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"If you want to make a new influenza vaccine using the traditional methods, you have to isolate the virus, learn how to grow it, learn how to inactivate it, and purify it. That takes months. With RNA, you only need the sequence,"

"When the Chinese released the sequence of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, we started the process of making RNA the next day. A couple weeks later, we were injecting animals with the vaccine."

Weissman's lab is now working on a universal coronavirus vaccine that would protect against Covid-19, SARS, MERS, coronavirus that cause the common cold -- and future strains.

"We started working on a pan-coronavirus vaccine last spring," Weissman said. "There have been three coronavirus epidemics in the past 20 years. There are going to be more."

The mRNA approach promises to send instructions for making the healthy version of a protein, and Weissman sees special promise in treating sickle cell disease, in particular.

Different tumor cell types have various, recognizable structures on the outside that the immune system can recognize. "You can imagine being able to inject someone with an mRNA that encodes an antibody that specifically targets that receptor," McLellan said.

"We identify mutations found on a patient's cancer cells," the company says on its website. Computer algorithms predict the 20 most common mutations. "We then create a vaccine that encodes for each of these mutations and load them onto a single mRNA molecule," Moderna says.

BioNtech has been working with academic researchers to use mRNA to treat mice genetically engineered to develop a disease similar to multiple sclerosis -- an autoimmune disease that starts when the immune system mistakenly attacks the myelin, a fatty covering of the nerve cells.In the mice, the treatment appeared to help stop the attack, while keeping the rest of the immune system intact.

The idea behind gene therapy is to replace a defective gene with one that works properly.

Another obvious use for mRNA technology is to fight cancer. The human body fights off cancer every day, and using mRNA could help it do so even better.

"It's gene therapy without the half a million dollar price tag," he added. "It should be just an IV injection and that's it."

"The idea there is if you are immune to tick saliva proteins, when the tick bites you, the body produces inflammation and the tick falls off," Weissman said.

But global warming changed things. Seas are rising. Homes are washing away. Much of the nation could become unlivable in the coming decade.Now, the Marshall Islands are putting forward a moonshot environmental plan, a carbon tax that would penalize polluters. It is a shot across the bow of the I.M.O.’s industrial and political forces.

At United Nations climate meetings, countries are typically represented by senior politicians and delegations of government officials. At the maritime organization’s environmental committee, however, one in four delegates comes from industry, according to separate analyses by The New York Times and the nonprofit group Influence Map.

The Cook Islands, another Pacific archipelago, make a similar argument. Like the Marshalls, they face rising seas and an uncertain future. But the more immediate concerns are jobs and cost of living, said Joshua Mitchell, of the country’s foreign office. “Existential questions have to be balanced against the priorities of the country in the moment,” he said.

Ultimately, France ceded to nearly all of China’s requests, records show. The dirtiest ships would not be grounded. Shipowners would file plans saying they intended to improve, would not be required to actually improve.

German delegates were so upset that they threatened to oppose the deal, likely triggering a cascade of defections, according to three people involved in the talks. But European Union officials rallied countries behind the compromise, arguing that Europe could not be seen as standing in the way even limited progress.

And just last week, delegates met in secret to debate what should constitute a passing grade under the new rating system. Under pressure from China, Brazil and others, the delegates set the bar so low that emissions can continue to rise — at roughly the same pace as if there had been no regulation at all.

Industry officials and the maritime organization say such arrangements give a voice to the experts. “If you don’t involve the people who are actually going to have to deliver, then you’re going to get a poor outcome,” said Guy Platten, secretary general of the International Chamber of Shipping.

The company, based in Virginia, did all the work and, on paper, the Marshall Islands became home to one of the world’s largest fleets. The government shared in the revenue — roughly $8 million a year as of recently, one official said.Things got thorny, however, when the foreign minister, Tony de Brum, traveled to the I.M.O. in 2015. His stories of his vanishing homeland had given urgency to the Paris talks and he expected a similar reception in London.

When delegates met last October — five years after Mr. de Brum’s speech — the organization had not taken any action. Proposals like speed limits had been debated and rejected.

German delegates were so upset that they threatened to oppose the deal, likely triggering a cascade of defections, according to three people involved in the talks. But European Union officials rallied countries behind the compromise, arguing that Europe could not be seen as standing in the way of even limited progress.

