Tangle - The Republican fight for Speaker of the House.

Episode Date: December 20, 2022

In the 2022 midterms, Republicans won the House of Representatives 222-213, grabbing the same number of seats Democrats currently hold in Congress. Because they will be in the majority, they need to elect a House Speaker, but the current favorite — Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) — does not appear to have the necessary votes. Today, we explore what both sides are saying about who the next House Speaker should be.Today’s clickables: Quick Hits (0:54), Today’s Story (2:56), Right’s Take (6:42), Left’s Take (11:31), Isaac’s Take (16:17), Your Questions Answered (22:06), Under the Radar (24:30), Numbers (25:19), Have A Nice Day (26:17)Today’s links:The return of earmarks (pork).FBI warns of explosion of "sextortion" schemes targeting kids and teensA stranger on a plane gave two girls fleeing civil war $100. Decades later, they reunited.You can read today's podcast here.You can subscribe to Tangle by clicking here or drop something in our tip jar by clicking here.Our podcast is written by Isaac Saul. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75. Today’s episode was edited by Zosha Warpeha.Our newsletter is edited by Bailey Saul, Sean Brady, Ari Weitzman, and produced in conjunction with Tangle’s social media manager Magdalena Bokowa, who also created our logo.--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/tanglenews/message Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Based on Charles Yu's award-winning book, Interior Chinatown follows the story of Willis Wu, a background character trapped in a police procedural who dreams about a world beyond Chinatown. When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. The flu remains a serious disease. Last season, over 102,000 influenza cases have been reported across Canada, which is Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. yourself from the flu. It's the first cell-based flu vaccine authorized in Canada for ages six months and older, and it may be available for free in your province. Side effects and allergic reactions can occur, and 100% protection is not guaranteed. Learn more at flucellvax.ca.

From executive producer Isaac Saul, this is Tangle. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, and welcome to the Tangle podcast, the place we get views from across the political spectrum. Some independent thinking without all that hysterical nonsense you find everywhere else. I'm your host, Isaac Saul, and on today's episode, we're going to be talking about the House Speaker Showdown and Kevin McCarthy and Republicans trying to pick a House Speaker for the next session of Congress. Before we jump in, though, as always, we'll start off with some quick hits.

First up, the House January 6th Committee unanimously voted to recommend former President Trump for four criminal charges, defrauding the government, conspiracy to make a false statement, aiding in an insurrection and obstruction of an official proceeding. The referrals are not binding but act as a recommendation to the Justice Department. Number two, the committee also referred House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and Representatives Jim Jordan, the Republican from Ohio, Scott Perry, the Republican from Pennsylvania, and Andy Biggs, the Republican from Arizona, to the Ethics Committee for refusing to comply with subpoenas. Number three, the Supreme Court temporarily blocked a lower court ruling that would have ended Title 42, effectively extending the policy that bars asylum applicants

from entering the U.S. to protect the American population from COVID-19. Number four, at least six people are dead, including a 73-year-old gunman after a mass shooting in Toronto, Canada. Number five, congressional appropriators filed a $1.7 trillion omnibus spending bill that will fund the government for next year, deliver supplemental aid to Ukraine, increase natural disaster relief funding, ban TikTok on government devices, and rewrite the Electoral Count Act, among many other provisions. Well, House GOP Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy has announced his bid for Speaker of the House,

with Republicans expected to retake control of the chamber. Republicans have nominated Congressman Kevin McCarthy, the current minority leader, as their candidate for Speaker of the lower chamber. An election where there's no polling, there's only one frontrunner, but where it all could come unglued for that frontrunner if just a handful of votes go the other way. This, in a nutshell, is House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy's existence right now. He wants to be, desperately, the next House Speaker in the upcoming new Republican-controlled House, but because his new majority is so slim, as you know, he's got to keep as many hardliners as possible from voting no.

