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The famed Chinese pilgrim to India Fa Hsien (Faxien), noted that Gupta law was exceptionally generous; crimes were punished only with fines.

The surviving architecture includes palaces and purpose-built temples for both Hindu and Buddhist religions, such as the Parvati Temple at Nachna Kuthara and the Dashavatara temple at Deogarh in Madhya Pradesh.

The emperors also founded free hospitals for their citizens, as well as monasteries and universities.

Aryabhata's incredibly accurate calculation of pi as 3.1416, and his equally amazing calculation that the solar year is 365.358 days long.

In part, this was due to the common people's dislike of the meddlesome and unwieldy bureaucracy.

As with the collapses of other classical political systems, the Gupta Empire crumbled under both internal and external pressures.

Internally, the Gupta Dynasty grew weak from a number of succession disputes. As the emperors lost power, regional lords gained increasing autonomy. In a sprawling empire with weak leadership, it was easy for rebellions in Gujarat or Bengal to break out, and difficult for the Gupta emperors to put such uprisings down.

By 500, many regional princes were declaring their independence and refusing to pay taxes to the central Gupta state. These included the Maukhari Dynasty, who ruled over Uttar Pradesh and Magadha.

By the later Gupta era, the government was having trouble collecting enough taxes to fund both its hugely complex bureaucracy, and constant wars against foreign invaders like the Pushyamitras and the Huns.

Chandragupta's son, Samudragupta (ruled 335–380 CE), was a brilliant warrior and statesman, sometimes called the "Napoleon of India."

Even those who felt a personal loyalty to the Gupta Emperor generally disliked his government and were happy to avoid paying for it if they could.

In addition to internal disputes, the Gupta Empire faced constant threats of invasion from the north. The cost of fighting off these invasions drained the Gupta treasury, and the government had difficulty refilling the coffers. Among the most troublesome of the invaders were the White Huns (or Hunas), who had conquered much of the northwestern section of Gupta territory by 500 CE.

“I have known and worked with Ms. Gupta for several years, and have been extraordinarily impressed by her seriousness, her honesty and her capacity to engage in fruitful and productive dialogue regarding policing and criminal justice,” David J. Mahoney, the president of the National Sheriffs’ Association, said in a letter to the Judiciary Committee.

he Judicial Crisis Network campaign, standing in opposition to the support of Ms. Gupta by mainstream law enforcement groups, shows a split among some conservatives over their willingness to work with the Biden administration on issues like criminal justice reform that have had bipartisan support. Former President Donald J. Trump signed a broad overhaul of the criminal justice system in 2018 that expanded job training and early-release programs and modified sentencing laws.

While the Judicial Crisis Network is not known for taking a strong stance on policing issues, it is little surprise that Ms. Severino would oppose Ms. Gupta’s nomination. The group has pushed for the Supreme Court to rule against measures that would expand gay rights, and Ms. Gupta was the head of the Civil Rights Division in the final years of the Obama administration while the department broadly supported extending those protections. The Trump administration pared back those protections, but that could be reassessed under the Biden administration.

Michigan's surge is a combination of two factors, Gounder says: the spread of the B.1.1.7 variant combined with people relaxing on mitigation measures before enough residents are vaccinated.

Florida has the highest number of cases of the variant, followed by Michigan, Minnesota and Massachusetts, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Experts say it's more contagious, may cause more severe disease and may potentially be more deadly. And it's rapidly spreading across the country.

Here's why: It takes about two weeks after the Pfizer and Moderna second doses and about two weeks after the Johnson & Johnson vaccine before people are immune, she said. Meanwhile, Gounder added, "the incubation period, which is the time from when you are exposed to when you are infected with coronavirus, is four to five days."close dialogSign up for the Results Are In NewsletterGet the latest expert advice to live a healthier and happier lifeSign me upNo, ThanksBy subscribing you agree to ourPrivacy PolicySign up for the Results Are In NewsletterGet the latest expert advice to live a healthier and happier lifePlease enter aboveSign me upNo, ThanksBy subscribing you agree to ourPrivacy PolicyYou have successfully subscribed.By subscribing you agree to ourPrivacy Policyclose dialog

"So there is no way that a surge in vaccination is going to help curb this when transmission is happening right now," she said.

the only thing that will curb transmission right now are measures that take effect immediately.

