Times
‘Extremely rare’ incidence of bird flu in human is detected in England
A “very rare” case of bird flu was diagnosed in a person in southwest England, the U.K. Health Security Agency said Thursday.
The person had been in close contact with infected birds, and human-to-human transmission was neither suspected nor expected.
In fact, the bird flu is difficult to contract, the agency implied.
“The person acquired the infection from very close, regular contact with a large number of infected birds, which they kept in and around their home over a prolonged period of time,” the agency said in a statement. “All contacts of the individual, including those who visited the premises, have been traced and there is no evidence of onward spread of the infection to anyone else. The individual is currently well and self-isolating.”
The bird flu virus, H5N1, rarely infects humans, according to the Mayo Clinic and numerous other medical experts, and human-to-human transmission is rarer still.
The U.K. Health Security Agency emphasized that “people should not touch sick or dead birds.”
England is in the grip of its largest outbreak ever of H5N1 virus, which causes most cases of bird flu. England has reported 63 cases confirmed since November, and at least a million birds have been culled, mostly at poultry farms, BBC News reported Wednesday.
—New York Daily News