In the 2022 midterms, Republicans won the House of Representatives 222 to 213, grabbing the same number of seats Democrats currently hold in Congress. Because they will be in the majority, they need to select a House Speaker. But the current favorite, Representative Kevin McCarthy, the Republican from California, does not appear to have the necessary votes. A quick reminder, on January 3rd, when the new Congress assembles, one of its first actions will be to vote on a new Speaker of the House. This comes before newly elected members of Congress are sworn into office. Republicans have already nominated McCarthy by a 188-31 vote, and Democrats,

after Nancy Pelosi stepped down, have nominated Representative Hakeem Jeffries, the Democrat from New York. If neither lawmaker wins a majority, the voting will continue until one does, what's known in Congress as a floor fight, something that has only happened 14 times in our history. The last floor fight was exactly 100 years ago in the 1923 Congress. During this voting, members can horse trade and deal among themselves in order to jockey for votes. Since Republicans hold the majority, there is a near guarantee the Speaker will end up being a Republican. However, McCarthy needs a majority of seated members to become Speaker, which in this case should be 218 votes. With 222

seats in the House, that means he can only afford to lose four members. Right now, five Republicans, Representative Andy Biggs, Representative Bob Good, Representative Matt Gaetz, Representative Ralph Norman, and Representative Matthew Rosendale have all said they would vote no on McCarthy for Speaker. Several other House Republicans have also not committed to voting yes. That puts him in serious danger of not being elected. Former President Donald Trump has also chimed in, calling on his supporters to back off their opposition of McCarthy and support his bid for Speaker. McCarthy's primary competition is Biggs, who ran against him in the caucus vote but lost by a large margin.

It's worth noting here that McCarthy may not need exactly 218 votes. Only a majority has to vote for him, so if enough members skip the vote or abstain by voting present, he could end up winning without a 218-vote majority, as Nancy Pelosi did in 2021 and John Boehner did in 2015, each with only 216 votes. Most of the opposition to McCarthy is coming from the Freedom Caucus, a group of more conservative lawmakers who are making rule-change demands of McCarthy in order to win their support. One of those rule changes includes the power to allow any member to call a no-confidence vote to remove the Speaker at any time, which they say will bring accountability. McCarthy and his allies, meanwhile, argue it will create a chaotic government.

Today, we're going to take a look at some with what the right is saying. Most conservatives seem to support McCarthy, but there is broad frustration with Republican leadership's recent lack of results. Some argue he has earned the right to be Speaker and led the House well. Others argue the Republican base is hungry for a change at the top, and McCarthy should be one of those changes. In Newsweek, Newt Gingrich said McCarthy has earned the role. Remember that when members were asked on November 15th to choose between McCarthy and Representative Andy Biggs, the House Republican Conference voted 188 to 31 for McCarthy. That's an 85% majority. In most elections, that's considered decisive, Gingrich said. No one has done more than McCarthy to earn the speakership. He has campaigned more

to create a Republican majority than anyone since Boehner in 2010. Set aside the $500 million McCarthy and his allies raised during the 2022 campaign cycle, McCarthy has been the most aggressive recruiter in the party's history. He has found and pulled in a historic number of new members and significantly brought in the GOP. In the 2020 cycle, the House GOP had 228 female candidates. By the 2022 cycle, this had grown to more than 250 female candidates, as well as more than 220 minority candidates and more than 120 veterans. McCarthy's commitment to a broader, more diverse, and open GOP is being translated into reality, Gingrich wrote. McCarthy united Republicans against the Democrats' impeachment efforts and January 6th show trials, putting Jim Jordan on the Intelligence Committee to fight them directly.

Members of the military are no longer under Joe Biden's draconian vaccine mandates. Thanks to McCarthy, Representatives Adam Schiff, Eric Swalwell, and Ilhan Omar will not be serving on major committees after their repeated lies to the American people. He's made clear that he's going to stop runaway spending, and he's willing to use the debt ceiling to do so. that he's going to stop runaway spending and he's willing to use the debt ceiling to do so. In American Greatness, Representative Andy Biggs wrote about why he is opposing McCarthy and why he could be a good alternative. For conservatives, the Republicans are culpable for failing to put the brakes on the left. Many of my constituents justifiably turn their ire on Republicans. They

want us to fight, Biggs said. I urge current Republican House leaders to use must-pass legislation as leverage to change bad policies. For instance, the National Defense Authorization Act is a bill that gives Republicans tremendous leverage because most Democrats don't want to support our troops, so the bill needs Republicans' support to pass. We could have leveraged it to exclude many provisions that advance wokeism, such as the establishment of a diversity, equity, and inclusion office. We could have demanded that military personnel dismissed from service solely for refusing the COVID vaccine be reinstated. We didn't do any of that. That was a missed opportunity. There will be more opportunities in the next term of Congress.