Worried about Chinese students’ high scores on comparative math tests? You’re looking at the curated outputs of highly selective groups of students. Whereas public school is free through high school in the United States, China’s government only covers the costs of elementary and middle school. At many Chinese high schools, families have to pay tuition and other expenses, and these outlays are among the highest in the world. Consequently, 76 percent of China’s working-age population has not completed high school.

The book argues that China’s economic, financial, technological, and military strength is hugely exaggerated by crude and inaccurate statistics.

The claim that China will “overtake” the U.S. in any meaningful way is polemical and wrong—and wrong in ways that may mislead Americans into serious self-harming mistakes.

China may well surpass the United States as the largest economy on Earth by the 2030s. China was also almost certainly the largest economy on Earth in the 1830s. A big GDP did not make China a superpower then

many of the advances cited as Chinese strengths don’t hold up to close scrutiny. American analysts often publish worries about China’s growing navy, and especially its two aircraft carriers. But, Beckley writes, “Chinese pilots fly 100 to 150 fewer hours than U.S. pilots and only began training on aircraft carriers in 2012,” and he adds that “Chinese troops spend 20 to 30 percent of their time studying communist ideology.”

in the 1800s, the Chinese empire had a GDP much larger than that of Great Britain. The Chinese army of 800,000 men also enormously exceeded Britain’s troop numbers. Yet when the two states clashed in the two Opium Wars, from 1839 to 1842 and again in 1858, China was crushingly defeated. Why? A great part of the answer, then as now, was the cost of repression.

Many Chinese college students describe their universities as “diploma factories,” where student-teacher ratios are double the average in U.S. universities, cheating is rampant, students spend a quarter of their time studying “Mao Zedong thought,” and students and professors are denied access to basic sources of information, such as Google Scholar and certain academic journal repositories.

Chinese firms’ total spending on R&D as a percentage of sales revenue stalled at levels four times below the average for American firms. … Chinese firms remain dependent on foreign technologies and manual labor and have a rudimentary level of automation and digitization: on average Chinese enterprises have just nineteen robots per ten thousand employees; U.S. firms, by contrast, use an average of 176 robots per ten thousand employees.

But isn’t China sprinting to overtake the United States? Yes, but it’s stumbling badly in that pursuit. China now leads the world in retractions of scientific studies due to fraud; one-third of Chinese scientists have admitted to plagiarizing or falsifying results (versus 2 percent of U.S. scientists); and two-thirds of China’s R&D spending has been lost to corruption.

Beckley’s clarifying theoretical insight: Repression is expensive

The Chinese military’s first and paramount mission is preserving the power of the Chinese Communist Party against China’s own people. The U.S. military can focus entirely on external threats.

The lines that plot the comparative GDP of the United States and China distort the real balance of power between the two societies, Beckley argues, because China must devote such a large share of its resources to basic subsistence needs to avert the overthrow of the state.

this might be a useful moment to hear a contrary voice. In 2018, the Tufts University professor Michael Beckley published a richly detailed study of Chinese military and economic weaknesses. The book is titled Unrivaled: Why America Will Remain the World’s Sole Superpower.

Nineteenth-century China faced an average of 25 local uprisings a year. Most of its troops had to be deployed to suppress rebellions and control banditry, leaving few available for war-fighting.

A final piece of the answer is that technological copycats face huge disadvantages against technological innovators. They will always lag behind the more creative rival, not only in the factory, but on the battlefield. “Repeatedly during the Opium Wars … Chinese armies of thousands were routed in minutes by a few hundred, or even a few dozen, British troops,”

Beckley seeks to highlight the immense defects of gross GDP as a measure of national strength—factoring in the costs of repression—and the strategic predicament of China’s location, barred from the open ocean by a ring of potential enemies on its eastern front, extending from Russia, through Korea, past Japan, to the Philippines, and then to Vietnam.

He said that he had become more alarmed by China’s aggressive and repressive intentions, but remained as dubious as ever about Chinese capacities.

