The promise of telecommuting tech was one of the biggest pump-fakes that workers have ever seen. Everyone was going to be able to work from anywhere—sad offices with pallid fluorescent lighting be damned!

Obviously, that didn’t really come until the pandemic, and in a lot of ways telecommuting chained workers to their offices even more by making sure that their work was always present, in their computers and in their cellphones. Something needs to get done late? It’s not waiting until you get back into the office. Your boss is going to email/Slack/text you tonight to do it. 

Portugal is done with all of that. Its parliament approved legislation on Friday making it illegal for managers to contact their staff outside of working hours. Now, if your boss tries to contact you late, they can be fined, unless it’s an emergency situation. The only catch is that you have to go into the office every two months to check in with your supervisors and fellow employees.

And if you have a kid, you don’t even need your boss’ permission for any of this. You can just work from home without getting them to sign off. 

The legislation was drafted by Portugal’s socialist-led government in the hopes of regaining the work-life balance that has escaped many remote workers during the pandemic. Which is why, as I write this in the middle of my once-every-two-months weekend shift, I’ve also got a tab open for flights to Lisbon. Wish me a boa viagem, will you?

Kaiser Permanente reached a tentative agreement with its workers’ unions Saturday, handing its workers a big victory and averting what would have been a historic strike by two days.

More than 30,000 employees had vowed to strike on Monday if the company did not reach an agreement with the unions. As my colleague Noah Lanard wrote last month, the health care workers threatening to walk off the job were particularly upset over the so-called two-tiered pay structure that Kaiser had proposed:

Workers’ biggest problem with the wage proposal is that it would cut starting pay for new hires by between 26 percent and 39 percent beginning in 2023. They believe it would deepen an existing staffing crisis at Kaiser’s facilities and put patients at risk by making the nonprofit unable to recruit and retain talented workers. There are also fears that it would lead to resentment among those paid less for the same work, or cause Kaiser to replace the more expensive workers covered by the old contract with new hires. Kaiser’s push for two-tier pay resembles similar proposals from Kellogg and John Deere that have already led to strikes this fall. 

Essentially, workers feared that Kaiser was trying to create a caste system within their ranks, paying workers who do the same jobs, even side by side, different salaries and benefits. These kinds of moves can splinter workers into different groups of have-somes and have-lesses, making it harder for them to organize in the future. In the end, Kaiser dropped its push for the two-tiered pay system.

The health care giant had defended the proposed cuts as necessary to stay competitive, but the numbers tell a different story. In 2019, Kaiser gave its outgoing CEO Bernard Tyson a $35 million pay and retirement package. During the pandemic, it made $10 billion. And it made that money while its workers were ground down by the grueling conditions of laboring through a global pandemic. 

In his October story, Noah detailed the intense situations that some of these workers have had to endure while their company’s bottom line has thrived. Take the case of Hollie Sili, an emergency room technician:

These days, Sili usually works a 12-hour shift from noon to midnight. But due to staffing shortages, she often ends up staying until 4 a.m. before returning for another shift eight hours later. Last year, she had a stroke, which she attributes to the physical and mental stress she’s experienced at work.

Or Daniel Stretch, a hospital engineer:

Stretch, the hospital engineer, estimates that his workload and stress levels have doubled during the pandemic, while pay has remained the same. He and roughly two dozen other engineers are responsible for keeping air conditioners, humidifiers, sterilization machines, cooking equipment, TVs, nurse call buttons, and much more running at their Southern California facility. In pandemic times, they scrambled to push air circulation systems beyond their normal limits to protect patients from COVID-19.

Or Katie Johnson, an oncology infusion nurse at a Kaiser clinic in Longview:

Johnson, an oncology infusion nurse at a Kaiser clinic in Longview, Washington, doesn’t see how new hires would be able to pay off their nursing school debts and maintain a decent standard of living after a 39 percent cut to starting salaries. Even at today’s higher rates, she ended up moving to Longview after being priced out of the housing market 50 miles south in Hillsboro, Oregon. She says Kaiser has always operated on a lean staffing model, but that things have only gotten worse as colleagues left the field during the pandemic. “If we can’t attract the talent now,” she asks, “how are we going to attract talent at a lower rate?” 

Had the strike happened, it would have been one of the largest in American health care history, and it would’ve come on the heels of an uptick of labor activism that observers have dubbed Striketober.

Chris Christie has a new book out, which means the former New Jersey governor—and Trump critic turned Trump ally who recently turned back again to Trump critic—is ready to put his longtime frenemy on blast. Sort of.

“An election for president was held on November 3, 2020. Joe Biden won. Donald Trump did not,” Christie says in his forthcoming book, Republican Rescue: Saving the Party From Truth Deniers, Conspiracy Theorists, and the Dangerous Policies of Joe Biden, according to the New York Times. “That is the truth. Any claim to the contrary is untrue.” 

This might sound like a strong criticism of Trump, who even before the results of the 2020 election had alleged that it would be rigged against him, but Christie has waffled in condoning and rebuking the former president. Despite saying that Trump’s election claims are false, he said in an interview with the Times‘ Maggie Haberman he would not rule out supporting a potential Trump presidential candidacy in 2024. 

After slamming Trump on the campaign trail ahead of the 2016 primaries, Christie eventually worked with him during his post-election transition and even in his debate prep ahead of the 2020 election. But he largely refrained from criticizing Trump until after the election and ensuing violence on January 6. 

In the interview with Haberman, Christie explains why he held back: “I generally agreed with the policies that he was pursuing.” When they did argue, he said, “it was rarely over policy.”