We need a leader who will open up the process to members of Congress by moving congressional authority away from the leadership and toward the members, Biggs said. Why not eliminate massive multi-subject bills? We should be handling more streamlined single-subject bills. And we should make sure every member has at least 72 hours to read every bill before it comes to the floor. Robust debate should be encouraged, as well as the opportunity for members to offer amendments on legislation. The Republicans in Congress have decided it's better to cling to the status quo than to make change. The Wall Street Journal editorial board expressed its opposition to the opposition. What's bizarre is that the dissenters don't have major policy differences

with Mr. McCarthy or a plausible alternative candidate for Speaker. Mr. Biggs has no chance. He and his rump group also don't seem to have any constructive reason to oppose Mr. McCarthy beyond a desire to grab the media spotlight or blow everything up, the board said. Their main demand is so self-defeating it could have come from Democratic Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The dissenters want Mr. McCarthy to concede that any member could call the chair vacant and insist on a vote to replace the sitting Speaker. In order to get votes to become Speaker, Mr. McCarthy is supposed to weaken himself so much that he wouldn't be able to govern as Speaker.

Yet a narrow GOP majority of only 222 to 213 requires a leader who can enforce party discipline, it added. That's how Nancy Pelosi has been able to govern with the mirror image majority in the last two years. Too many House Republicans are too dimwitted to understand the uses of power and how to wield it. They'd rather rage against the machine to no useful effect. Meanwhile, across the Capitol, Senate Republicans are doing Mr. McCarthy no favors by joining Democrats to pass a giant omnibus spending bill for fiscal year 2023. by joining Democrats to pass a giant omnibus spending bill for fiscal year 2023. Most House Republicans prefer a continuing resolution to fund the government only into next year when Republicans will have more leverage as the House majority.

All right, that is it for what the right is saying, which brings us to what the left is saying. Many on the left worry what it means for the future if McCarthy acquiesces to the right flank of the House. Some call out the coddling of extremists as self-defeating. Others say McCarthy's problems are only just beginning and will get much worse once he has the job. In MSNBC, Michael A. Cohen said McCarthy is in the unenviable position of having to negotiate with the extremists. He's threatened to impeach Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas and vowed to throw Democratic Representatives Eric Swalwell, Ilhan Omar, and Adam Schiff off their congressional committees to win over Representative Marjorie

Taylor Greene. He's also pledged to restore Greene's committee assignments. McCarthy has also promised to lift all COVID restrictions in the House, end proxy voting, and even remove the metal detectors installed off the House floor after January 6, Cohen said. And while Senate Republicans were happy to criticize Trump's recent meeting with a pair of anti-Semitic cretins, McCarthy refused to do so, no doubt in part because most of his members reside in districts where Trump remains popular. The coddling of Republican extremists will not end with one vote. It will continue for as long as McCarthy is speaker, he said. On practically every issue, he will have to navigate the same choppy waters. This will be bad for McCarthy, but it will

be worse for the country, because when McCarthy is held hostage by GOP extremists, that means the House is held hostage by GOP extremists, which means all of Congress will be held hostage, which in turn means, well, you get the idea. And even if Senate Democrats with a possible one-seat majority are able to find common ground, it won't matter much because a little of the legislation they pass will go anywhere in the House. In Slate, David Farris said Kevin McCarthy is about to enter political hell. Outgoing Speaker Nancy Pelosi had two things that her Republican counterpart will not. A caucus full of mostly sane team players and a policy agenda less radioactive than graphite from an exploded nuclear reactor, Farris said. The Freedom Caucus's demands won't end with idle chatter.

