The NPR Politics Podcast - US Loans Vaccines To Mexico, Canada

Episode Date: March 23, 2021

AstraZeneca's vaccine has not been authorized for use in the United States, but the nation has millions of doses in its stockpile. Now, the Biden administration has announced it will loan some of those doses to Mexico and Canada. And a delay in 2020 census tallies is posing problems for states that need to draw legislative district maps.This episode: political reporter Juana Summers, White House correspondent Tamara Keith, health reporter Pien Huang, and census correspondent Hansi Lo Wang.Connect:Subscribe to the NPR Politics Podcast here.Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Listen to our playlist The NPR Politics Daily Workout.Subscribe to the NPR Politics Newsletter.Find and support your local public radio station.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hi, I'm Frances from Woodland, California, and I just got a 100% on my driver's test. This podcast was recorded at 1.45 p.m. on Tuesday, March 23rd. Things may have changed by the time you hear this. All right, here's the show. Fun story, Woodland, California is in Yolo County. Yolo, have fun with that driver's license. Congratulations. You did better than I did last time I took mine. Hey there. It's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Juana Summers. I cover politics.

I'm Tamara Geith. I cover the White House. And Ping Wong is here from our health team. Hey there. Hey, thanks so much for having me. Glad you're here. Tam, I know you have been doing some reporting over the last couple of days about President Biden and the AstraZeneca vaccine. What have you learned? Yeah, so the Biden administration has been reluctant thus far, even though we know in the future that the U.S. is going to have way more, like hundreds of millions more vaccine doses than there are actually Americans. The Biden administration has been reluctant to respond to requests for vaccine sharing, but they announced that they are planning to share about a total of four million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine with Canada and Mexico, our continental neighbors. This is sort of

a first foray into what is called vaccine diplomacy. And conveniently, the AstraZeneca vaccine is not yet authorized for use in the U.S. But this week we did get, I don't know how to say it. Initially, there was some promising news about the AstraZeneca vaccine. And today, it's just been confusing news about the AstraZeneca vaccine. Yeah, so it's been kind of a roller coaster. So yesterday, AstraZeneca said, look, we've got some trial results from the trials that we've been having in the US and a couple other countries. It looks good.

Our vaccine appears to be 79% effective at keeping people from getting sick from COVID. But then overnight, we got, you know, some news from the Data Safety Monitoring Board. This is a group of experts that advises the US National Institutes of Health. And they basically accused AstraZeneca of using outdated data to make their vaccine look more effective. And they basically said that they were kind of misleading the public, you know, and that's really unfortunate. I mean, you know, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the country's top infectious disease doc was on Good Morning America this morning calling it an unforced error. He said that the AstraZeneca vaccine is very likely still a good vaccine. But you know, this kind of miscommunication is what's sowing distrust in

the public. So, you know, there's there's a lot more to come on this, you know, this kind of miscommunication is what's sowing distrust in the public. So, you know, there's there's a lot more to come on this, you know, it's still a couple weeks away, AstraZeneca is still a few weeks away from applying for emergency use authorization here in the US. And I guess the message that US regulators are currently sending is that they're going to be reviewing that data independently. And they're going to really not let that product through if it doesn't pass their standards. Yeah, absolutely. And the thing is, this AstraZeneca vaccine, while it isn't authorized for use in the U.S., it is authorized for use all over the world. It is one of the main vaccines being used in Europe.

And there were some questions about safety that have mostly been resolved there. And in Canada and Mexico, it's authorized for use there. And yet the U.S. has this stockpile of pre-ordered vaccines that can't be used for Americans. And so, you know, what good does that do? A lot of countries, including Canada and Mexico, but apparently many others, have been eyeing this stash of about 7 million vaccines that could be sent out time as conversations about controlling the U.S. border with Mexico and issues with unaccompanied minors coming into the country and all of those issues along the border. The White House has said that, yeah, well, you know, in diplomatic conversations, a lot of things come up at the same time. So there are some questions about that. But the fact is that vaccine diplomacy is called vaccine diplomacy in part because it can potentially be used to get what a country wants or to exert global influence. And certainly that's what some other countries have been doing with

their vaccines. Is this something we're going to see more of in the future? This is absolutely something that we're going to see more of. Russia and China have been using their vaccines, spreading them around to countries in need, striking deals. Some of them are, you know, they're selling them sometimes. Sometimes they're giving them. But they have been really doing this vaccine diplomacy and emphasizing this with a series of bilateral deals. The U.S., up until this point where they did actually lend some doses to Canada and Mexico, before that they had given $4 billion to this international vehicle known as COVAX, which is an international effort to make sure that vaccines get to the poorest countries. And the idea essentially is we are not safe here until the world is safe.

You know, you don't know where the next big bad variant that could get around a vaccine is going to pop up. But a variant popped up in Brazil where there's out of control spread of the virus. So the more virus there is, the more potential there is for a variant that could cause a problem. So Russia and China have been sharing vaccine, selling vaccine, doing deals. The debate here in the U.S. is ultimately we are going to have hundreds of millions more doses than we likely need. Does the U.S. put those doses into COVAX or does it do bilateral deals like the ones with Canada and Mexico where, you know, somebody can go out and say, hey, the American government gave me this vaccine. This came from America.

Ping, before we let you go, I'm curious, how is vaccination going across the country right now? What are you hearing? Yeah, well, what I'm hearing is that it really depends on where you are. You know, in some places, I'm hearing about cases of extreme vaccine FOMO, people seeing friends and family get vaccinated, feeling like they're missing out, really impatient for their turn. And in other parts of the country, you know, we're seeing signs that demand is starting to decrease. You know, some states like Mississippi, Alaska, Arizona are opening up vaccines to anyone 16 and older over a month before Biden's May 1st deadline. And, you know, that's good for people in those places that want vaccines, but it's also an indication that those vaccine appointments are not really getting snapped up as quickly as they were at the start.