Michigan is now reporting thousands of new Covid-19 cases daily, when just weeks ago, state data showed the daily reported case count was as low as 563 cases.

"Hospitals are being inundated," Dr. Jonathan Reiner, a professor of medicine and surgery at George Washington University, told CNN. "Michigan needs to shut down."

With respect to crime, poverty and homelessness, Brown argued,One thing that may occur is that disinvestment in city downtowns will alter the spatial distribution of these elements in cities — i.e. in which neighborhoods or areas of a city is crime more likely, and homelessness more visible. Urban downtowns are often policed such that these visible elements of poverty are pushed to other parts of the city where they will not interfere with commercial activities. But absent these activities, there may be less political pressure to maintain these areas. This is not to say that the overall crime rate or homelessness levels will necessarily increase, but their spatial redistribution may further alter the trajectory of commercial downtowns — and the perception of city crime in the broader public.

“The more dramatic effects on urban geography,” Brown continued,may be how this changes cities in terms of economic and racial segregation. One urban trend from the last couple of decades is young white middle- and upper-class people living in cities at higher rates than previous generations. But if these groups become less likely to live in cities, leaving a poorer, more disproportionately minority population, this will make metropolitan regions more polarized by race/class.

the damage that even the perception of rising crime can inflict on Democrats in a Nov. 27 article, “Meet the Voters Who Fueled New York’s Seismic Tilt Toward the G.O.P.”: “From Long Island to the Lower Hudson Valley, Republicans running predominantly on crime swept five of six suburban congressional seats, including three that President Biden won handily that encompass some of the nation’s most affluent, well-educated commuter towns.

In big cities like New York and San Francisco we estimate large drops in retail spending because office workers are now coming into city centers typically 2.5 rather than 5 days a week. This is reducing business activity by billions of dollars — less lunches, drinks, dinners and shopping by office workers. This will reduce city hall tax revenues.

Public transit systems are facing massive permanent shortfalls as the surge in working from home cuts their revenues but has little impact on costs (as subway systems are mostly a fixed cost. This is leading to a permanent 30 percent drop in transit revenues on the New York Subway, San Francisco Bart, etc.

Insofar as fear of urban crime grows, as the number of homeless people increases, and as the fiscal ability of government to address these problems shrinks, the amenities of city life are very likely to diminish.

First, “Saved commute time working from home averages about 70 minutes a day, of which about 40 percent (30 minutes) goes into extra work.” Second, “Research finds hybrid working from home increases average productivity around 5 percent and this is growing.” And third, “Employees also really value hybrid working from home, at about the same as an 8 percent pay increase on average.

three other experts in real estate economics, Arpit Gupta, of N.Y.U.’s Stern School of Business, Vrinda Mittal, both of the Columbia Business School, and Van Nieuwerburgh. They anticipate disaster in their September 2022 paper, “Work From Home and the Office Real Estate Apocalypse.”

“Our research,” Gupta wrote by email,emphasizes the possibility of an ‘urban doom loop’ by which decline of work in the center business district results in less foot traffic and consumption, which adversely affects the urban core in a variety of ways (less eyes on the street, so more crime; less consumption; less commuting) thereby lowering municipal revenues, and also making it more challenging to provide public goods and services absent tax increases. These challenges will predominantly hit blue cities in the coming years.

the three authors “revalue the stock of New York City commercial office buildings taking into account pandemic-induced cash flow and discount rate effects. We find a 45 percent decline in office values in 2020 and 39 percent in the longer run, the latter representing a $453 billion value destruction.”

Extrapolating to all properties in the United States, Gupta, Mittal and Van Nieuwerburgh write, the “total decline in commercial office valuation might be around $518.71 billion in the short-run and $453.64 billion in the long-run.”

the share of real estate taxes in N.Y.C.’s budget was 53 percent in 2020, 24 percent of which comes from office and retail property taxes. Given budget balance requirements, the fiscal hole left by declining central business district office and retail tax revenues would need to be plugged by raising tax rates or cutting government spending.

Prior to the pandemic, these ecosystems were designed to function based on huge surges in their daytime population from commuters and tourists. The shock of the sudden loss of a big chunk of this population caused a big disruption in the ecosystem.