Still, Christie did blame Trump’s “rigged” rhetoric for helping induce the Capitol riot, and criticized Republicans for not moving on from the unfounded conspiracy theory. Meanwhile, Christie also didn’t rule out another presidential run of his own in 2024.

On Thursday, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) went on Fox News to tell President Joe Biden that their friendship could not continue, on account of “what he did in Afghanistan.” 

“I will never forgive,” Graham said of Biden’s withdrawal—before continuing on with a gleeful hope of stopping the Democrat’s “socialist train” in the upcoming election.

Graham does this all the time. With his faux-gentlemanly air, he pays lip service to his relationship with Joe Biden before denouncing his friend’s actions on national television and demanding that he face severe punishment. The underlying message always seems to be: This time Biden has just gone too far! Of course you have to believe me! I’m Biden’s friend. 

Graham took a similar tone when he called for a special prosecutor to investigate the business dealings of Biden’s son Hunter. He insisted that he still liked Biden personally. But, especially during Donald Trump’s first impeachment trial, something had to be done.

According to the New York Times, Graham called Biden in November 2020 to make amends over his attacks on Hunter, allegedly explaining that he was simply trying to placate Trump supporters. But around that same period, Graham made additional calls to election officials as part of Trump’s attempt to overturn Biden’s presidential win.

Biden and Graham were genuinely close friends from their time serving together in the Senate. In 2015, Graham told Huffington Post that the then–vice president was “as good a man as God ever created” and “the nicest person I think I’ve ever met in politics.” 

“If you can’t admire Joe Biden as a person, you’ve got a problem. You need to do some self-evaluation, because what’s not to like?” he said. 

How many times will Graham use that friendship to throw Biden under the bus?

A New Jersey man who was captured on video hitting a police officer in the head outside the Capitol on January 6 has been sentenced to 41 months in prison by a federal judge, the most serious sentence yet stemming from the attack.

Scott Fairlamb, a 44-year-old gym owner and former MMA fighter, pleaded guilty to assaulting a police officer. He was the first Capitol rioter sentenced for violence against the police, and the federal judge’s highly awaited decision will likely serve as a benchmark for how other January 6 insurrectionists charged with violence will be punished. Most other Capitol riot cases have dealt with nonviolent offenders charged with misdemeanors and sentenced to minimal, if any, jail time.

In a video, Fairlamb can be seen in a camouflage jacket shoving and then punching a Capitol Police officer. Other evidence showed Fairlamb posing with an “AREA CLOSED” sign outside the Capitol and encouraging others to storm the building.

Prosecutors had recommended a 44-month sentence. The judge, Royce Lamberth, said that Fairlamb’s guilty plea and and expression of remorse earned him a lesser sentence than what other offenders might receive. “Had you gone to trial, I don’t think there’s any jury that could have acquitted you,” he said.

BIG, BIG hearing at 11am.

Sentencing for a high-level Jan 6 defendant. Scott Fairlamb pleaded guilty to assaulting police. Does judge go higher — or lower — than the 44 months recommended by prosecutors?

(Video from court exhibit) pic.twitter.com/Whas87cvco

— Scott MacFarlane (@MacFarlaneNews) November 10, 2021

“I truly regret my actions that day,” Fairlamb told the judge. “I have nothing but remorse.” Still, that hasn’t stopped him from raising more than $30,000 in an online fundraiser since his arrest.

Sen. Joe Manchin’s efforts to winnow down key parts of Joe Biden’s agenda appear to have earned him clout with a like-minded constituency: Republican billionaires.

In a Wednesday morning interview with CNBC, Home Depot co-founder Ken Langone said that he plans to raise money for the West Virginia Democrat’s 2024 reelection campaign.

“I’m going to have one of the biggest fundraisers I’ve ever had for him,” Langone told CNBC. “He’s special. He’s precious. He’s a great American.”

Langone is one of the GOP’s most prominent rainmakers, famous for pouring money into Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, he has also contributed to some Democrats in the past, including former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (N.Y.).

Manchin’s campaign and Senate office did not respond to requests for comment.

Manchin has also received public praise from Nelson Peltz, a billionaire investor, who previously hosted fundraisers for Donald Trump in his Florida home. In an October interview, Peltz told CNBC that he speaks with Manchin every week and offers him words of encouragement.

Langone’s announcement comes as Manchin and Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D) work to reduce the scale and scope of Biden’s $1.8 trillion social spending plan. Manchin has specifically opposed programs designed to shift American businesses from fossil fuels to clean energy, while owning millions of dollars in coal industry stock. He has also criticized a Democratic plan to tax billionaires as divisive and has opposed raising the corporate tax above 25 percent.

Sinema has herself received an influx of cash from GOP megadonors. Fundraising reports filed in October showed that big-name Republican donors, including billionaire businessmen and private equity executives, had contributed thousands of dollars to her campaign.

The congressional committee investigating the January 6 riot at the US Capitol appears to be zeroing in on Donald Trump’s inner circle. On Tuesday afternoon, the committee handed down fresh subpoenas to 10 former Trump administration officials, including press secretary Kayleigh McEnany and Trump senior adviser Stephen Miller. 

Both McEnany and Miller vocally spread the big lie that massive voter fraud swung the election to Joe Biden. From the White House briefing room, McEnany made unsubstantiated claims about mail-in voting and said that Trump’s campaign was pursuing “very real claims” of voter fraud. According to the committee, Miller participated in efforts to encourage the appointment of alternate slates of pro-Trump electors in states that Biden won. 

Miller, McEnany, and the eight other subpoena recipients will have until November 23 to turn over documents to the committee. They will also have to submit to depositions scheduled for December. 

