Background Briefing: January 21, 2021

On By gram

 

Biden Rejoins the WHO and Joins the Fight Against Covid as Mutations Race Against Vaccinations

We begin with the flurry of executive orders coming from President Biden, most associated with trying to get control of the Covid-19 pandemic which has claimed over 400,000 American lives and will likely kill over a half a million of our fellow citizens before the current vaccines stop it, assuming the virus does not outrun us in the race between vaccination and mutation. Lawrence Gostin, University Professor and Founding Chair in Global Health at Georgetown University Law Center and Director of the World Health Organization Collaborating Center on National and Global Health Law, joins us to discuss the Biden Administration’s pledge “We can and will beat Covid-19. America deserves a response to the Covid-19 pandemic that is driven by science, data and public health – not politics.” We also examine the importance of the U.S. rejoining the World Health Organization which was done by a Biden Executive Order.

 

How Biden Will Navigate a New Political Landscape Reshaped by Trump

Then we speak with Samuel Moyn, the Henry R. Luce Professor of Jurisprudence at Yale Law School and a Professor of History at Yale University and the author of Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World. He joins us to discuss his article at The Atlantic, “The Presidency Won’t go Back to How it Was: President Joe Biden – and those who follow him – will navigate a new political landscape, reshaped by four years of Donald Trump.”

 

Fox Moves to the Right and the Collapse of QAnon

Then finally we look into how Rupert Murdoch will see to it that there will be no unity and healing of the divide in this country that Fox News has done a lot to create, as he moves to fire professional journalists who rightly predicted the Arizona results and installs more rabid opinionators instead of journalists in the Fox lineup to try and stop the loss of viewers to the more insane fringes of the Right on Newsmax and OAN. Jared Holt, a visiting research fellow at The Atlantic Council Digital Forensic Lab who specializes in right-wing media and social media, joins us to discuss the collapse of the QAnon movement and how instead of broadcasting the inauguration concert and celebration last night, Fox propagandists were going on about Hunter Biden.