Since March 2020, Manhattan has lost 200,000 households, the most of any county in the U.S. Brooklyn (-88,000) and Queens (-51,000) also appear in the bottom 10. The cities of Chicago (-75,000), San Francisco (-67,000), Los Angeles (-64,000 for the city and -136,000 for the county), Washington DC (-33,000), Seattle (-31,500), Houston (-31,000), and Boston (-25,000) make up the rest of the bottom 10.

Just as the pandemic has caused a surge in telework, Loh wrote, “it also caused a huge surge in unsheltered homelessness because of existing flaws in America’s housing system, the end of federally-funded relief measures, a mental health care crisis, and the failure of policies of isolation and confinement to solve the pre-existing homelessness crisis.”

The upshot, Loh continued,is that both the visibility and ratio of people in crisis relative to those engaged in commerce (whether working or shopping) has changed in a lot of U.S. downtowns, which has a big impact on how being downtown ‘feels’ and thus perceptions of downtown.

The nation, Glaeser continued, isat an unusual confluence of trends which poses dangers for cities similar to those experienced in the 1970s. Event#1 is the rise of Zoom, which makes relocation easier even if it doesn’t mean that face-to-face is going away. Event#2 is a hunger to deal with past injustices, including police brutality, mass incarceration, high housing costs and limited upward mobility for the children of the poor.

Progressive mayors, according to Glaeser,have a natural hunger to deal with these problems at the local level, but if they try to right injustices by imposing costs on businesses and the rich, then those taxpayers will just leave. I certainly remember New York and Detroit in the 1960s and 1970s, where the dreams of progressive mayors like John Lindsay and Jerome Patrick Cavanagh ran into fiscal realities.

Richard Florida, a professor of economic analysis and policy at the University of Toronto, stands out as one of the most resolutely optimistic urban scholars. In his August 2022 Bloomberg column, “Why Downtown Won’t Die,”

His answer:

Great downtowns are not reducible to offices. Even if the office were to go the way of the horse-drawn carriage, the neighborhoods we refer to today as downtowns would endure. Downtowns and the cities they anchor are the most adaptive and resilient of human creations; they have survived far worse. Continual works in progress, they have been rebuilt and remade in the aftermaths of all manner of crises and catastrophes — epidemics and plagues; great fires, floods and natural disasters; wars and terrorist attacks. They’ve also adapted to great economic transformations like deindustrialization a half century ago.

Florida wrote that many urban central business districts are “relics of the past, the last gasp of the industrial age organization of knowledge work the veritable packing and stacking of knowledge workers in giant office towers, made obsolete and unnecessary by new technologies.”

“Downtowns are evolving away from centers for work to actual neighborhoods. Jane Jacobs titled her seminal 1957 essay, which led in fact to ‘The Death and Life of Great American Cities,’ ‘Downtown Is for People’ — sounds about right to me.”

Despite his optimism, Florida acknowledged in his email thatAmerican cities are uniquely vulnerable to social disorder — a consequence of our policies toward guns and lack of a social safety net. Compounding this is our longstanding educational dilemma, where urban schools generally lack the quality of suburban schools. American cities are simply much less family-friendly than cities in most other parts of the advanced world. So when people have kids they are more or less forced to move out of America’s cities.

What worries me in all of this, in addition to the impact on cities, is the impact on the American economy — on innovation. and competitiveness. Our great cities are home to the great clusters of talent and innovation that power our economy. Remote work has many advantages and even leads to improvements in some kinds of knowledge work productivity. But America’s huge lead in innovation, finances, entertainment and culture industries comes largely from its great cities. Innovation and advance in. these industries come from the clustering of talent, ideas and knowledge. If that gives out, I worry about our longer-run economic future and living standards.

The risk that comes with fiscal distress is clear: If city governments face budget shortfalls and begin to cut back on funding for public transit, policing, and street outreach, for the maintenance of parks, playgrounds, community centers, and schools, and for services for homelessness, addiction, and mental illness, then conditions in central cities will begin to deteriorate.

There is reason for both apprehension and hope. Cities across time have proven remarkably resilient and have survived infectious diseases from bubonic plague to cholera to smallpox to polio. The world population, which stands today at eight billion people, is 57 percent urban, and because of the productivity, innovation and inventiveness that stems from the creativity of human beings in groups, the urbanization process is quite likely to continue into the foreseeable future. There appears to be no alternative, so we will have to make it work.

Souls can move not only among different levels of human society but also into other animals - hence the vegetarianism of many Hindus. Within a life cycle, people had little social mobility. They had to strive for virtue during their present lives in order to attain a higher station the next time around.