“We need to know precisely what role the former President and his aides played in efforts to stop the counting of the electoral votes and if they were in touch with anyone outside the White House attempting to overturn the outcome of the election,” committee chair Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) said in a statement. “We believe the witnesses subpoenaed today have relevant information.”

The January 6 committee appears to be steadily working its way up the chain to senior Trump administration leadership. Only a day before the new subpoenas were issued, the committee subpoenaed six former Trump officials and associates, including national security adviser Michael Flynn and conservative lawyer John Eastman, who outlined a legally dubious, six-point plan describing how Vice President Mike Pence could supposedly throw out electors from states Biden won. 

In October, the House of Representatives voted to hold former Trump adviser Steve Bannon in contempt for spurning a subpoena from the select committee. The Justice Department has yet to indicate whether it will prosecute Bannon for his refusal. 

Two weeks ago, New York City taxi drivers and their supporters launched a hunger strike. Their goal was to pressure Mayor Bill de Blasio and the city to guarantee the loans they took out to purchase medallions required to operate Yellow cabs.

On Wednesday, they achieved a near total victory.

Big news: My office, @NYTWA, & @NYCMayor reached a deal that includes city backstop to ensure DESPERATELY needed debt relief for our taxi workers

This is a real victory—Thank you to the brave hunger strikers and extraordinary movement of NYers for coming together for our cabbies

— Chuck Schumer (@SenSchumer) November 3, 2021

In a course reversal, de Blasio has agreed to have the city serve as a backstop for the debt past administrations loaded onto drivers. That will allow the cabbies, many of whom still owe more than $500,000, to reduce their debts to $170,000 at most. Their loan payments will also be capped at about $1,100 per month. So far, the agreement covers drivers who owe money to Marblegate, which became the largest holder of medallion loans after the bubble burst.

Our taxi workers are the backbone of our city and we refuse to leave them behind. I’m proud to have worked with the @NYTWA, @SenSchumer and Marblegate to come to this agreement.
 
To our drivers: congratulations on a well-earned victory. https://t.co/07DckFv9e2

— Mayor Bill de Blasio (@NYCMayor) November 3, 2021

As I wrote last month at the start of the strike:

A Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times investigation established in 2019 [that] lenders, medallion brokers, and city officials spent years taking advantage of a scheme to inflate the prices of the taxi medallions that let New York City drivers operate cabs. The victims were the mostly immigrant cab drivers now left with hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt. There have been three suicides by owner-drivers in recent years.

In September, de Blasio tried to make up for city officials’ predatory behavior by unveiling a debt relief plan. Members of the New York Taxi Workers Alliance—the 21,000-person organization that led the hunger strike—deemed the proposal, which could still have left many drivers hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, woefully inadequate. They proposed a new plan that capped driver debt at $175,000 by having the city guarantee their loans.

After a month of protests outside City Hall failed to get a response from de Blasio, drivers, local elected officials, and other supporters, launched a hunger strike on October 20. A few minutes after he stopped eating, Richard Chow—a 63-year-old driver whose brother Kenny had died by suicide in 2018 after buying a medallion for more than $700,000—told me he wasn’t sure how long he would last. “This is our last moment to fight,” he said. “I’m risking my life so that Mr. de Blasio can save the lives of thousands of medallion owner and families.”

During visits to the protest site, I watched his condition deteriorate as he relied on coconut water and Gatorade for energy. By Monday, Chow, who still owed about $400,000 on his medallion, was using a wheelchair. Two days later, after Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called in from Washington, DC, to congratulate the hunger strikers, he ate a plain avocado. It was his first solid food in more than two weeks.

On the unlikely chance that you missed it at the end of last week, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg released a 77-minute video during the company’s annual conference about virtual reality that previewed a shift for the social media giant: a new focus on the “metaverse.”

Speaking in front of a sleek background peppered with just the right ratio of wood accoutrements and, to the delight of the internet, a single bottle of barbecue sauce, he announced that Facebook would be renaming its holding company “Meta” to match its new focus on virtual and augmented reality. The rebranding comes just as Facebook is facing a series of reputational crises, from an ex-employee whistleblower to federal government efforts to break up the company.  

I have…a lot of thoughts about this metaverse pivot, and they mirror a lot of what’s been said in the tech and business press already: that this may be a lot less about building the all-encompassing virtual world that Zuckerberg is pitching, and a lot more about rolling out a shiny distraction from all the controversy swirling around the company.

But one question I’m still sitting with days later is: What exactly is it that led Zuckerberg and his fellow executives to think that the way to renew enthusiasm for their beleaguered company is to give people *more* virtual interaction?

At one point in his video, Zuckerberg demonstrates his company’s vision by preparing to attend a work get-together in the metaverse. He pulls up an avatar of himself, clicks it through a series of different tech bro outfits (“Just gotta find something to wear!” he says cheerily to a hovering screen), and then enters the “meeting” where his colleagues are in their virtual forms, floating, in a room that resembles the command center of a spaceship. One of them is dressed, I gathered, as some sort of giant, red robotic bug.

Is this what most people want? The ability to attend virtual meetings as avatars drifting through a pretend corporate Death Star?

Of course not. But Facebook executives are not “most people.” Unlike many of their nearly 3 billion users, they exist in some of the most vaunted ranks of the professional managerial class. They’re among the lucky few who have spent the pandemic in gilded lifeboats, working from plush home offices, riding their Pelotons, and padding out their already ample savings. This metaverse pivot reflects their unfamiliarity with the struggles faced by most people as the last 19 months of a deadly pandemic have upended millions of jobs, homes, and bank accounts. 

