The Headlines - Gaza Fighting to Pause for Polio Vaccinations, and Harris’s CNN Interview

Episode Date: August 30, 2024

Plus, complacency as Covid cases surge.   Tune in every weekday morning. To get our full audio journalism and storytelling experience, download the New York Times Audio app — available to Times news subscribers on iOS — and sign up for our weekly newsletter.Tell us what you think at: [e-mail]. On Today’s Episode:Israel Agrees to Staggered Pauses in Fighting to Allow for Polio Vaccination, U.N. Says, by Lara Jakes and Ephrat Livni7 Takeaways From Harris’s First Major Interview, by Reid J. EpsteinTrump Floats Coverage Mandate for I.V.F. Treatment, by Neil Vigdor and Michael GoldOn the Covid ‘Off-Ramp’: No Tests, Isolation or Masks, by Emily BaumgaertnerAnother Icon-of-the-Seas-Style Megaship? Make That 3 More, by Ceylan Yeğinsu

From The New York Times, it's The Headlines. I'm Tracey Mumford. Today's Friday, August 30th. Here's what we're covering. Can you hear me loud and clear? Perfectly. Okay, well, first of all, greetings from Gaza. And I want to update you first on the polio campaign.

In Gaza, the World Health Organization is trying to stop an outbreak of polio. And a top official with the group announced they've reached a deal with Israel to pause military operations there for a brief window to try and vaccinate as many children as possible. Starting on Sunday, the military has agreed to suspend its offensive in central Gaza from 6 a.m. to 3 p.m. They'll repeat that schedule for three days, and there will be pauses in different parts of the territory later on, as health workers try to vaccinate some 650,000 kids. This is a way forward. I'm not going to say this is the ideal way forward, but not doing anything would be really bad. We have to stop this transmission in Gaza. Global health authorities have been pushing for an emergency vaccination campaign after polio was found in the wastewater in Gaza last month, and a young child was later diagnosed, the first confirmed case of polio in the area in 25 years.

The disease has been nearly eradicated in most of the world, but the 10-month-long war has devastated the health services in Gaza, and aid officials say that the severely unsanitary conditions there have allowed even rare diseases to spread. read. Kamala Harris gave the first major interview of her presidential campaign yesterday, sitting down with CNN's Dana Bash. The voters are really eager to hear what your plans are. If you are elected, what would you do on day one in the White House? Well, there are a number of things. I will tell you, first and foremost, one of my highest priorities is to do what we can to support and strengthen the middle class. The interview was a high-stakes moment for Harris, who voters have really only seen give scripted speeches rather than off-the-cuff answers

since she jumped into the race last month. She was joined by her running mate Tim Walls, though he pretty much took the back seat as Harris was pressed to lay out specifics of her policy plan. So what would you do day one? Day one, it's going to be about, one, implementing my plan for what I call an opportunity economy. I've already laid out a number of proposals in that regard, which include what we're going to do to bring down the cost of in office and what she would do if elected to a term in her own right.

Times political reporter Reid Epstein is covering Harris's campaign. She embraced his economic record, his stance toward Israel and Gaza, his position on the border, and even on fracking in the key battleground state of Pennsylvania. Anything that Mr. Biden is for, she essentially said that she is for too. I'm very proud of the work that we have done that has brought inflation down to less than 3%. The work that we have done to cap the cost of insulin at $35 a month for seniors. I mean, these are themes that we can expect Harris to come back to again and again over the final weeks of the campaign, and particularly in the days leading up to the September 10th debate with Donald Trump. She's essentially going to argue that people can have the parts that they might have liked about the Biden years, his policies, without the parts of

the Biden years that they didn't like, primarily the president himself. Meanwhile, Donald Trump is trying to reposition himself with voters on a key issue in this year's presidential race, reproductive health. I'm announcing today in a major statement that under the Trump administration, your government will pay for, or your insurance company will be mandated to pay for, all costs associated with IVF treatment, fertilization for women. At a rally in Michigan, he floated a new proposal that would mandate total coverage for in vitro fertilization treatments,

though he didn't say how that would be paid for. One cycle of IBF can cost $20,000 or more. You know, if you talk to them, they'll say, oh, he really doesn't like, they have ads, like I'm against it. It's just the opposite. Trump also suggested yesterday that he might support a ballot measure that would expand abortion rights in his home state of Florida, though his campaign quickly tried to downplay that. Previously, Trump has bragged about appointing the Supreme Court justices who voted to overturn Roe v. Wade. But his new messaging seems to be part of a pattern of trying to appeal to women voters. Recent polling suggests Harris has made big gains with women voters in battleground states. In nearly every part of the country right now, COVID levels are at high or very high levels, according to the CDC.

Hospitalizations are up. 600 people a week are dying from the virus. And the surge is hitting just as kids are packing back into classrooms and millions of Americans are getting together for Labor Day weekend. But this is also the country's fifth summer of COVID. And Emily Baumgartner, the Times National Health correspondent, has found that many people are taking the virus less seriously than ever before. I've been talking to people about how they're living with the virus and what their life looks like now. And I've just come across this collective psychology

of people who are ready to move on. Emily has been covering COVID since 2020. People who used to mask everywhere they went and always have a mask in their pocket don't even own any masks anymore. A lot of people who used to test before going out to a social event or after traveling and now people avoiding tests because they don't want to know whether they have the virus. They don't want to have to change their plans. One reason that the culture of COVID has

changed so much is because this is a virus that still evades our understanding, even epidemiologists understanding. These variants are evolving faster than the flu. And so there's really no predictability. These surges come at different times throughout the year, every time. And another reason is that people have become extremely confused. One person I spoke to said that he would test if he felt that he was supposed to, but he couldn't even keep track of what the CDC recommendations were anymore. At this point, the CDC has started recommending that people deal with COVID the same way they deal with the flu and the same way they deal with RSV. They recommend if you have a fever, stay at home for 24 hours after the fever is gone, make sure your symptoms are improving. And then when you go back out in public, make sure you wear a mask and protect others.

But there's really no specific COVID guidance anymore. And on some level, there's also a bit of a callousness that's developed culturally. A lot of epidemiologists say that even though 600 deaths a week is really heartbreaking, when you compare that to what we were seeing at the peak of the pandemic, when you compare that to 20,000 deaths a week, it's something that we seem to just have decided as a society that we are collectively willing to live with. And finally, cruise ships are getting bigger, a lot bigger. The world's largest cruise ship ever, the Icon of the Seas, launched earlier this year. It weighs over a quarter million tons, and it's capable of carrying nearly 8,000 people, the size of a small city. Now, there's been so much demand for cruises that Royal Caribbean announced it's adding

more megaships, with at least four more on order. Other cruise companies are also eyeing big, big, big expansions. The massive scale of the ships has raised concerns about their environmental impact, including their emissions. Royal Caribbean says it's designed its megaship to be energy efficient. But some people are asking just how much bigger they'll get. A report from an environmental advocacy group found that the world's largest cruise ships are now twice as big as they were 20 years ago. If they continue growing at that current rate, by next year, they will be eight times the size of the Titanic. Those are the headlines.

Today on The Daily, Michael Barbaro shares a personal take on the legacy of TV talk show pioneer Phil Donahue. You can listen on The Times audio app or wherever you get your podcasts. This show is made by Jessica Metzger, Jan Stewart, and me, Tracy Mumford, with help from Isabella Anderson and Jake Lucas. Original theme by Dan Powell. Special thanks to Larissa Anderson, Zoe Murphy, and Paula Schumann. The headlines will be back on Monday.