The three key areas of life dominated by caste were marriage, meals and religious worship

Marriage across caste lines was strictly forbidden; most people even married within their own sub-caste or jati.

At meal times, anyone could accept food from the hands of a Brahmin, but a Brahmin would be polluted if he or she took certain types of food from a lower caste person. At the other extreme, if an untouchable dared to draw water from a public well, he or she polluted the water and nobody else could use it.

If the shadow of an untouchable touched a Brahmin, he/she would be polluted, so untouchables had to lay face-down at a distance when a Brahmin passed.

People who violated social norms could be punished by being made "untouchables." This was not the lowest caste - they and their descendants were completely outside of the caste system.

Mohandas Gandhi advocated emancipation for the Dalits, too, coining the term harijan or "Children of God" to describe them.

The untouchables did work that no-one else would do, like scavenging animal carcasses, leather-work, or killing rats and other pests. They could not be cremated when they died.

The Bhagavad Gita, however, from c. 200 BCE-200 CE, emphasizes the importance of caste. In addition, the "Laws of Manu" or Manusmriti from the same era defines the rights and duties of the four different castes or varnas.

Thus, it seems that the Hindu caste system began to solidify sometime between 1000 and 200 BCE.

The caste system was not absolute during much of Indian history. For example, the renowned Gupta Dynasty, which ruled from 320 to 550 CE, were from the Vaishya caste rather than the Kshatriya.

From the 12th century onwards, much of India was ruled by Muslims. These rulers reduced the power of the Hindu priestly caste, the Brahmins.

When the British Raj began to take power in India in 1757, they exploited the caste system as a means of social control.The British allied themselves with the Brahmin caste, restoring some of its privileges that had been repealed by the Muslim rulers. However, many Indian customs concerning the lower castes seemed discriminatory to the British and were outlawed.

During the 1930s and 40s, the British government made laws to protect the "Scheduled castes" - untouchables and low-caste people.

Curiously, non-Hindu populations in India sometimes organized themselves into castes as well.

India's new government instituted laws to protect the "Scheduled castes and tribes" - including both the untouchables and groups who live traditional lifestyles. These laws include quota systems to ensure access to education and to government posts.

Over the past sixty years, therefore, in some ways, a person's caste has become more of a political category than a social or religious one.

And on Monday, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention brought that moment into clearer focus. The agency came out with its first set of guidance about what fully vaccinated people can now do.

My parents had a significant emotional burden lifted after they were vaccinated, because they are now approximately 95% protected against getting severely ill from Covid-19. But like the rest of the country, they are restless and want to do something with their newly vaccinated status. That is why they called me right after they saw the news report about new recommendations from the CDC to ask me what it all meant. I laid out the good news for them, and the caveats as well.

In a major step, the CDC said people who are fully vaccinated against Covid-19 can safely visit with other fully vaccinated people in private settings without masks, without social distancing and without having to be outdoors.

Additionally, however, the CDC guidance now allows for fully vaccinated people to visit indoors with unvaccinated people from a single household without masks or physical distancing, if the unvaccinated people are at low risk for severe disease. That last part is important.

This was starting to sound like it was going to work, and that my parents should be able to safely visit, even though my kids or wife haven't been vaccinated. They meet the age requirements and would be considered low risk, both in terms of health and their very limited exposures.

As I kept digging into the guidelines and speaking with members of the Biden administration's Covid-19 task force, it became increasingly clear that a visit was looking possible, but with a few strings attached.

And, perhaps most notably, fully vaccinated people are also still being discouraged from traveling, something that throws a monkey wrench into my fantasy of an imminent family reunion.

"I think the guidelines are in a good middle ground," she said. "We're starting to go back to normal now, but it's not going to be flipping a switch... We will make that journey towards normalcy, or at least a new normal, as more people get vaccinated."

At 10% vaccinations we have this guidance. At 20-30%, we will have new guidance," he said, noting that there's going to be a distinct shift in the messaging of what people can and cannot do -- moving away from more binary messaging to one that describes activities as a range of low, medium and high risk.

Even as Walensky delivered the hopeful new guidance, she also noted the country still stands at a seven-day average of about 59,000 new cases of Covid-19 per day -- a rate that has leveled off somewhat, instead of continuing to steadily decline. And there are close to 2,000 deaths per day. So, she and other experts warn, any easing of restrictions is going to have to be gradual.