Its members will likely demand hearings and then impeachment proceedings based on Hunter Biden's purported laptop material, an issue Republicans have now spent many years trying to get a justifiably indifferent general public to care about with zero success. Because there are likely at least four Republicans in the House who understand that it's a terrible idea to impeach the president over an inscrutable decade-old scandal that no one even pretends involved the crime, they won't have the votes to do it anyway. Making Obama-era material from the president's son's computer the centerpiece of the House GOP's agenda would be bad enough if that were all they were promising to do. But the only other thing they seem eager to talk about is gutting Social

Security and Medicare, Farah said. Republicans seem incapable of resisting the urge to publicly threaten Social Security any time they reach the warning track of power. This is especially puzzling since they will utterly lack the power to gut the program over the next two years. They haven't come close to doing it even when they've held Congress and the presidency this century, and they are surely aware that cutting or privatizing Social Security polls only marginally better than police abolition. Based on Charles Yu's award-winning book, Interior Chinatown follows the story of Willis Wu,

a background character trapped in a police procedural who dreams about a world beyond Chinatown. When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. The flu remains a serious disease. Last season, over 102,000 influenza cases have been reported across Canada, which is nearly double the historic average of 52,000 cases. What can you do this flu season? Talk to your pharmacist or doctor about getting a flu shot.

Consider FluCellVax Quad and help protect yourself from the flu. It's the first cell-based flu vaccine authorized in Canada for ages 6 months and older, and it may be available for free in your province. Side effects and allergic reactions can occur, and 100% protection is not guaranteed. Learn more at FluCcellvax.ca. In The New Republic, Alex Shepard asks why McCarthy would even want this job. How is McCarthy equipped for the road ahead? He is not a well-known ideologue or policy wonk like his Republican predecessor, Paul Ryan.

Nor is he a master of arm-twisting and political arts, both dark and light, like his Democratic predecessor Nancy Pelosi, Shepard wrote. What the agitated right-flank wants goes beyond extortion. They would essentially disempower McCarthy almost completely and hand control over to the House's most extreme members. Their demands include the right for any member to force a vote on removing the Speaker, for members to be given at least 72 hours between the release of a final bill's text and a vote on the floor, an increase of the number of Freedom Caucus members on the House Rules Committee, and, naturally, a commitment not to raise the debt ceiling without an agreement to balance the budget in the next decade, something that would inevitably

result in steep cuts to federal programs like Social Security and Medicare. The result of all of this may well spell long-term political disaster for Republicans as they further alienate themselves from normie America, Shepard wrote. Instead of making the case that they can govern, they will spend the next two years launching increasingly incoherent investigations into whatever boutique outrage or spectral threat is leading Tucker Carlson's show on any given day and consistently threatening to gut some of the country's most popular programs. This will all be quite bad for both McCarthy's party and the country, but he knows better than to say so, lest his ambitious

plan to become speaker, and thus an indispensable man at last, fails to come to fruition. All right, that is it for what the right and the left are saying, which brings us to my take. I'll just start by saying plainly that it should be McCarthy's job. I don't see the dispute here in real terms. He won the caucus vote in a landslide, and he's far and away the most qualified person for the job. Not only has he led the party the last few years, he's led it fairly well from a conservative perspective. House Republicans run the gamut, from Representative Liz Cheney to Representative Lauren Boebert,

and are not an easy group to wrangle. Aside from Cheney, who has basically gone all in on anti-Trumpism, McCarthy has kept his caucus unified in big moments while recruiting new candidates and running a pretty well-operated election machine during the midterms. And most importantly, there are no real alternatives. Representative Andy Biggs is a blunt force instrument the Freedom Caucus is using to clog up this process, but very few Republicans in the House really think he should have the job. They just want to protest McCarthy and get some rule changes. The vast majority of Republicans I'd wager don't even know who Biggs is, so I certainly don't think his candidacy is representative of the base's will. All that being said, I do think

the requests from the Freedom Caucus should be discussed with more objectivity and, in my opinion, more favorability. One of the requests, the restoration of any member's ability to bring up a vote to remove McCarthy, should be ignored. It's an arcane rule that would make the House entirely dysfunctional, and McCarthy is right to reject it. Because of this request, most of the commentators above frame the entirety of the demands as some kind of ransom note, the political equivalent of hostage taking. I disagree. In a moment, you're going to hear the requests in fairly plain language laid out by Emily Brooks and The Hill, and then I'm going to give you some of my brief commentary next to them. First, they want to require at least 72 hours from the release of

a final bill text before it gets a vote on the House floor. I'd vote for this rule change. Members of Congress are now regularly left out of the legislative process because of leadership, and this would be a small step toward remedying that. Additionally, it would force bills to be completed well ahead of deadlines rather than, say, just hours before. The next request is to bar House GOP leadership and leadership-affiliated PACs from getting involved in the primaries. The McCarthy-aligned Congressional Leadership Fund was active in many House primaries, boosting McCarthy-friendly candidates in the 2022 cycle. So this is a totally reasonable debate for members of Congress to have. I'm not sure if you're a