Sanders lost the nomination, but he won the debate within the Democratic Party over trade policy. In his address, Biden committed to extending and enlarging “Buy American” favoritism in government procurement. His administration is maintaining Trump’s anti-China tariffs and is “reviewing”—not yet removing—tariffs against the European Union and other trade partners. Biden economic advisers warned during his campaign that trade expansion would rank low on their list of priorities, and so it is proving.

The Trump administration raised the defense budget by more than $100 billion a year, and the spending increases have continued even after the campaign against ISIS came to an end. More and more of the money is being directed to preparations for a conflict with China.

China’s language and behavior is assertive and provocative, for sure. China’s power is rising, yes. Its behavior at home and abroad is becoming more oppressive and more brutal; that’s also tragically true.

as Americans muster the courage and will to face Chinese realities, that reckoning needs also to appreciate the tremendous capabilities of this country, and the very real limits besetting China: a fast-aging population, massive internal indebtedness, and a regime whose worsening repression suggests its declining popularity.

two deep truths about Chinese society: It’s about to be home to a lot of old people, and trust in the state is very low, and for good reason.

As China’s population ages, it will deplete its savings. Chinese people save a lot to compensate for the state’s meager social-security provision. For three decades, the savings of ordinary people financed the spectacular borrowing of China’s state-owned enterprises

What happens as the savings are withdrawn to finance hundreds of millions of retirements? Again—who knows?

China misallocates capital on a massive scale. More than a fifth of China’s housing stock is empty—the detritus of a frenzied construction boom that built too many apartments in the wrong places

China overcapitalizes at home because Chinese investors are prohibited from doing what they most want to do: get their money out of China. Strict and complex foreign-exchange controls block the flow of capital

More than one-third of the richest Chinese would emigrate if they could, according to research by one of the country’s leading wealth-management firms. The next best alternative: sending their children out. Pre-pandemic, almost 1 million young Chinese attended Western universities. Pre-pandemic, only about 10,000 Americans were studying in China; single thousands were from other Western countries—and almost all of them were in the country to study language, not any academic specialty.

U.S. policy makers should look to the future with a little more confidence and a lot more trust in trade, markets, and the superior potential of a free people under an elected government.

Without individual memory, a person literally loses his or her identity, and would not know how to act in encounters with others. Imagine waking up one morning unable to tell total strangers from family and friends!

what if the world is more complicated and diverse than words can ever tell? What if human minds are incapable of finding' neat pigeon holes into which everything that happens will fit?

This value of historical knowledge obviously justifies teaching and learning about what happened in recent times, for the way things are descends from the way they were yesterday and the day before that

in fact, institutions that govern a great deal of our everyday behavior took shape hundreds or even thousands of years ago

Only an acquaintance with the entire human adventure on earth allows us to understand these dimensions of contemporary reality.

Memory is not something fixed and forever. As time passes, remembered personal experiences take on new meanings.

Collective memory is quite the same. Historians are always at work reinterpreting the past, asking new questions, searching new sources and finding new meanings in old documents in order to bring the perspective of new knowledge and experience to bear on the task of understanding the past.

what we know and believe about history is always changing. In other words, our collective, codified memory alters with time just as personal memories do, and for the same reasons.

skeptics are likely to conclude that history has no right to take student time from other subjects. If what is taught today is not really true, how can it claim space in a crowded school curriculum?

Often it is enough for experts to know about outsiders, if their advice is listened to. But democratic citizenship and effective participation in the determination of public policy require citizens to share a collective memory, organized into historical knowledge and belief

What if we have to learn to live with uncertainty and probabilities, and act on the basis of the best guesswork we are capable of?

Then, surely, the changing perspectives of historical understanding are the very best introduction we can have to the practical problems of real life. Then, surely, a serious effort to understand the interplay of change and continuity in human affairs is the only adequate introduction human beings can have to the confusing flow of events that constitutes the actual, adult world.

it follows that study of history is essential for every young person.

Systematic sciences are not enough. They discount time, and therefore oversimplify reality, especially human reality.

Memory, indeed, makes us human. History, our collective memory, carefully codified and critically revised, makes us social, sharing ideas and ideals with others so as to form all sorts of different human groups

The varieties of history are enormous; facts and probabilities about the past are far too numerous for anyone to comprehend them all. Every sort of human group has its own histor

Where to start? How bring some sort of order to the enormous variety of things known and believed about the past?