The wealthy-professional blinders here are so glaring that I’m not sure where to start. There’s also the premise that lots of people have the disposable income to invest in the tools necessary to access the metaverse: The Oculus headset, for instance, currently retails for between $300 and $400—while nearly half of Americans would have trouble covering a $400 emergency expense. Facebook, it should be noted, spent $2 billion to purchase Oculus in 2014, and has also deployed nearly 20 percent of its global workforce to work on augmented and virtual reality products—all while contending with the reality that the customer base for this sort of gaming is quite small: VR gaming makes up just 0.4 percent of spending on gaming, in part because it’s just too expensive.

After nearly two years of pandemic life mixed with wide frustration toward Facebook as a breeding ground for conspiracy theories about the very science that would help us get out of the pandemic faster, it’s telling that the tech titans behind the company have opted to do their reputational rehab by going all in on a virtual play world that no one really asked for, ignoring the real world in service of building up a fictional one where it’s a lot easier to gloss over big problems—and Facebook’s role in exacerbating many of them.

The Supreme Court heard oral arguments today challenging and defending Texas’ new abortion law through a pair of cases—Whole Woman’s Health v. Jackson and United States v. Texas. Both were fairly technical in nature: The first took on the standing of the state’s six-week abortion ban, which also threatens anyone who “aids or abets” an abortion with a civil lawsuit that could literally be filed by any private citizen. The second addressed the Department of Justice’s ability to intervene when a state passes a law that infringes on its residents’ constitutional rights. As a result, listening to today’s arguments, you could easily forget what is actually at stake: The thousands of people who have already suffered the gargantuan consequences of the law over the two months it’s been in effect—a number that grows each and every day this law continues to stand.

As I wrote ahead of the arguments:

It’s easy for outsiders to lose sight of the issue at hand in all the legal hubbub, but the fact is that this is a law that is causing very real harm to pregnant Texans, who are now being forced to seek care out of state or on the internet. I have spent the past couple months reporting out of reproductive health clinics for a book project I’m working on, and I’ve seen Texans seeking care in Alabama, Kansas, and Tennessee. The one that sticks with me was a young woman who came to Huntsville, Ala. after traveling to Jackson, Miss., where she was told she was barely over that clinic’s gestational limit. She had been traveling for almost a week and was exhausted. She told me it was only the second time in her life that she had ever left Texas. 

Zaena Zamora, executive director of the Frontera Fund, a nonprofit that works to help pregnant people in deep southern Texas to get abortion care, was unsurprised by this anecdote. “The day after SB 8 went into effect, we had a caller who had to travel 15 hours overnight [by car] to Wichita, Kansas—she was seven weeks pregnant,” Zamora says. She is seeing unprecedented demand for help with travel and logistics. She told me that the group spent more on travel support just in the month of October than it did in the entire year of 2020.  

It’s not surprising that the court’s focus today was procedural rather than personal, but it is nonetheless frustrating to consider how far removed the people who are affected remain from the legal process. In all the procedural quibbling, the word “abortion” was only said a handful of times, and very little was said about the way the law creates multiple hurdles to abortion care, and, for some, impedes abortion access altogether and forces the pregnant person to carry to term—an outcome that has documented negative socioeconomic, mental, and physical consequences.

 Nearly as frustrating were the gendered dynamics of the courtroom. The sole female lawyer, Elizabeth Prelogar, who is the newly inducted US solicitor general, was repeatedly interrupted and patronized by male justices, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch in particular, while the men of the defense were given noticeably more room to make their case. To be sure, as columnist and legal expert Chris Geidner pointed out on Twitter, the defense approached the judges with arrogance that “reflects both their constituency and the current trajectory of the law,” he wrote. “They probably went too far, for today, but it was a sign of the direction in which they think they can go.” This is not a fight that will be won easily, or through a ruling that will resolve the constitutionality of the ban in a straightforward way. 

It is unclear when the court will issue rulings in either case, but given the stakes, it’s a reasonable assumption that the decisions will come sooner rather than later. Even if they come soon, though, in just a few weeks the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on another abortion-centered case, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which legal minds are predicting will beget a grim outcome for abortion rights. See you back here in a month, I guess. 

SB8 undercuts the power of the courts and undermines the Court's popularity. Siding against TX might give the Court some badly needed political cover for whatever is to come in Dobbs. https://t.co/QRxWh77mvs

— Mary Ziegler (@maryrziegler) November 1, 2021

Speaker Nancy Pelosi said on Sunday that Democrats are close to reaching a deal on President Joe Biden’s social spending bill and will lock it down by the end of next week. Pelosi told CNN’s Jake Tapper that Democrats have “90 percent of the bill agreed to and written, we just have some of the last decisions to be made.”

Tapper asked if there would be a deal by the time President Biden leaves for Europe Thursday or Friday, and Pelosi said, “I think we’re pretty much there now.”

“You think you have a deal now?” Tapper asked. “We’re almost there,” Pelosi replied. 

Speaker Nancy Pelosi says Democrats are "almost there" on an agreement on a social safety net bill which would also allow the bipartisan infrastructure bill to move forward.

"I think we pretty much have a deal now," she tells @jaketapper. "…I think we're pretty much there now." pic.twitter.com/i5OG4SzAGN

— State of the Union (@CNNSotu) October 24, 2021

The bill started out as a $3.5 trillion package that included family leave, child care, Medicare expansion, climate action, and free community college. Democratic Sens. Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin have opposed the bill, which is now down to about $2 trillion. 

Pelosi acknowledged that Democrats couldn’t agree on the bill as it was first proposed, so what’s on the table now is “less than what we had projected to begin with but it is still bigger than anything we have ever done in terms of addressing the needs of America’s working families.”  