Republican why you'd choose House leadership whose help you don't want in winning elections, but I do understand the desire to decentralize these kinds of funding decisions. The next demand is an increase in the number of Freedom Caucus members in committee chairmanships and on the House Rules Committee. This is a totally self-serving rule request from the Freedom Caucus. I would not support it if I were a Republican member, but I don't think it's radical for the caucus to use this moment to try and increase their power and sway in the party. This seems like a totally inbounds thing to put in some kind of list of demands. Next up is a decline to raise the debt ceiling without a plan to cap spending and balance the federal budget in 10 years. We're going to talk more about the debt ceiling debate soon in a separate tangle newsletter, but just to put it simply, I think this is the most radical of all the proposals

and I would raise the prospect of an economic disaster or a political disaster for Republicans, so it should just be discarded outright. I think this is a bad rule proposal. The next one is do not return to the blind embrace of earmarks. The practice of directing federal spending to specific recipients or projects was brought back to Congress as a community project funding after a decade-long ban. The House Republican Conference last month voted overwhelmingly against an internal proposal to ban the practice. Earmarks are also known as pork. There are very, very good arguments on both sides for and against earmarks. We covered them in a past edition of Tangle. I've linked to that

edition in today's newsletter and in the episode description today if you want to go read that. The next proposal is more of a recommendation. It's not really a rule change. The Freedom Caucus says we should use must-pass bills like the annual defense authorization bill and the farm bill as leverage to secure conservative priorities and check the Biden administration. Okay, so if you're interested in grinding the Biden administration to a halt, this is a smart way to do it. The Freedom Caucus is asking Republicans to play more hardball. They believe this is a reflection of the basis sentiment after feeling steamrolled by Biden the last two years.

Again, I don't support leveraging must-pass bills to disrupt Congress. That's not a good way to legislate. But it's something Democrats have been doing, and Republicans could certainly be more disruptive with a committee like this. Finally, they suggest to create a panel in the style of a church committee to target weaponized government. While McCarthy and House Republicans have promised extensive investigations into the Biden administration and alleged politicization

of federal agencies, some of those representatives, like Representative Chip Roy, think the plans do not go far enough. This rule suggestion is basically a nothing burger. House Republicans have a majority and will run committees. They'll be able to investigate whatever they want so long as they can get other members on board. So with or without this rule, I think Republicans are going to get a lot of the investigations that they want. Okay, so those are the entirety of the demands. I don't know which or how many of them McCarthy will actually cede in an attempt to sway one or two of the members opposing him, but I don't think it would be totally unreasonable to explore some of them. Either way, unless Republicans have a legitimate alternative, McCarthy is the guy.

He should, and I think probably will, end up as the next House Speaker. All right, that is it for my take, which brings us to your questions answered. This one's from David in Kansas City, Missouri. David said, do you believe or have you heard any news about Dr. Fauci being the subject of criminal or even non-criminal, possibly in the next Congress investigation? I have friends who are convinced he will be charged, prosecuted, and convicted of a COVID-19 related crime, but I'm not seeing this anywhere and I wonder if there's some truth to it or if it's simply an unfounded conspiracy theory. Okay, David, so I think it is basically a guarantee that Dr. Fauci will have to testify before Congress next year. House Republicans are committed to fleshing out our early response to COVID, the origins of the virus, and ensuring

that any mistakes Fauci made are filed into the historical record. I think you can basically take the prospect of these high-profile hearings to the bank. They are going to happen and Fauci made are filed into the historical record. I think you can basically take the prospect of these high-profile hearings to the bank. They are going to happen, and Fauci has said already that he will cooperate. As for being charged, prosecuted, or convicted, I have no idea. What would he be charged with? I ask that genuinely. I've seen some theories online from right-wing YouTube accounts that Fauci's going to face charges for racketeering or other self-serving crimes, but those accusations are always very vague and I haven't really seen much evidence for them. Maybe there is a way to