But abandoning the effort to present a meaningful portrait of the entire national and civilizational past destroyed the original justification for requiring students to study history

This second course was often broadened into a survey of Western civilization in the 1930s and 1940s

But by the 1960s and 1970s these courses were becoming outdated, left behind by the rise of new kinds social and quantitative history, especially the history of women, of Blacks, and of other formerly overlooked groups within the borders of the United States, and of peoples emerging from colonial status in the world beyond our borders.

much harder to combine old with new to make an inclusive, judiciously balanced (and far less novel) introductory course for high school or college students.

Early in this century, teachers and academic administrators pretty well agreed that two sorts of history courses were needed: a survey of the national history of the United States and a survey of European history.

Competing subjects abounded, and no one could or would decide what mattered most and should take precedence. As this happened, studying history became only one among many possible ways of spending time in school.

The costs of this change are now becoming apparent, and many concerned persons agree that returning to a more structured curriculum, in which history ought to play a prominent part, is imperative.

three levels of generality seem likely to have the greatest importance for ordinary people.

First is family, local, neighborhood history

Second is national history, because that is where political power is concentrated in our time.

Last is global history, because intensified communications make encounters with all the other peoples of the earth increasingly important.

Other pasts are certainly worth attention, but are better studied in the context of a prior acquaintance with personal-local, national, and global history. That is because these three levels are the ones that affect most powerfully what all other groups and segments of society actually do.

National history that leaves out Blacks and women and other minorities is no longer acceptable; but American history that leaves out the Founding Fathers and the Constitution is not acceptable either. What is needed is a vision of the whole, warts and all.

the study of history does not lead to exact prediction of future events. Though it fosters practical wisdom, knowledge of the past does not permit anyone to know exactly what is going to happen

Consequently, the lessons of history, though supremely valuable when wisely formulated, become grossly misleading when oversimplifiers try to transfer them mechanically from one age to another, or from one place to another.

Predictable fixity is simply not the human way of behaving. Probabilities and possibilities-together with a few complete surprises-are what we live with and must learn to expect.

Second, as acquaintance with the past expands, delight in knowing more and more can and often does become an end in itself.

On the other hand, studying alien religious beliefs, strange customs, diverse family patterns and vanished social structures shows how differently various human groups have tried to cop

Broadening our humanity and extending our sensibilities by recognizing sameness and difference throughout the recorded past is therefore an important reason for studying history, and especially the history of peoples far away and long ago

For we can only know ourselves by knowing how we resemble and how we differ from others. Acquaintance with the human past is the only way to such self knowledge.

So in recent years, scientists started creating structures that resemble human embryos in the lab by using chemical signals to coax cells into forming themselves into entities that look like very primitive human embryos.

Now, Wu's team and another international team of scientists have gone further than ever before. They created hollow balls of cells that closely resemble embryos at the stage when they usually implant in the womb, which are known as blastocysts. The new laboratory-made embryos have been dubbed "blastoids."

Now with this technique we can make hundreds of these structures. So this will allow us to scale up our understanding of very early human development. We think this will be very important." Some other scientists are hailing the research.

The goal of the experiments is to gain important insights into early human development and find new ways to prevent birth defects and miscarriages and treat fertility problems.But the research, which was published in two separate papers Wednesday in the journal Nature Portfolio, raises sensitive moral and ethical concerns.

The two experiments started with different cells to get similar results. Wu's group created his blastoids from human embryonic stem cells, and from "induced pluripotent stem cells," which are made from adult cells. Polo's group started with adult skin cells.

Hyun agrees the research is very important and could lead to a many other advances. But Hyun says it's important to come up with clear guidelines about how scientists can responsibly be permitted to pursue this kind of research.

Hyun favors revising a guideline known as the 14-day rule, which prohibits experiments on human embryos in the lab beyond two weeks of their existence. Hyun says exceptions should be allowed under certain carefully reviewed conditions.

But others worry about easing the 14-day rule.That could mean "we could just keep growing these sort-of humans in a test tube and not even considering the fact that they're so close to being human, right?"