Overall, across the country, we've hit a groove with vaccine distribution. We're getting about 2.3 million shots into arms every day and around 18 percent of the total adult population here in the U.S. has been fully vaccinated. But we do have a lot more people to reach if we're going to try to get to Biden's goal of having some kind of normalcy restored by the 4th of July. I did want to add that Krispy Kreme was trending on Twitter yesterday for sweetening the deal a little bit. Oh, quite a pun. Sweetening the deal. Yeah. So Krispy Kreme is offering a free donut a day to anyone who comes in with a card that shows that they're vaccinated. And as a health reporter, I might not be able to actually endorse a donut a day.

But as a person, I will say that donuts as a sometimes food are totally delicious. A sometimes food. Ping Huang from NPR's health team, thank you so much for being with us and for that sweet reminder that we can get some donuts if we get vaccinated. Thanks for having me. We're going to take a quick break. And when we get back, we're going to talk about how the troubled 2020 census is still causing problems in the year 2021.

On NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast, we talk about what we're watching, listening to, or just trying to figure out. Like what concert films you should watch if you miss live music, and great books to read alone or in your book club. All of that in around 20 minutes every weekday. Listen now to the Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast from NPR. And we're back with Hansi Lo Wang, our census expert. Hey, Hansi. Hey, Juana. So the census is obviously really important for a ton of reasons, but I think it's been a couple of months since we've actually talked about it on the podcast. So can you kind of give us the quick and dirty breakdown as to why people should care so much and what they need to know?

Listen, if you're interested in politics in the US, you should be interested in the census, because these are population numbers from a national headcount required by the Constitution once every 10 years used to determine how many electoral college votes your state gets in determining who is the next president of the United States, how many members in the House of Representatives represent your state in Congress for the next decade. These are also numbers that determine the areas other elected officials represent, all the way down to your local city council and school board members. And, you know, if you're not interested in political power, maybe you're interested in money, federal money,

that's distributed based in part on census data, $1.5 trillion a year in federal funding. That's trillion with a T for Medicare, Medicaid, education, roads, and other public services. So, it says this may sound boring, but behind all that effort to try to count every person living in the U.S., it's really about power and about money. Those are such great points. I mean, we know historically that counting everyone across this country is a really daunting task. And like everything else in 2020, I think it was especially difficult to do. Can you talk to us about some of those obstacles? You know, it's interesting. The nationwide rollout of the census, the 2020 census last March,

took place a day after COVID-19 was officially declared a pandemic. This is something the Census Bureau did not prepare for. So in-person counting was delayed last year. There was lots of confusion about where to get counted. People were moving in the early months of the pandemic, especially college students. Plus, the Trump administration made last-minute changes to the census schedule that ultimately cut short the time for counting and forced the Census Bureau to cut some processes for quality checks of the data. So the Bureau has been trying to sort through this really a mess of a census. And that's why 2020 may be over, but the 2020

census is not over. Yeah, Hansi, it is 2021 now. And there are states that I think would like to start the long and difficult and highly political process of figuring out how to draw those congressional district lines and other political lines so that, you know, there are elections coming. I mean, heck, there are elections in Virginia at least this year. Next year, there are elections in every congressional seat in the country. These census delays are causing headaches around the country among state and local redistricting officials because the Bureau is late. According to current federal law, the Census Bureau right now is close to three months overdue in producing those first set of results, the state population numbers. And it's also expected to miss the March 31st legal deadline for the redistricting data that all

those states you just mentioned are waiting for to start this really long, arduous process of redistricting. But the thing to keep in mind here is that the Census Bureau has been signaling that all this will be late since April of last year because of the pandemic. And the Trump administration's interference with the census schedule just really made this a much more difficult task than it already was. And so the original census timeline had out, sometime within the range of April 16th and April 30th. The numbers that determine the new electoral college map and how house seats are redistributed,

those numbers are expected to be announced by the Census Bureau finally. And then the Census Bureau says it needs the rest of this spring and into summer to make sure the second set of results, that redistricting data that states are waiting for, to make sure those results are accurate. It needs more time to do that. And it's fine to start releasing that information in August. So as our listeners know, we taped this podcast a little bit earlier in the day. But Hansi, I know this afternoon, there's a hearing happening on Capitol Hill, where a lot of these issues are going to come up. What are you watching for? Well, the head of the Census Bureau, the acting director,

Ron Jarman, is expected to testify. And I'm watching to see how he responds to presumably a lot of questions from lawmakers about the timing, this timeline, this schedule, and see if there are any new signals that the Census Bureau may be shifting its schedule, given maybe it made some progress in some aspect. I'm also to see just the line of questioning from different lawmakers and depending on their political affiliations, their party, because the fact is the Bureau has missed a legal reporting deadline for the first set of results and is expected to miss that second reporting deadline. And so Congress presumably needs to pass a new law that extends those deadlines formally. This is something that in

similar situations not quite has happened in the past. And there were efforts to do this last year that even the Trump administration was backing and then made an about face and stopped asking Congress to extend deadlines formally, legally. And there is a bipartisan group of senators that is planning to introduce a new bill that does this. And I'm trying to see if this hearing is any indication of where the political parties, if there are any, you know, strong partisan lines here that could stop that from happening, and really cross that off the Bureau's really long list of things to think about. All right, Hansi, I know you've got a lot to do. So we're gonna let you go. Thanks so much. You're welcome. Thanks for having me back.

All right, we're gonna leave it there for today. I'm Juana Summers. I cover politics. And I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.