So where does that leave my family reunion plan? Unless my parents make the long drive to see us, we are going to hold off on a visit for now. With more than 2 million people getting vaccinated a day, however, another 20% of the country could be vaccinated by the end of the month. And, that will probably lead to a further relaxing of CDC guidelines and maybe allow my parents a plane ride instead, which means a possible visit to celebrate their wedding anniversary this spring!

The remarks were met with approval by committee members, who agreed that the department had been improperly wielded for political gain — even as Democrats and Republicans disagreed about whether such politicization occurred under the Trump or the Obama administration.

Ms. Monaco said the Justice Department’s efforts to combat domestic extremism would be among her top priorities, especially in light of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob. She said the department needed to understand how “we could have such an attack that I personally never thought I would see in my lifetime.”

She pledged to deploy law enforcement resources to learn what motivated the insurrectionists and to prevent a repeat, calling the Justice Department’s sprawling investigation into the attack “nothing less than the defense of our democracy.”

And civil libertarians have raised questions about how the F.BI. will investigate extremists for activities protected by the First Amendment.

Manchin joined the Senate after literally shooting the Democrats' climate change proposal in a 2010 campaign ad -- and more recently joining Republicans in the Trump years on some of the most controversial matters, such as voting to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court and William Barr as attorney general. Yet he also voted to convict Trump in both impeachment trials and voted against efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act.

Manchin's opposition effectively sank the nomination of Neera Tanden to head the Office of Management and Budget, as he claimed her past tweets made her "too toxic." And he sent Washington into nearly 12 hours of tension when he initially balked at a last-minute change on jobless benefits, a position Democrats feared could have sunk Biden's $1.9 trillion Covid relief plan. Ultimately, he cut a deal and then backed the bill, which passed the Senate on a 50-49 vote with no GOP support.

"Anybody in a 50-50 Senate is in a position to be able to do that," said Sen. Debbie Stabenow, a Michigan Democrat and member of leadership. Asked if Manchin should be careful not to overreach, Stabenow: "I think all of us need to be careful about that."

"Here's what I'm going to say about Manchin: Everybody asks me about him. Why don't you just ask him?" said GOP Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, who also represents West Virginia. "Seriously. When you have a one-vote margin, everybody has a lot of influence. Talk to him about it."

"Tweets," Manchin said, sounding exasperated. "I don't know why people want to get on there. I really don't know."

"Here's the thing, I've been pretty differential on that, you follow me?" Manchin said of presidential nominees.

"He's just out of the mainstream of his own party with regards to abortion and with regards to religious freedom," Romney said of Becerra on Wednesday.

Other nominees could potentially hinge on winning all Democratic support, such as Vanita Gupta as the No. 3 at the Justice Department, though Manchin signaled he has yet to review her nomination.

"I wanted Donald Trump to succeed," Manchin said in the interview. "I want Joe Biden to succeed. ... But like he said, 'Joe,' he said, 'I've never asked you to go against your convictions.' And I told him, 'I appreciate that, Mr. President, because I won't.' "

"It would be nice to find some common ground first," Tester said of trying to win over Republicans before moving ahead on reconciliation. He added with a laugh: "But I don't want to sound like Joe Manchin."

"The red line is having minority participation in your process," Manchin said. "That's the way we were designed. ... I haven't seen any reason to come off the 60."

"I hope he sticks to his guns," said Sen. Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina. "I'm sure Robert Byrd would want him to. And the people of West Virginia. We cease to be the Senate if that goes away."

Still, to call it a pandemic felt momentous and weighty.

A couple of days later, WHO adopted the same language.

WHO had been sounding the alarm steadily for nearly six weeks, since January 30, 2020, when the director general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, declared the situation a "public health emergency of international concern" -- the highest level of health alert under international law. The definition is "an extraordinary event that may constitute a public health risk to other countries through international spread of disease and may require an international coordinated response."

While every country has responded to the emerging threat in its own way, some countries took the early warnings more seriously, she said.

"It wasn't about rich or poor countries. It was about experience. It was about those countries that knew the threat that this was; they heeded our warnings," said Van Kerkhove. That experience came from dealing with previous infectious outbreaks, such as SARS, MERS and Ebola. And those countries quickly implemented strong public health measures, mobilized community health workers, contact tracers and lab technicians. Van Kerkhove points to places like South Korea, Japan and Nigeria -- all of which managed to keep transmission of this novel virus relatively under control.