In fact, another team of scientists at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel figured out how to grow mouse embryos outside the womb — a step toward creating an "artificial womb," according to report published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

The Justice Department has been directed to draft rules regulating stabilizing braces that make AR-15 pistols, which are generally subject to fewer regulations than rifles, more stable and accurate.

The Justice Department will draft a template for states to use to write "red flag" laws that enable law enforcement and family members to seek court orders to remove firearms from people determined to be a threat to themselves or others.

"He called out, forthright, that violence is a public health crisis and that it disproportionately impacts Black and brown communities," she said. "He named that violence is the leading cause of death for Black boys and men, and the second leading cause of death for Latino boys and men. That matters.

As a member of the Senate, Biden was in the forefront of passing measures regulating guns, including a ban on sales of assault-style weapons and the Brady law, which instituted a nationwide system of background checks. But as president, Biden has been relatively cautious, calling on the Senate to pass House-approved measures expanding background checks and giving the FBI more time to process them, but he has been prioritizing other actions, such as a COVID-19 relief bill and his infrastructure and jobs plan.

Biden has been under pressure to act to curb gun violence after last month's shootings in Boulder and at several Atlanta-area businesses that killed eight people, six of whom were women of Asian descent.

"This is not the end of what this administration will do, but we thought it was very important for the president to come out early, within the first 100 days of his administration, to make clear ... that this remains a very significant priority for the administration."

Biden reiterated his call for the Senate to act on the House bills on Thursday, but it's not clear the measures have a simple majority there, much less the 60 votes they would need to overcome a Republican filibuster. Biden said members of Congress have "offered plenty of thoughts and prayers" but have failed to pass any legislation. "Enough prayers," Biden said. "Time for some action."

"If done in a manner that respects the rights of law-abiding citizens, I believe there is an opportunity to strengthen our background check system so that we are better able to keep guns away from those who have no legal right to them," Toomey said.

Biden said none of his actions "impinges on the Second Amendment," but gun rights advocates are likely to challenge the new restrictions in court.

"We will not be open to doing nothing," the president said. "Inaction, simply, is not an option." Translation: Get on board or step aside.

In remarks Wednesday pushing for his sweeping $2.3 trillion plan, Biden said he wants to meet with Republicans about it and hopes to negotiate in "good faith" — a political tenet that hasn't been practiced much in Washington, D.C., in recent years.

With the narrowest of majorities, one defection kneecaps the ability of Democrats to pass anything — even through partisan procedures such as budget reconciliation, which requires a simple majority and was used for the COVID-19 relief bill.

But Biden's overall approach to legislating so far — on a big, bold agenda — is winning plaudits from political strategists, left and right. "I am more impressed with Joe Biden than I ever thought I could be in the last few months,"

Several strategists said Biden has been more organized and disciplined out of the gate than former Democratic Presidents Obama or Bill Clinton, and they said his team's steadiness — so far — resembles someone Biden has almost nothing in common with from a policy standpoint: George W. Bush.

the Biden team's policy rollouts have been about as smooth, methodical and drama-free as you could expect, particularly given the polarized nature of our politics,"

"is effectively taking advantage of D.C.'s Trump hangover by just engaging in straightforward communications tactics."

It seems like Biden has taken a page from the Bush playbook, essentially cauterizing the chaos that defined Trump's policy announcements and replacing it with a fact-driven, drama-free approach that's working."

Biden clearly wants to do big things. On Wednesday, he made a case for a grand vision when it came to infrastructure. He drew on the past but looked to the future, and he swatted down GOP concerns about the size of the plan and criticism that he should focus on "traditional infrastructure" like roads, highways and bridges.

"We are America," the president said. "We don't just fix for today, we build for tomorrow.

Biden has been acutely aware of attempting to establish his place in history, even though he's been in office fewer than 100 days. Last month, in fact, the 78-year-old met with historians at the White House. Biden wants to be a bridge to the transformation of the country — and this infrastructure proposal is clearly a big part of that.

"He sees this as an opportunity to deliver massive change, the literal infrastructure of the country,"

"It's the return of traditional politics in a way that neither Trump nor Obama were willing to do," Simmons said, noting that "the Obama people did really good things. I think that they did not sell them very well."