Scientists in Cape Town, South Africa, are “assembling and calibrating the equipment needed to reverse engineer a coronavirus vaccine that has yet to reach South Africa and most of the world’s poorest people,” the Associated Press reported Sunday. 

Last weekend, the New York Times reported that Moderna was profiting by sending most of its vaccines to wealthy countries and that “some poorer countries are paying more and waiting longer for the company’s vaccine than the wealthy—if they have access at all”— something my colleague Edwin Rios called “shameful and dangerous.” 

Earlier this year, Moderna said it would expand its vaccine distribution to poor countries. But as we get closer to the end of 2021, most poor countries still don’t have access to Moderna’s shot, all while the a Massachusetts-based company is expected to make around $20 billion in revenue this year. 

The move to reverse engineer the Moderna vaccine has backing from the World Health Organization, which coordinates vaccine research, training and production in South Africa, the AP reported. It is a last-resort effort to get vaccines to poor countries in Africa. 

“We are doing this for Africa at this moment, and that drives us,” said Emile Hendricks, a 22-year-old biotechnologist for Afrigen Biologics and Vaccines, the company trying to reproduce the Moderna shot. “We can no longer rely on these big superpowers to come in and save us.”

Some experts see reverse engineering—recreating vaccines from fragments of publicly available information—as one of the few remaining ways to redress the power imbalances of the pandemic. Only 0.7% of vaccines have gone to low-income countries so far, while nearly half have gone to wealthy countries, according to an analysis by the People’s Vaccine Alliance.

Details around potential conflict with intellectual property are still “murky” in part because the WHO has never directly taken part in reverse engineering a novel vaccine. But WHO officials said the urgency of the pandemic calls for it. 

The team in South Africa is hoping to have a version of the Moderna vaccine tested within a year, and in production for commercial distribution soon after. 

Over the weekend, the New York Times reported that Moderna, the Massachusetts-based pharmaceutical company that is producing the most effective COVID vaccine, had shipped almost all its doses to rich countries—more than any other pharmaceutical company with a vaccine on the market. Citing data company Airfinity, the Times reported that:

About one million doses of Moderna’s vaccine have gone to countries that the World Bank classifies as low income. By contrast, 8.4 million Pfizer doses and about 25 million single-shot Johnson & Johnson doses have gone to those countries.

Of the handful of middle-income countries that have reached deals to buy Moderna’s shots, most have not yet received any doses, and at least three have had to pay more than the United States or European Union did, according to government officials in those countries.

Moderna’s chief executive Stéphane Bancel told the Times that the situation was out of the company’s control, noting that the company sought help from governments to help pay to expand its production capacity. He added that “it is sad” that the vaccine didn’t reach poorer countries. Meanwhile, the Times reports Moderna “expects its vaccine to generate at least $20 billion in revenue this year, which would make it one of the most lucrative medical products in history.”

At one point in May, Moderna offered the African Union doses for just $10 a pop—significantly less than it charged the US and European countries—but they wouldn’t be available until 2022. African Union officials told the Times that the proposal collapsed because of that significant delay. That same month, Moderna committed to sending 34 million doses in 2021—and 466 million in 2022—to Covax, an international program meant to share vaccines with lower income countries. But a Covax spokesperson told the Times the program hasn’t received any of Moderna’s doses from the company (though it has distributed Moderna doses donated by the United States). 

The choices by Moderna, which disputed the Times‘ reporting that it sent just 900,000 doses to poor countries, speaks to the growing difficulties low-income countries face as they try to obtain life-saving vaccines. To some, like World Health Organization Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the pursuit of booster shots while poorer countries struggle to obtain doses reeks of “vaccine injustice.” And the organization’s Africa director, Matshidiso Moeti, slammed countries like the United States that distributed booster shots before they distributed more doses to poorer countries, calling it “a mockery of vaccine equity.”

Even as six billion doses of various vaccines have been distributed across the world, 56 countries, most of which were in Africa and the Middle East, failed to vaccinate at least 10 percent of their population, falling short of the WHO’s target by the end of September.

As my colleague Lil Kaslish reported in August, the continued unequal access to vaccines could prolong the pandemic, putting, well, everyone at risk:   

Administering boosters in the US while much of the world cannot access vaccines isn’t just ethically dubious. Experts say this could drag the pandemic on even longer, especially while Delta and other variants continue to travel. As long as vaccination rates are low in other parts of the world, more robust variants will continue to crop up. 

While all eyes are on Moderna currently, don’t forget it’s not alone in its behavior. This summer, the Times also revealed that Johnson & Johnson was producing its vaccines in South Africa, only to export them to wealthier countries. 

As kids across the country settle into the rhythm of outbreaks and school closures during the second pandemic school year, a staggering number of children are having to do so without their parents or caregivers. A study in the academic journal Pediatrics, published Friday, found that more than 140,000 children lost caregivers or parents to COVID-19 between April 2020 and June 2021. CDC epidemiologist Susan Hillis, a lead author of the study, told NPR that that number has risen to roughly 175,000 today. 

Making this more heartbreaking is the uneven way the affliction has been felt by Black, Latino, and indigenous children. Researchers in the Pediatrics study found that American Indian/Alaska Native children were 4.5 times more likely to lose a parent or caregiver to COVID compared to white children. Black children were nearly two and a half times more likely, while Hispanic children were twice as likely. “The highest burden of COVID-19-associated death of parents and caregivers occurred in Southern border states for Hispanic children, Southeastern states for Black children, and in states with tribal areas for American Indian/Alaska Native populations,” the authors wrote.