The US has more than 29 million total reported cases and more than half a million deaths. South Korea? Fewer than 100,000 cases and less than 2,000 deaths. You can't dismiss that as the US having a higher population than South Korea, because when you look at the per capita deaths per 100,000 population, the US has more than 161 compared with South Korea's 3.2.

How did they do it? By being strategic and leveraging the tools they had at their disposal, Van Kerkhove said. "They looked at the situation that they were in. They enhanced their cluster investigation. ... They ramped up their screening capacity, their testing capacity. They used quarantine effectively and they brought that outbreak under control. But at one point in time, it seemed almost impossible -- and they turned it around," she said.

But that's changing, thanks to COVAX, a global initiative that promotes equitable access for developing nations to Covid-19 vaccines. Led by the WHO and other organizations, COVAX delivered 20 million vaccine doses to 20 countries last week during the first week of distribution, according to WHO Director-General Tedros. An additional 14.4 million vaccine doses are slated to go out this week to an another 31 countries.

"I have glimmers of hope in many countries around the world," Van Kerkhove said, pointing to places such as Australia, New Zealand, China and Japan. "I see societies that are opened up. I see sporting events that are happening. I see a resilient community that is living their life, that has driven transmission down in some situations to zero."

CNN chief medical correspondent Sanjay Gupta asked Birx how much of a difference she thinks it would have made had the United States “mitigated earlier, … paused earlier and actually done it,” referring to extending shutdowns, urging people to wear masks and implementing other steps to slow the spread of the virus.

Since last February, more than 549,000 people in the United States have died of the coronavirus. The initial rise in cases in spring 2020 was followed by another spike that summer, then a post-holiday surge over the winter that led to the deadliest month for the country so far, when an average of 3,100 people died every day of covid-19 in January.

Trump, who later admitted that he initially tried to downplay the seriousness of the virus, at first compared it to the flu and suggested the media was in “hysteria mode.”

“The malicious incompetence that resulted in hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths starts at the top, with the former President and his enablers,” Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) tweeted. “And who was one of his enablers? Dr. Birx, who was afraid to challenge his unscientific rhetoric and wrongfully praised him.”

Birx, who headed the White House’s efforts to combat the coronavirus throughout that period, has been criticized for not speaking more frequently and more forcefully against Trump. Last March, Birx praised Trump for being “so attentive to the scientific literature and the details and the data” with regards to the outbreak.

Attacks from Trump's allies led to enhanced security. In August, Fauci told CNN's Sanjay Gupta he had to get security protection after his family received death threats and harassment.

To those who reached out fearful of what could be coming, Fauci was honest -- both about what experts knew and didn't know.

"I'm chronically fatigued, I don't get a lot of sleep," he said. "I'm constantly briefing, talking, doing things, hopefully getting the right cause out."

Their turbulent relationship stands in stark contrast to President Joe Biden's elevation of Fauci to chief medical adviser -- a role where he's been free to promote public health advice without scorn from the Oval Office.

the available vaccines slash the odds that infected people will spread the virus onward by at least half and likely more. In the rare cases that the virus breaks through, infections are generally milder, shorter, and lower in viral load.

Worryingly, a recent study documented several cases during India’s spring surge in which health-care workers who were fully vaccinated with AstraZeneca’s vaccine were infected by Delta and passed it on.

If other vaccines have similar vulnerabilities, vaccinated people might have to keep wearing masks indoors to avoid slingshotting the virus into unvaccinated communities

2. The variants are pummeling unvaccinated people.

Vaccinated people are safer than ever despite the variants. But unvaccinated people are in more danger than ever because of the variants.

While America worries about the fate of states where around 40 percent of people are fully vaccinated, barely 10 percent of the world’s population has achieved that status, including just 1 percent of Africa’s.

Many nations that excelled at protecting their citizens are now facing a triple threat: They controlled COVID-19 so well that they have little natural immunity; they don’t have access to vaccines; and they’re besieged by Delta.

richer nations would be wrong to think that the variants will spare them, because ...3. The longer Principle No. 2 continues, the less likely No. 1 will hold.

it’s how we might eventually face variants that can truly infect even vaccinated people.

“We have to assume that’s going to happen,” Gupta told me. “The more infections are permitted, the more probable immune escape becomes.”