"It's a Kennedy and Johnson-type dynamic,"

"Lyndon Johnson was phenomenal at working Congress, because that's what he did. President Obama was phenomenal at inspiring the public, as did Kennedy."

And while Biden would prefer bipartisanship, Cardona notes that Biden "learned the lessons of the Obama era" — not to wait around for Republican support that never materialized.

"He's not giving up on bipartisanship," she noted, "but he is living in a cold and cruel reality. ... These are things Biden has learned the hard way and taken to heart."

"We're at an inflection point in American democracy," Biden said Wednesday. "This is a moment where we prove whether or not democracy can deliver." And whether or not he can, too.

"I am more impressed with Joe Biden than I ever thought I could be in the last few months,"

"In contrast to his immediate predecessor and President Obama, the Biden team's policy rollouts have been about as smooth, methodical and drama-free as you could expect, particularly given the polarized nature of our politics,"

"The Biden team," Jones added, "is effectively taking advantage of D.C.'s Trump hangover by just engaging in straightforward communications tactics."

"It reinforces the fact that governing actually does take experience and does take knowledge,

Biden clearly wants to do big things. On Wednesday, he made a case for a grand vision when it came to infrastructure. He drew on the past but looked to the future, and he swatted down GOP concerns about the size of the plan and criticism that he should focus on "traditional infrastructure" like roads, highways and bridges.

"We are America," the president said. "We don't just fix for today, we build for tomorrow

Biden has been acutely aware of attempting to establish his place in history, even though he's been in office fewer than 100 days. Last month, in fact, the 78-year-old met with historians at the White House. Biden wants to be a bridge to the transformation of the country — and this infrastructure proposal is clearly a big part of that.

"He sees this as an opportunity to deliver massive change, the literal infrastructure of the country," said Gurwin Ahuja, who worked in the Obama administration and was an early supporter of Biden's and worked on his campaign. "His general approach of not being distracted by the day to day is why he is president. It is the singular reason he was able to defeat so many candidates when he was running in the Democratic primary."

"It's the return of traditional politics in a way that neither Trump nor Obama were willing to do," Simmons said, noting that "the Obama people did really good things. I think that they did not sell them very well."

"It's a Kennedy and Johnson-type dynamic,"

"Lyndon Johnson was phenomenal at working Congress, because that's what he did. President Obama was phenomenal at inspiring the public, as did Kennedy."

"He's not giving up on bipartisanship," she noted, "but he is living in a cold and cruel reality. ... These are things Biden has learned the hard way and taken to heart."

Biden seems very aware of that need to show competence — and results. "We're at an inflection point in American democracy," Biden said Wednesday. "This is a moment where we prove whether or not democracy can deliver." And whether or not he can, too.

As the president and his aides deliberate over pardons, Mr. Trump has also been increasingly focused on another legal matter in his final days in office: his defense team for his Senate impeachment trial.

Mr. Broidy was charged in federal court in Washington, D.C., in October and accused of failing to report work for which he was paid at least $6 million by the man accused of masterminding the alleged fraud, Jho Low, to try to influence the Justice Department investigation into the scandal.

Mr. Trump’s legal authority to pardon himself is dubious; a 1974 legal memorandum said the president can’t pardon himself, but some legal scholars disagree and the matter has never been tested in

The two men met on Sunday, and the former New York mayor isn’t currently expected to be part of the president’s team, another person familiar with the plan said, though the person cautioned: “Never say never.”

"This idiotic ruling will not prevent abortions," Cezary Jasinski, a 23-year-old student, told Reuters in central Warsaw. "But for every woman who will experience pain because of this ruling, or will be forced to give birth to a child with Down syndrome, they (court judges) will be to blame."

There were 1,100 abortions performed last year in Poland; of those, 1,074 were due to fetal abnormalities, The New York Times reports.

"In cases when the fetus doesn't have a skull or has no chance to live outside the womb, there should be a choice. We will work on this," Suski told Polish public radio, according to Reuters.

Clement Beaune, France's European Affairs minister, wrote on Twitter: "A sad day that reminds us that rights can recede if they are not defended. The fight goes on."

The months-long delay between the ruling and its implementation appears to be a result of the large protests that ensued. Last October, a planned "women's strike" drew more than 400,000 protesters across more than 400 Polish cities and towns.

