Republican Sen. Mike Lee (Utah) deemed House Republicans' American Health Care Act a "missed opportunity and a step in the wrong direction" in a statement Tuesday. Joining many conservatives unhappy with the ObamaCare replacement plan unveiled Monday evening, Lee was quick to point out the bill's multitudinous flaws — namely, that it does not fulfill the Republican Party's promise to the American people to "drain the swamp and end business as usual in Washington."
Moreover, Lee contended, Republicans repeated Democrats' mistakes when they rolled out this proposal. "This is exactly the type of back-room dealing and rushed process that we criticized Democrats for," Lee said. He noted Republicans "don't know how many people would use this new tax credit, we don't know how much it will cost, and we don't know if this bill will make health care more affordable for Americans."
Lee ended his statement with a plea for his fellow Republicans to take the replacement plan back to the drawing board, while moving ahead with the repeal. "Let's fulfill our ObamaCare repeal promise immediately," Lee said, "and then take our time and do reform right." Becca Stanek
China is on course to overtake the United States as the world's biggest economy by 2028, the Center for Economics and Business Research predicted in a report released Saturday. The two countries have long been expected to swap places, but CEBR anticipates the pace has accelerated thanks to China recovering more quickly from the COVID-19 pandemic.
A year ago, the CEBR pegged 2033 as the transition year, but China's economy is expected to grow by 2 percent in 2020, the lone major global economy to expand, while the U.S. economy, on the other hand, is expected to contract by 5 percent. The report also anticipates China will become a "high-income economy" by 2023, though living standards are expected to remain much lower than in the U.S.
China is not alone in its region when it comes to economic growth. "Other Asian economies are also shooting up the table," said Douglas McWilliams, the CEBR's deputy chair. "One lesson for western policymakers, who have performed relatively badly during the pandemic, is that they need to pay much more attention to what is happening in Asia rather than simply looking at each other." Read more at The Guardian and Bloomberg. Tim O'Donnell
Scientists are homing in on the potential cause of allergic reactions to the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine.
The United States Center for Disease Control and Prevention has recorded six severe allergic reactions (all of which were treated successfully) out of the 272,001 administered through Dec. 19, and the compound polyethylene glycol, known as PEG, has become a leading suspect in the cases, The Wall Street Journal reports. While still speculative at this point — allergies to PEG are rare and the reactions may have been to something else, per the Journal — PEG is found in other drugs, cosmetics, and food and is known to trigger anaphylaxis on rare occasions, though not all forms of the compound are "equal" in terms of allergic potential.
Part of the challenge of pinpointing PEG as the likely catalyst for the reactions is that the compound in the vaccines "is different than what has been previously associated with allergic reactions," James Baker, an immunologist who heads the Michigan Nanotechnology Institute for Medicine and the Biological Sciences at the University of Michigan, told the Journal.
PEG is also found in the Moderna vaccine. A health care worker became the first known person to experience an allergic reaction to that shot on Thursday. Dr. Hossein Sadrzadeh, who said he has a history of allergies, reported tingling sensations, an elevated heart rate, and low blood pressure shortly after his inoculation. The symptoms were akin to a reaction he had previously had to shellfish, he said. He was discharged a few hours later.
Despite the rare incidents — more than 1 million Americans have been vaccinated — scientists and public health officials maintain the vaccines are safe, effective, and crucial to ending the pandemic. Read more at The Wall Street Journal and CNN. Tim O'Donnell
The United Kingdom and the European Commission published the full text of their trade agreement Saturday morning after the sides came to terms ahead of the Dec. 31 Brexit deadline earlier this week. The deal includes a 1,246-page trade document, as well as accords on nuclear energy, classified information exchanges, and several joint declarations.
Writing in The Times on Saturday, Michael Gove, a senior British minister and a prominent voice in the campaign for the U.K. to leave the European Union since the 2016 referendum, said he hopes the pact will mean leaving behind some of the divisions between London and Brussels, and within the U.K. itself, that cropped over the last several years because of Brexit. "Friendships have been strained, families were divided, and our politics has been rancorous and, at times, ugly," he wrote. "Through the past four years, as a politician at the center of this debate, I've made more than my fair share of mistakes or misjudgments, seen old friendships crumble, and those closest to me have to endure pressures they never anticipated."
But with a deal in tow, he wrote, "we can develop a new pattern of friendly cooperation with the EU, a special relationship if you will, between sovereign equals." Read more at BBC and Reuters. Tim O'Donnell
Expanded unemployment benefits for around 14 million Americans were set to expire Saturday, as President Trump continues to hold off on signing Congress' $900 billion COVID-19 pandemic relief bill.
The enhanced jobless benefits that were included in the CARES Act earlier this year end Dec. 26, so even if Trump changes course and puts pen to paper later in the day, a temporary lapse in payments is inevitable since states will need time to reprogram to account for the new law, which includes an extra $300 per week on top of the usual state unemployment benefit. In that scenario, The New York Times reports, unemployed workers would still be able to claim the benefits.
But any further delay beyond Saturday could prove more costly because states cannot pay out benefits for weeks that begin before the bill is signed, the Times notes. The payments would then restart in January, but the March expiration date remains the same, trimming the extension from 11 weeks to 10. Of course, Trump could simply sit on the bill until he leaves office next month, forcing Congress to reintroduce and vote on the package again.
Trump surprised lawmakers by threatening to veto the new relief bill, though his actual intentions remain unclear. As Reuters notes, he has complained the package designates too much money for cultural projects and foreign aid, and he considers the $600 stimulus checks to be too small. On Friday, the president again called for $2,000 checks, a figure to which GOP lawmakers appear resistant. Read more at Reuters and The New York Times. Tim O'Donnell