We’re unlikely to be as vulnerable as we were at the beginning of the pandemic. The vaccines induce a variety of protective antibodies and immune cells, so it’s hard for a variant virus to evade them all. These defenses also vary from person to person, so even if a virus eludes one person’s set, it might be stymied when it jumps into a new host.

“I don’t think there’ll suddenly be a variant that pops up and evades everything, and suddenly our vaccines are useless,” Gupta told me. “It’ll be incremental: With every stepwise change in the virus, a chunk of protection is lost in individuals. And people on the edges—the vulnerable who haven’t mounted a full response—will end up bearing the cost.”

The discussion about vaccine-beating variants echoes the early debates about whether SARS-CoV-2 would go pandemic. “We don’t think too well as a society about low-probability events that have far-reaching consequences,”

even highly vaccinated nations should continue investing in other measures that can control COVID-19 but have been inadequately used—improved ventilation, widespread rapid tests, smarter contact tracing, better masks, places in which sick people can isolate, and policies like paid sick leave.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was forced into quarantine after being exposed to someone who had tested positive for the coronavirus after hosting a string of large, indoor holiday parties at the State Department and attending a private party Saturday to watch the annual Army-Navy football game

The president, who recovered from his own bout with the virus after being treated with experimental drugs at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, is described by aides and allies as preoccupied with the election results he still refuses to accept, and has shown no interest in participating in any kind of public health message.

Instead, Mr. Trump has been focused on his efforts to overturn the election results and consumed by his anger at Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, who this week finally congratulated Mr. Biden on his victory and said that “the Electoral College has spoken.”

After months of positioning himself in opposition to public health experts, people familiar with his thinking said, Mr. Trump feels on some level as if he does not want to be seen as caving in the end to the advice of the same people he has disparaged.

As Mr. Trump hesitates, lawmakers and Supreme Court justices are expected to begin receiving vaccines in the coming days, though the doses will be limited.

Public health officials said they were pleased that the vice president was going to be vaccinated in public, along with Surgeon General Jerome Adams, despite the president’s own lack of interest in sending a similar public health message.

“The question is why don’t they do it together, six feet apart? It would be really powerful for the president, who has gotten exceptional treatment, to say that even in spite of getting the best care, it’s important that I get this vaccine.”

Mr. Trump’s decision, so far, to not get vaccinated, Dr. Gupta said, risked undermining any confidence that Mr. Pence might instill among skeptics who take their cues from the president alone.

“giving false reassurances to the American people that the vaccine is here and vigilance is no longer required.”

White House officials have said Mr. Trump does not need to get vaccinated because he still has the protective effects of the monoclonal antibody cocktail that was used to treat him for the virus in October. But Dr. Gupta said that was a misinterpretation of the results and that there was “no scientific reason not to get vaccinated.”

Mr. Trump said on Sunday that he would delay a plan for senior White House staff members to receive the coronavirus vaccine in the coming days

Doctors from Walter Reed this week set up vaccine stations inside the Indian Treaty Room in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. There, they began vaccinating staff considered critical to the functioning of government: That included Secret Service members, some medical staff and some other support staff who work near Mr. Trump.

“His priority is frontline workers, those in long-term care facilities, and he wants to make sure that the vulnerable get access first,” Ms. McEnany said this week. When it came to staff working in the West Wing, she added, “it will be a very limited group of people who have access to it, initially.”

Mr. Pence, people familiar with his thinking said, was concerned about the optics of jumping the line, when he wanted the administration to receive credit for the distribution of an effective vaccine to frontline medical workers without any distractions.

"In order to make sure this is a successful decree, we got to make sure that this something we can implement, something we can afford," Knowles said.

"Their vote to do so creates an unnecessary delay in the essential work to bring constitutional policing to the city and marks an unfortunate outcome for concerned community members and Ferguson police officers."

The Ferguson City Council has attempted to unilaterally amend the negotiated agreement,"

"This is not going away. We have to pay," Patricia Cowan, 54, told council members. "We need to think about where we’re at, and we need to move forward."

"My fear is that with your vote that Ferguson will cease to exist," said Susan Ankenbrand, 73, who has lived in the city for 41 years. "I would rather lose our city by fighting in court than losing it to DOJ’s crushing demands."