This reflects the cruel national reality that the pandemic has discriminated in whom it affects, resulting in disproportionate job loss, infections, and even death for people of color. This racist reality isn’t limited to adults. Rather, it is interconnected with how children suffer. Among the 4.9 million children under 19 years old who have contracted COVID over the last year and a half, children of color have been impacted the most. In mid-September, an analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation noted that Black and Latino children were not only more likely to contract COVID but also more likely to be hospitalized for it. Even though children rarely die of COVID, Black children alone were roughly 2.7 times more likely to die of COVID than white children. What’s more, Black and Latino children together account for more than 70 percent of those who contract MIS-C, a rare inflammatory disease associated with COVID that has infected just over 5,000 kids nationwide. And in addition to experiencing more illness, studies by McKinsey & Company and the NWEA, a nonprofit that conducts academic assessments, have found deep learning losses for children of color during the pandemic.

But why do disparities exist among children? The social and economic barriers their parents face, they also face. And those barriers could not only determine whether children get infected and become hospitalized by the virus, they can also determine whether they have adequate access to the vaccines that would help protect them from future suffering. Children of color are also disproportionately afflicted with underlying health conditions that put them at greater risk for hospitalization once they contract COVID. Beyond that, CDC researchers have noted that Black and Latino adults are “disproportionately represented among essential workers unable to work from their homes,” raising the risk of exposure for children and other family members to contract the virus. “In addition, disparities in social determinants of health, such as crowded living conditions, food and housing insecurity, wealth and educational gaps, and racial discrimination, likely contribute to racial and ethnic disparities in COVID-19 and MIS-C incidence and outcomes,” government researchers wrote in a study last September.

All of this speaks to the systemically racist underpinnings of American society. In thinking about this new study, I’m reminded of something Michigan epidemiologist Debra Furr-Holden told me when I examined how her hometown of Flint managed to close disparities during the pandemic: 

Getting “upstream” of the disease itself, to the political-economic factors that enable its spread and amplify its effects, was hard work. Furr-Holden was under no illusions about why. “We’ve never been honest as a nation about how truly inequitable our society is—how the systems and structures are set up by their very design for some people to prosper and have better access and more opportunity than others. And there’s a cost to it,” Furr-Holden told me. “So many Black and brown people, so many rural communities, getting hit so hard by this pandemic has cost our nation millions if not billions of dollars. Inequity has cost us tremendously. All those Black and brown people that then were fighting for beds and ventilators and hospitals were the reason some of these nice middle-class and wealthy white folks weren’t able to get on those ventilators. Literally, inequity costs us all.”  

And it can’t be repeated enough: It costs children of color, and their futures, even more. 

After a long, very bad week for Facebook, the company sent one of its top executives, Nick Clegg, to make the rounds on the Sunday shows. Though, he didn’t make things better for the company. Notably, he couldn’t—or wouldn’t—even answer a simple but crucial question: Did Facebook amplify violent rhetoric ahead of the January 6th insurrection?

CNN's Dana Bash: "Did the algorithms that are in place amplify pro-insurrection voices ahead of Jan. 6? Yes or no?"

Facebook's Nick Clegg: "I can't give you a yes or no answer to the individual, personalized feeds that each person uses." pic.twitter.com/MwLUwiYkLI

— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona) October 10, 2021

Former Facebook product manager Frances Haugen recently revealed how the social media giant knew its algorithms could spread hate and misinformation, warning that Facebook chose “profit over safety.” She claimed that the company’s decision to dissolve its civic integrity unit and roll back protections prematurely contributed to the spread of hate and misinformation that undergirded the insurrection at the US Capitol.

But when CNN’s Dana Bash asked Clegg, who is Facebook’s vice president of global affairs, about Haugen’s claims, specifically about how the company’s algorithms boosted content ahead of January 6, he gave a roundabout non-answer. He said that if the company removed Facebook’s current algorithm, which amplifies posts with more “meaningful social interactions,” that would perpetuate “more, not less, hate speech, more, not less, misinformation.”

Bash then put him on the spot: “My question is specifically about January 6. Did the algorithms that are in place amplify pro-insurrection voices ahead of January 6th? Yes or no.” “I can’t give you a yes or no answer,” he finally conceded, before pivoting to argue that the responsibility for the insurrection was on “the people who broke the law.” 

Haugen, who has already testified before Congress, is set to go this Thursday before the House select committee investigating the Capitol insurrection. She has filed numerous complaints to the Securities and Exchanges Commission alleging that Facebook “misled investors and the public about its role perpetuating misinformation and violent extremism relating to the 2020 election and January 6th insurrection.” She has also called for more oversight of the social media giant, though, as my colleague Ali Breland recently argued, even her proposals fall short on the sort of structural overhaul Facebook needs.

A week ago, thousands of people turned out for Women’s March rallies across the country, galvanized by Texas’ recent six-week abortion ban and the very real fear that Roe v. Wade could soon be overturned, as challenges to the Texas law and another law in Mississippi wend their way to the Supreme Court and its 6-3 conservative majority. 

But while the battle over the Texas law rages, and people rightfully worry about a world in which abortion access is no longer protected, women in Mississippi are already living it.

In 2019, reporter Becca Andrews went to Mississippi to explore where Roe doesn’t reach, meeting a young woman on a 221-mile journey to get an abortion beyond state lines. The Mother Jones Podcast team thought revisiting Becca’s piece provided compelling context for just how high the stakes are for people needing abortions in Texas right now, and more broadly, for the consequential decision in the hands of the Supreme Court.