Doctors in Poland can be jailed for performing illegal abortions.

The F.B.I. in 1955 learned that Mr. Seborer had defected to the Soviet bloc, the study said, but kept the information under tight security. The bureau’s information about the defector had come from infiltrators of the Communist Party of the United States, and the bureau worried about their possible exposure. The name of the undercover operation was Solo.

Democrats would have to sweep both races to draw the chamber to a tie and effectively take control when Vice President-elect Kamala Harris, who would cast tiebreaking votes when needed, is sworn in with Mr. Biden on Jan. 20.

The result was a perfect storm: A U.S. government not well prepared for a pandemic, run by a president who was slow to act after his intelligence community and public health advisers were warning about the dangers.

U.S. government over 20 years of successive administrations and Congresses failed to heed the warnings by taking basic steps that would have made it easier to quickly respond to a fast spreading and lethal pathogen. They didn't set up and fund a large volunteer medical reserve corps, for example, or build surplus hospital capacity, or create a system to quickly produce and deploy virus tests.

elected officials from both parties have never fully geared up for the biological threat, former officials and public health experts told NBC News. Each new White House deprioritized the issue, only to elevate it later after some defining event led to a presidential revelation. They then belatedly scrambled to respond with ambitious plans and initiatives, which faded after a few years.

"Here's the problem: In 10 years, if there's no pandemic, then everybody starts getting a bit relaxed," said Michael Leavitt, a former Utah governor who served as secretary of Health and Human Services in the Bush administration.

When President George W. Bush took office in 2001, Bernard wrote a transition memo. He soon learned the Bush team had eliminated his job as White House biodefense czar.

But after 9/11 and the subsequent anthrax attacks, the newly created Department of Homeland Security hired Bernard back, with added staff, to run a bio-preparedness unit.

After Bush read a book about the 1918 influenza pandemic in 2005, he forced his administration to double down on pandemic preparation, replenishing the stockpile and creating an early warning system.

officials deserved "at least a B-plus," and Mount Sinai virologist Peter Palese called the overall response "excellent." Republicans in Congress praised the CDC for developing a vaccine in six months.

When Ebola erupted in Africa in 2014, Obama brought in an outsider, Ron Klain, to run the federal response. The effort was widely praised, as was Obama's response to the 2016 Zika virus outbreak. But afterward, the Obama administration failed to fully replenish the federal stockpiles, according to research by ProPublica and USA Today.

Under Obama and a mostly Republican-controlled Congress, public health spending declined. Per capita public health spending, adjusted for inflation, rose from $39 in 1960 to $281 in 2008, and fell by 9.3 percent from 2008 to 2016, according to a 2016 study published in the American Journal of Public Health. It has fallen further under the Trump administration, records show.

During the transition from Obama to Trump, Obama officials conducted a tabletop exercise based on a pandemic with incoming Trump aides. But in his second year as president, Trump fired his top official in charge of pandemic response, Tom Bossert, and did not replace him. Trump then allowed his national security adviser to disband the NSC's global health unit. As a result, when alerts about coronavirus began to emanate from the intelligence and public health communities, there was no senior official in the White House to coordinate a response.

"Every administration has at some point in time gotten religion and realized there is a program and dusted it off and used it," Clarke told NBC News."Except this one."

"The disease-causing microbes of the planet," wrote Garrett, "far from having been defeated, [are] posing ever greater threats to humanity."

The exercise predicted many of the problems besetting the coronavirus response – confused lines of authority, shortages of medical gear, controversies over social distancing.

They failed to set up a system that would insure the rapid deployment of tests for a novel virus. And they failed to replenish a federal stockpile that hospital officials say is both insufficiently stocked and rife with defective gear.

Those failures — and the late start on gear purchases by the Trump administration — have severely hampered the U.S. response to coronavirus, said Scott Gottlieb, who ran the FDA from 2017 to 2019.

"In no way, shape or form can anyone say that we weren't warned, that the information wasn't available and shared with them," he said. "We've known about the risk of pandemics, and war gamed them literally going back some 30 years."

Biden’s weak showing in Obama-Trump country is a reminder that Democrats will need to reckon with their increasingly strained relationship to the white working class.