The tentative agreement reached last month calls for Ferguson to pay the cost of a Justice Department monitor for at least three years and purchase software and hire staff to maintain data on arrests, traffic stops and use-of-force incidents. It calls for a revision in the police department's training with an emphasis "toward de-escalation and avoiding force — particularly deadly force — except where necessary."

"since time immemorial"

“We reject this argument out of hand as an affront to democracy," said Sherilyn Ifill, president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. "All public institutions, including police departments, must operate in accordance with the U.S. Constitution."

This week, some White House officials privately said certain steps taken over the past two months by the CDC were ill-advised. A delay in developing adequate tests -- a critical breakdown in the administration's response -- is being pinned on the leaders of the CDC, FDA and HHS by Trump's allies, who say the failure has led to embarrassing questions of competence for the administration.

The most revealing false claim: The flu mortality rate

VirusesAwareness of Ebola in 2014Comparing the coronavirus outbreak with the Ebola situation of 2014, Trump said, "At that time, nobody had ever even heard of Ebola." -- February 25 press conference in New Delhi, India "Nobody knew anything about it. Nobody had ever heard of anything like this." -- February 26 coronavirus press conference Facts First: Some Americans certainly didn't know a whole lot about Ebola before 2014, but the claims that "nobody" had ever even heard of Ebola and that "nobody" knew anything about it are absurd. Ebola was discovered in 1976. It had been the subject of considerable media coverage in the next three decades, not to mention scientific study.

Gupta, CNN chief medical correspondent, told Trump at a press conference, "Mr. President, you talked about the flu and then in comparison to the coronavirus. The flu has a fatality ratio of about 0.1%." Trump said, "Correct." But Trump later disputed the figure, saying, "And the flu is higher than that. The flu is much higher than that." -- February 26 coronavirus press conferenceFacts First: Even if Trump meant that the flu has a "much higher" fatality rate than 0.1% -- rather than meaning that the flu's mortality rate is "much higher" than that of the novel coronavirus -- he was wrong. The mortality rate for seasonal flu is "about 0.1%, 0.2% at the most," Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health -- who appeared with Trump at this same news conference -- told this to USA Today in mid-February, echoing the comments of other experts and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data since 2010.

Though these moments could be inconsequential, they call attention to the alarming absence of a system to evaluate elected officials’ fitness for office—to reassure concerned citizens that the “leader of the free world” is not cognitively impaired, and on a path of continuous decline.

Trump was once a more articulate person who sometimes told stories that had beginnings, middles, and ends, whereas he now leaps from thought to thought. He has come to rely on a small stable of adjectives, often involving superlatives. An improbably high proportion of what he describes is either the greatest or the worst he’s ever seen; absolutely terrible or the best; tiny or huge.

Ben Michaelis, a psychologist who analyzes speech as part of cognitive assessments in court cases, told Begley that although some decline in cognitive functioning would be expected, Trump has exhibited a “clear reduction in linguistic sophistication over time” with “simpler word choices and sentence structure.”

She was put in an impossible predicament, something Birx has been vocal about since she left the White House, most recently in a much-hyped CNN interview with Sanjay Gupta that aired this past weekend.

unlike Fauci, who stumbled more than once but managed to stay truthful enough to get himself ostracized by Team Trump, Birx practiced some impressive moral yoga in her defense of the president’s response.

Birx operated on the same premise that many others in senior roles, including career soldiers such as former White House chief of staff John F. Kelly and onetime national security adviser H.R. McMaster, accepted as well.

She apparently woke up every morning believing it was nobler to try to manage an ignorant, mercurial president than it was to speak out publicly and risk losing all influence.

She no doubt told herself she had an obligation, as a policy expert, to do whatever she could to protect Americans from the administration’s abject incompetence. And if that meant she had to echo untruths and offer up a bunch of silly praise, so be it.

This was Birx’s dilemma: to work within the system and maybe mitigate the tragedy, or to say what she knew and resign herself to powerlessness.

What we do know is that, by tempering her remarks, Birx enabled and amplified Trump’s lies — that the virus was a media creation, that reopening the economy wasn’t dangerous, that the government had things under control.

the larger lesson here — as though we should have to learn it again — is that appeasement never works.

It doesn’t work for nations facing down aggressors. It doesn’t work for a political party that’s been taken over by a nativist bully. And it doesn’t work when you’re serving a president who demands unyielding loyalty and a willful disregard for the truth.