Listen to Becca’s 2019 story—currently being expanded into a book—on this week’s episode of the Mother Jones Podcast, produced in partnership with Audm:

As the end of pandemic relief for student debt looms, progressives are pushing the White House for clarity on its plans for cancelling some student debt.

The administration has delayed movement on student debt cancellation while waiting for the Education Department’s review of presidential authority to cancel debt, which has dragged on for more than six months. With the pandemic pause on student debt payments set to expire in January, a group of progressive House members, led by Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), made clear on Friday that they’re tired of waiting—and are demanding that the administration release the Education Department’s findings in the next two weeks.

“The resumption of payments on federally-held student loans weighs heavily on tens of millions of borrowers,” wrote 15 House members in a letter they will send to the White House on Friday, as reported by Politico. “The time has come to release the memo and deliver on your promise to cancel student debt. Doing so will benefit every citizen and support our communities. With a single signature, you can improve the economy, create new jobs, transform the lives of 45 million Americans, narrow the racial wealth gap, and maintain the trust of voters.”

In April, White House chief of staff Ron Klain told Axios that the administration would make a decision about the president’s authority to cancel debt within “the next few weeks”—they were simply waiting to receive the relevant memo. But there has been no public word about the contents of this memo, or about the decisions that would stem from it. In their letter, progressives argue that the executive branch is already using its legal authority to cancel debt to provide pandemic relief from student loans, which includes a pause on interest accrual.

“It would be an exercise in legal gymnastics to suggest that the President had the authority to cancel the interest on student debt on his first day, but lacks the authority to cancel the principal on student debt moving forward,” they write.

This move is the latest in an ongoing disagreement between progressives and Biden about student debt cancellation. On the campaign trail, Biden promised to cancel up to $10,000 in student debt for most individuals, but a group of congressional Democrats, led by long-time student debt foe Sen. Elizabeth Warren, have been pushing the administration to cancel $50,000 instead.

Alex Jones, the founder of Infowars, lost two defamation suits filed by family members of the victims of the Sandy Hook shooting after a judge ruled he failed to provide information required by the court.

Judge Maya Guerra Gamble of Travis county Texas’s civil district court criticized Jones for making “persistent discovery abuses” by failing to turn over documents in the case, making a default ruling against him, nothing that  “an escalating series of judicial admonishments, monetary penalties, and non-dispositive sanctions have all been ineffective at deterring the abuse.”

A lawyer for the parents of the murdered children, Mark D. Bankston, told the New York Times that the next step would be a jury trial on March 28 to determine damages that Jones must pay.

The latest rulings were handed down on Monday, but only became public on Thursday, and were first reported by the Huffington Post. The cases are just two of many against the Infowars proprietor that have been launched by parents of Sandy Hook victims who were frustrated by Jones’s willingness to push fantastic conspiracies about the shooting being a hoax. Jones has since recanted such claims, but before he did, the conspiracy prompted aggressive harassment campaigns against the parents.

Norm Pattis, a lawyer for Jones and Infowars, wrote in a statement that the ruling was “stunning” and a “blatant abuse of discretion.”

“It takes no account of the tens of thousands of documents produced by the defendants, the hours spent sitting for depositions and the various sworn statements filed in these cases,” Pattis argued. 

California voters have chosen to retain Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom in the state’s high-profile gubernatorial recall election, with early results giving the first-term governor a landslide 70–30 mandate to remain in office. That means the Democratic-leaning state, which last recalled a governor in 2003, will retain its mask and vaccine mandates, its minimum wage, and its wide access to abortion—all of which leading Republican candidate Larry Elder had promised to abolish on taking office.

Elder, a Republican talk radio host born in South Los Angeles, won a substantial lead among replacement candidates, drawing four times as many votes as his closest rival. He was the leading opposition candidate for much of this year—despite (or thanks in part to) a long track record of racist and sexist commentary, as I previously reported:

Women know less than men about political issues, economics and current events,” Elder wrote in a 2000 op-ed; in an April 2021 editorial, he argued that “George Floyd might be alive had former President Barack Obama not, for eight years, consistently played the anti-cop race card.” Elder’s former fiance recently accused him of brandishing a gun at her while high and demanding that she get a “Larry’s Girl” tattoo.

Though the recall petition, launched by retired police sergeant Orrin Heatlie in February 2020, started life as “the fringe project of anti-maskers, QAnon believers, and the state’s ever-shrinking hard right”—as I noted earlier this month—it garnered wide appeal as the pandemic raged on, eclipsing the threshold of 1.5 million signatures to trigger a recall for statewide office. It also generated millions in political contributions, attracted a clown car of 46 gubernatorial hopefuls, and cost the state close to $300 million to administer.

At the polls in Los Angeles on Tuesday evening, voters expressed widespread frustration—either that the recall was happening at all, or toward Newsom himself. “It’s a terrifying thought for my whole family that a Republican could take power in this way,” says Punam Bean, 39, in Glassell Park. At a South LA park, Christina L., a 31-year-old hospital pharmacist, told me the recall is “a waste of money” and believes that only once the pandemic was reaching a turning point for the better—when Newsom mandated vaccines in hospitals—”that’s when the Republicans decided the recall should happen.”

Eddie, a 33-year-old construction worker who asked to be identified by only his first name, disagrees. Though he voted for Newsom in 2018, he says he was fed up with the governor after the French Laundry incident and the closures of businesses which cost him his livelihood. “I’m sick of this elitist group of people. I don’t want Nancy Pelosi’s nephew or a manufactured candidate,” Eddie told me at the Glassell Park Recreation Center. He says he wants to see “a person of color as governor,” and planned to vote for Elder. 

gavin has to go back to the french laundry to celebrate his win

— Matthew Zeitlin (@MattZeitlin) September 15, 2021

The recall also became a focal point, briefly, of national politics. After earlier polling showed Newsom in peril, both President Biden and Vice President Harris traveled to California to show support for the embattled governor. The election of a Republican governor could have thrown control of the US Senate into uncertainty, as Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s expected retirement would give the state’s governor the opportunity to appoint a replacement.