As we argue in our new book, Trump’s Democrats, citizens in these communities admire Trump not primarily because of defects in their personal character. Rather, they like Trump for reasons that are more cultural than psychological.

many were Trumpy well before Trump arrived on the national political stage. Some of these communities’ most beloved Democratic leaders are brazen, thin-skinned, nepotistic, and promise to provide for their constituents by cutting deals—and corners, if needed. This is partly because their political culture has been shaped by a working-class honor culture that prizes strong men and a tradition of boss-style politics that is more transactional than ideological.

These citizens also have strong loyalties to hometowns that are confronting serious social and economic problems. Unlike the Proud Boys, most Trump Democrats take more pride in their hometown than their skin color

just looking at some of the places where he performed well at the polls suggests that his appeal cannot be reduced to white nationalism.

Biden, after all, won back some of these states by the slimmest of margins despite a pandemic and slumping economy hanging over the head of the incumbent president

it really took a plague to drive Donald Trump from office.

even if Democrats are somehow able to consistently cobble together winning coalitions without these voters, they still have to ask themselves a more existential question: What kind of party do they want theirs to become? More pointedly, do they want to have a broad-based party of the American working class?

progressives need to better understand the cultural chasm that divides blue communities in college towns and urban centers from those that lie behind the Democrats’ tattered blue wall.

Republicans, meanwhile, face a different challenge. They need to dispense with Trumpism without alienating the president’s new enthusiasts. To walk that tightrope, they need a far better cultural understanding of these Obama-Trump voters

For Never Trumpers that begins by resisting the temptation to read Trump’s deplorableness back into his supporters.

78 percent of white evangelical voters are Republicans or lean Republican. So are 62 percent of white men without a college degree, 60 percent of rural southerners and 57 percent of people who attend religious services weekly.

the percentage of Americans who are not affiliated with a religion keeps rising — up 9 percentage points since 2009, to 26 percent in 2019 — and the percentage of people identifying as Christians keeps falling — down 12 percentage points, to 65 percent over the same decade

Lastly, the percentage of Americans with college degrees keeps rising, moving from 4.6 percent in 1940 to 36 percent in 2019.

Conservatives see all of these trends, and they are alarmed. So, they want to freeze time, or even turn it back. Their reading of the Constitution is stuck in the understanding of it when it was written. It is the same for religious texts. They want to return to a pre-1960s era, before the civil rights movement, women’s rights movement and the gay rights movement, before the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 and Roe v. Wade, before the Affordable Care Act and gay marriage, before there was a Black president and a browning country.

This is why they happily cheer Trump’s attack on immigrants — both legal and undocumented. It is why they encourage efforts to disenfranchise voters. It is why Trump’s attacks on cities resonate, as does his MAGA mantra.

Social progress is now on the chopping block. In this way, for many of us, Donald Trump’s legacy will likely be with us for the rest of our lives.

Let’s imagine the initial focus had remained instead on a demand to tackle discrimination in policing and criminal justice, expanding to include the higher death rates from Covid-19 among black Britons. Johnson and others in power would now be on the defensive, forced to promise action.

Conservative senators are pushing for a swift vote before Nov. 3. The Senate Judiciary chairman who will shepherd the nomination through the chamber said Republicans have the support they need for confirmation.

Democrats point to hypocrisy in Republicans trying to rush through a pick so close to the election after McConnell led the GOP in refusing to vote on a nominee of President Barack Obama in February 2016, long before that year’s election.

The nominee is going to be supported by every Republican in the Judiciary Committee

We’ve got the votes to confirm the justice on the floor of the Senate before the election and that’s what’s coming.

But he acknowledged the court will shift to become more conservative.

Trump told confidants he was “saving” Barrett for Ginsburg’s seat.

Barrett has long expressed sympathy with a mode of interpreting the Constitution called originalism, in which justices try to decipher original meanings of texts in deciding cases

Biden was appealing to GOP senators to “uphold your constitutional duty, your conscience” and wait until after the election.

No nominee has won confirmation so quickly since Sandra Day O’Connor — with no opposition from either party — became the first woman to serve on the Supreme Court in 1981.

Trump criticized Republican Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska for opposing a vote before elections. The president warned they would be “very badly hurt” by voters.