US president-elect Joe Biden on Thursday said that he would ask Americans to commit to 100 days of wearing masks as one of his first acts as president, stopping just short of a nationwide mandate he has pushed before to stop the spread of COVID-19.
The move marks a notable shift from US President Donald Trump, whose own skepticism of mask-wearing has contributed to a politicization of the issue.
That has made many Americans reticent to embrace a practice that public health experts say is one of the easiest ways to manage the pandemic, which has killed more than 275,000 people in the US.
Photo: AP
Biden has frequently emphasized mask-wearing as a “patriotic duty” and during the campaign floated the idea of instituting a nationwide mask mandate, which he later acknowledged would be beyond the ability of the president to enforce.
Speaking with CNN’s Jake Tapper, Biden said that he would make the request to Americans on his first day in office, Jan. 20.
“On the first day I’m inaugurated, I’m going to ask the public for 100 days to mask. Just 100 days to mask — not forever, just 100 days. And I think we’ll see a significant reduction,” the president-elect said.
Biden reiterated his call for US lawmakers to pass a COVID-19 aid bill and expressed support for a US$900 billion compromise bill that a bipartisan group of legislators introduced this week.
“That would be a good start. It’s not enough,” Biden said. “I’m going to need to ask for more help.”
Biden has said that his transition team is working on its own COVID-19 relief package, and his aides have signaled that they plan for that to be their first legislative push.
Biden also said that he asked US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Anthony Fauci to stay on in his administration, “in the exact same role he’s had for the past several presidents.”
Biden said he has asked Fauci to be the “chief medical adviser” on his COVID-19 team.
Regarding a COVID-19 vaccine, Biden offered begrudging credit for the work the Trump administration has done in expediting the development of a vaccine, but said that planning the distribution properly would be “critically important.”
“It’s a really difficult but doable project, but it has to be well planned,” Biden said.
Part of the challenge the Biden administration would face in distributing the vaccine would be instilling public confidence in it.
Biden said that he would be happy to get inoculated in public to assuage any concerns about its efficacy and safety.
Three former US presidents — Barack Obama, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton — have said that they would also get vaccinated publicly to show that it is safe.
“People have lost faith in the ability of the vaccine to work,” Biden said, adding that “it matters what a president and the vice president do.”
In the same interview, Biden also weighed in on reports that Trump is considering pardons of himself and his allies.
“It concerns me in terms of what kind of precedent it sets, and how the rest of the world looks at us as a nation of laws and justice,” he said.
Biden committed that the US Department of Justice would under his administration “operate independently” and that whoever he chooses to lead it would have the “independent capacity to decide who gets investigated.”
“You’re not going to see in our administration that kind of approach to pardons, nor are you going to see in our administration the approach to making policy by tweets,” he said.
In addition to considering pre-emptive pardons, Trump has spent much of his time in the past few months trying to raise questions about the US presidential election he lost by millions of votes while his lawyers pursue baseless lawsuits alleging voter fraud in multiple states.
Meanwhile, Republicans in the US Congress have largely given Trump cover, with many defending the lawsuits and few publicly congratulating Biden on his win.
However, Biden said that he has received private calls of congratulations from “more than several sitting Republican senators” and that he has confidence in his ability to cut bipartisan deals with despite the rancor that has characterized the past four years in Washington.
Trump aides have expressed skepticism that the president would attend Biden’s inauguration.
Biden on Thursday night said he believes that it is important that Trump attends, largely to demonstrate the nation’s commitment to peaceful transfer of power between political rivals.
“It is totally his decision,” Biden said. “It is of no personal consequence to me, but I think it is to the country.”
The Burmese junta has said that detained former leader Aung San Suu Kyi is “in good health,” a day after her son said he has received little information about the 80-year-old’s condition and fears she could die without him knowing. In an interview in Tokyo earlier this week, Kim Aris said he had not heard from his mother in years and believes she is being held incommunicado in the capital, Naypyidaw. Aung San Suu Kyi, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, was detained after a 2021 military coup that ousted her elected civilian government and sparked a civil war. She is serving a
China yesterday held a low-key memorial ceremony for the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) not attending, despite a diplomatic crisis between Beijing and Tokyo over Taiwan. Beijing has raged at Tokyo since Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi last month said that a hypothetical Chinese attack on Taiwan could trigger a military response from Japan. China and Japan have long sparred over their painful history. China consistently reminds its people of the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, in which it says Japanese troops killed 300,000 people in what was then its capital. A post-World War II Allied tribunal put the death toll
‘NO AMNESTY’: Tens of thousands of people joined the rally against a bill that would slash the former president’s prison term; President Lula has said he would veto the bill Tens of thousands of Brazilians on Sunday demonstrated against a bill that advanced in Congress this week that would reduce the time former president Jair Bolsonaro spends behind bars following his sentence of more than 27 years for attempting a coup. Protests took place in the capital, Brasilia, and in other major cities across the nation, including Sao Paulo, Florianopolis, Salvador and Recife. On Copacabana’s boardwalk in Rio de Janeiro, crowds composed of left-wing voters chanted “No amnesty” and “Out with Hugo Motta,” a reference to the speaker of the lower house, which approved the bill on Wednesday last week. It is
FALLEN: The nine soldiers who were killed while carrying out combat and engineering tasks in Russia were given the title of Hero of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea North Korean leader Kim Jong-un attended a welcoming ceremony for an army engineering unit that had returned home after carrying out duties in Russia, North Korean state media KCNA reported on Saturday. In a speech carried by KCNA, Kim praised officers and soldiers of the 528th Regiment of Engineers of the Korean People’s Army (KPA) for “heroic” conduct and “mass heroism” in fulfilling orders issued by the ruling Workers’ Party of Korea during a 120-day overseas deployment. Video footage released by North Korea showed uniformed soldiers disembarking from an aircraft, Kim hugging a soldier seated in a wheelchair, and soldiers and officials
RSS