Even before results came in, Republican recall supporters pushed a narrative that echoed 2020: The election was stolen. Donald Trump released a statement calling the recall “totally rigged”; on social media, false claims spread like wildfire. Recall supporters on Facebook fretted that the holes in their ballot envelopes would be used to sniff out their votes (the envelopes are designed to assist visually impaired voters in finding the signature line). Others offered stories about being given Sharpie markers at polling stations, apparent evidence that the election was a sham.

$276 million to lose in 12 minutes… incredible

— Carly Usdin (@carlytron) September 15, 2021

The fraud claims have become a rallying point for conservatives across the country, more than half of whom still believe the 2020 election was rigged against President Trump. Elder’s campaign helped lay the groundwork even before results were in: On Monday, his website launched an online form for users to submit affidavits of evidence of voter fraud. “We implore you…to join us in this fight,” the site reads—its URL is StopCAFraud.com—“by signing our petition demanding a special session of the California legislature to investigate and ameliorate the twisted results of this 2021 Recall Election of Governor Gavin Newsom.” The same day, Elder told NBC’s Jacob Soboroff that he wouldn’t commit to accepting the election results. Elder previously expressed interest in mounting a legal challenge to unfavorable results.

For now, California’s mask and vaccine mandates are secure. But the state in general, and the recall in particular, offer a glimpse at what New America fellow Lee Drutman says is “becoming the standard GOP playbook”: Don’t expect to win the popular vote? Discredit it.

When California announced in February that enough signatures were gathered to recall Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, I decided to look up the rules and regulations for such an election. The convoluted nature of the process (even though this is about recalling him, his name does not appear on the ballot?) intrigued me, and I was reminded immediately of BoJack Horseman, a cartoon for adults on Netflix. In case you might have missed the first three seasons, let me bring you up to speed. The anti-hero is an anthropomorphized depressed horse who stars in Horsin’ Around, an amalgamation of the family sitcoms that dominated the 1990s.

But season 4 has a special storyline. Mr. Peanutbutter—a loveable yellow labrador—has launched a recall effort against the state’s governor Woodcharles “Woodchuck” Coodchuck-Berkowitz, who is a well-educated groundhog. When Mr. Peanutbutter fails to reach the signature threshold, his human ex-wife, and campaign manager, Katrina, lobbies for a constitutional amendment that will allow Mr. Peanutbutter to challenge Gov. Coodchuck-Berkowitz to a ski race instead. (Could the show’s creators possibly be lampooning California’s recall process?) 

I may not be from California, but even from a distance of 3,000 miles, the way the state allows recall elections is baffling. For starters, the petition to recall a statewide elected official, like, say, Gov. Newsom, only has to have 12 percent of the total number of votes most recently cast for the office. For Newsom’s recall, petitioners needed approximately 1.49 million signatures. They got 1.71 million. Because there’s no limit to how many people can run, there are more than 40 names on the ballot, including such bold-face names as right-wing radio host Larry Elder, former Olympian and former Kardashian Caitlyn Jenner, and Kevin Praffath landlord-turned-YouTube influencer.

Voters must respond to two questions on the ballot. Should Gov. Newsom be recalled, and if you voted yes, who should replace him?  In the very crowded field, Elder has approximately 25 percent support but is leading the pack. But while Mr. Peanutbutter was just a friendly buffoon who just wanted to be adored, Elder believes in abolishing the minimum wage, has been accused of sexual harassment, and is skeptical of climate change. Given all this, somehow the recall election in a show where animals and humans can fall in love and get married doesn’t seem like it requires such an imaginative leap. 

Does Elder actually have a chance of winning? Though California is a solidly blue state in federal elections, the ridiculously complicated recall process means that should enough voters vote to recall Newsom, and enough voters choose Elder as his replacement, the idiosyncratic talk show host could actually become governor. It’s happened before. In 2003, Arnold Schwarzenegger won a recall election against then-governor Gray Davis with only 48.6 percent of the vote. 

Let’s suppose Elder assumes the governorship. His first action likely would be to rescind COVID mandates and restrictions. Should 88-year old Sen. Dianne Feinstein somehow succumb to age or infirmity when he is in office, he would pick this Democratic senator’s replacement, tipping the balance of the US Senate, as my colleague Lil Kalish details here. Democrats in California have a supermajority in the legislature, so it’d be hard for Elder to pass much, if any, legislation.

Let’s return to the more rational BoJack universe, where Coodchuck-Berkowitz finally wins the election and all is well. But not before a series of calamities ensue including someone else accidentally winning the ski race, Mr. Peanutbutter causing an earthquake by fracking underneath his own house, celebrity cannibalism, and a scandal over a candidate’s hatred of avocado. In real life, polls are pointing towards a Newsom victory—but even then, there will be no happy ending, as there was in BoJack. 

Elder has already begun making noise about voter fraud, a variation on the theme of the Republican’s cherished Big Lie that resulted in the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol. The Republican Party will continue to undermine democracy by framing his loss as more evidence that the only way a right-wing bullshitter could lose an election is if it’s stolen from him. No matter the outcome, democracy will grow even more fragile. Wouldn’t an interspecies ski race just make much more sense? 

Image credits: Netflix; K.C. Alfred/San Diego Union-Tribune/Zuma; Brian Cahn/Zuma