It’s Tuesday.
For Tuesday, August 10th, 2021, President Biden has received his daily brief. Late this morning D.C., time, President Biden will arrive back to the White House. This afternoon he will meet with FEMA, DHS, and the White House COVID-19 response teams to discuss how COVID-19 is impacting hurricane preparedness.
Daniel Dale is still on vacation.
President Biden has tweeted 3 times so far for Tuesday; I’ll be sharing them down thread.
When Biden Bits was published for Monday, President Biden had tweeted 3 times. He added 6 tweets giving him a Monday Tweeting Total of 9 tweets and 0 retweets.
Infrastructure Week(s) Tweets.
Not exactly related, but yeah, I missed this one earlier, so it’s going here. See yesterday’s Biden Bits where he mentions similar…
Tuesday.
The updated White House Bipartisan Infrastructure deal can be found here.
The full text of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act can be found here.
The Senate met this morning where they approved the bill 69-30.
Coronavirus Vaccine Tweets.
Monday Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin announced his intent to seek Presidential approval to mandate the coronavirus vaccine for military personal by mid-September.
Pentagon Press Secretary John Kirby offered some details on the memo during a Pentagon press briefing yesterday. You can find his full remarks here.
Kirby: I would just point out that there’s sort of three elements here to it. One is that — that he will — it — request approval from the President for a waiver to make the COVID vaccines mandatory by mid-September — he’ll make the request for the waiver by mid-September. I’ve seen some reporting out there that that means that all of the troops have to be vaccinated by mid-September. That’s not accurate. He’ll make the request by mid-September, unless or until FDA licensure occurs before that time, at which point the Secretary has the authority he needs, upon FDA licensure, to issue — to make whatever vaccine is then given that license mandatory. I just want to clear that up. That’s point number one.
Kirby Con’t: Point number two, in the meantime, two things are going to happen. One, the services are going to be tasked to come back to the Secretary with implementation plans for how they’re going to get this moving. And there is not probably a lot of time between now — certainly not a lot of time between now and mid-September, but if FDA licensure comes sooner than that, and there’s press reporting to suggest that the Pfizer vaccine will be perhaps even completely approved by the end of this month — so the services have a — a — a fair but limited amount of time to come back to the Secretary with their implementation plans for how they would go about mandatory vaccines for all their personnel. We have — understand, of course, that they have their own deployment schedules, their own manning constructs, their own differences in — in unvaccinated numbers, and so we’re going to be respectful of that.
Kirby Con’t: The second thing that will happen in the meantime is that we are going to be developing policies to comply with the President’s direction that the unvaccinated will have to be subjected to certain requirements and restrictions. I don’t have the details for all of that today. We’re working hard on what will be a policy directive to come in the coming days, that will make it clear what those requirements and restrictions are and how they apply to everybody in the DOD workforce, including uniformed personnel. And then the last thing that I’d say about this memo is — and I hope you caught the — the — the — towards the end of it, where the Secretary says we’re going to watch the trends closely. We’re seeing an uptick in cases, uptick in hospitalizations across the force, as we are in the country, and the Delta variant is a factor in that. So we’re going to watch it closely.
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley also issued a memo in support of mandatory vaccination against COVID-19.
The President issued the following tweet in response to the Defense Secretaries memo.
His full statement:
I strongly support Secretary Austin’s message to the Force today on the Department of Defense’s plan to add the COVID-19 vaccine to the list of required vaccinations for our service members not later than mid-September. Secretary Austin and I share an unshakable commitment to making sure our troops have every tool they need to do their jobs as safely as possible. These vaccines will save lives. Period. They are safe. They are effective. Over 350 million shots have been given in the United States alone. Being vaccinated will enable our service members to stay healthy, to better protect their families, and to ensure that our force is ready to operate anywhere in the world. We cannot let up in the fight against COVID-19, especially with the Delta variant spreading rapidly through unvaccinated populations. We are still on a wartime footing, and every American who is eligible should take immediate steps to get vaccinated right away. I am proud that our military women and men will continue to help lead the charge in the fight against this pandemic, as they so often do, by setting the example of keeping their fellow Americans safe.
White House.gov. 08/09/2021.
The 10 second video is a snip taken from remarks he gave on August 3rd, 2021, regarding the coronavirus vaccine.
President Biden: [Folks,] this is isn’t about politics. The virus doesn’t care if you’re a Democrat or a Republican. This is about life and death. Life and death.
The daily press briefing is scheduled for 12:30 p.m. D.C., time.
This is an Open Thread.
P.S.,
Speaking of Lindell, he told Vice News that “nobody said” Twice Impeached 45 would be back in office after his great tech challenged “cyber symposium.”
He is quoted as saying this exactly; Nobody said that, nobody said that, nobody said that, nobody said that, nobody said that, nobody said that, OK? I think this interview is over.
Vice News shared this in the linked above article…
The quote comes toward the end of the clip shared…
But yeah, nobody said it…
Also, Governor Cuomo has given his two weeks notice.