pin him on lying to Congress if someone can prove that he knowingly misled members in previous testimony on gain-of-function research or other issues he has testified about. Again, though, I need more specificity and a lot of people get away with lying to Congress. Ultimately, I find the prospect of Fauci in an orange jumpsuit rather absurd. Not because I am certain he has never committed a crime, I'm not, but because I haven't seen any clear specific charge against him, nor any well-organized effort from qualified people to charge him with anything resembling criminal activity. That's probably because Fauci, while a highly important and public-facing expert for the Trump administration,

was only part of a massive organizational effort. Decisions he made did not happen in isolation, and any criminal charges for mishaps during the pandemic would be very, very difficult to peg on him alone. So no, I think Fauci facing criminal charges is pretty unlikely, but I will be very curious to hear his testimony on COVID in front of the next Congress. All right, that is it for your questions answered, which brings us to our under the radar section. The FBI issued a little notice public safety alert warning of sextortion schemes targeting kids and teenagers. The agency said it has received over 7,000 reports of such schemes where a victim is coerced into sending explicit images online and then extorted for money or gift cards on the threat of making the images public. Several suicides have also been linked to the scheme,

and the primary targets are often minor boys. The FBI says the schemes usually take place on social media platforms, gaming websites, and video chat apps from predators posing online as women. Axios has the story, and there's a link to it in today's episode description. All right, next up is our numbers section. The number of votes it took to resolve the last floor fight over House Speaker was nine, which happened in 1923. The number of days Congress went without a House Speaker over a similar dispute in 1849 was 19 days. The number of days Congress went without a House Speaker over a similar dispute in 1849 was 19 days. The percentage of all Republican or lean Republican voters who say they have never

heard of Kevin McCarthy is 34%. McCarthy's favorable-unfavorable rating among Republican lean Republican voters who have heard of him is 34 to 29%. The number of voters who reported seeing, reading, or hearing a lot about the May 24th mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas was 73%, making it the most salient news story of 2022. The number of voters who reported seeing, reading, or hearing a lot about the Queen's death and the Supreme Court's Dobbs v. Jackson decision was 71%, making them the second most salient news stories of 2022. Alright, and last but not least, our have a nice day section. More than two decades ago, Ida Zuge was fleeing civil war in former Yugoslavia when she found herself and her sister on a plane to the United States.

Zuge vividly remembers the fear of flying to a foreign country, but also a kind stranger who ended up in the seat next to her. She comforted Zuge and her sister during the flight and then handed them an envelope. I hope your stay in America will be a safe and happy one, signed a friend from the plane, Tracy. Inside the envelope was a $100 bill. A few years ago, Zuge put out a note on social media in hopes of finding the friendly stranger. A few months later, a friend recognized Tracy's handwriting and story about the piece in CNN. And you know what happened next. CBS News has the story of their reunion, and you can find a link to it in today's episode description.

Alright everybody, that is it for today's podcast. As always, if you want to support our work, please go to retangle.com slash membership and be sure to check back in on us tomorrow. We've got a special podcast for you coming up and we'll be right back here. Same time. Have a good one. Peace. back here same time have a good one peace our podcast is written by me isaac saul and edited by zosia warpea our script is edited by sean brady ari weitzman and bailey saul shout out to our interns argy morehead and watkins kelly and our social media manager magdalena picova who created our podcast logo music for the podcast was produced by Diet75. For more from Tangle, check out our website at www.lootangle.com. We'll see you next time. Chinatown. When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. The flu remains a serious disease.

Last season, over 102,000 influenza cases have been reported across Canada, which is nearly double the historic average of 52,000 cases. What can you do this flu season? Talk to your pharmacist or doctor about getting a flu shot. Consider FluCellVax Quad and help protect yourself from the flu. It's the first cell-based flu vaccine authorized in Canada for ages 6 months and older, and it may be available for free in your province. Side effects and allergic reactions can occur, and 100% protection is not guaranteed. Learn more at FluCellVax.ca.