In Brief: December 23, 2020

US close on deal with Pfizer for millions more vaccine doses

WASHINGTON — The U.S. government is close to a deal to acquire tens of millions of additional doses of Pfizer’s vaccine in exchange for helping the pharmaceutical giant gain better access to manufacturing supplies.

A person with knowledge of the negotiations told The Associated Press on Tuesday that the deal is under discussion and could be finalized shortly. The person spoke on condition of anonymity to describe ongoing deliberations.

Pfizer’s vaccine was the first to gain approval from the Food and Drug Administration and initial shipments went to states last week. It has now been joined by a vaccine from Moderna, which was developed in closer cooperation with scientists from the National Institutes of Health.

Moderna’s vaccine comes under the umbrella of the government’s own effort, which is called Operation Warp Speed. That public-private endeavor was designed to have millions of vaccine doses ready and available to ship once a shot received FDA approval.

But another deal with Pfizer would move the nation closer to the goal of vaccinating all Americans.

Dominion worker sues Trump campaign and conservative media

NEW YORK — An election systems worker driven into hiding by death threats has filed a defamation lawsuit against President Donald Trump’s campaign, two of its lawyers and some conservative media figures and outlets.

Eric Coomer, security director at the Colorado-based Dominion Voting Systems, said he wants his life back after being named in false charges as a key actor in “rigging” the election for President-elect Joe Biden. There has been no evidence that the election was rigged.

His lawsuit, filed Tuesday in district court in Denver County, Colorado, names the Trump campaign, lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell, conservative columnist Michelle Malkin, the website Gateway Pundit, Colorado conservative activist Joseph Oltmann, and conservative media Newsmax and One America News Network.

“I have been thrust into the public spotlight by people with political and financial agendas but, at heart, I am a private person,” Coomer said in a statement.

“While I intend to do everything I can to recapture my prior lifestyle, I have few illusions in this regard,” he said. “And so, today, I put my trust in the legal process, which has already exposed the truth of the 2020 presidential election.”

Biden: Trump ‘failed’ to shore up nation’s cybersecurity

WILMINGTON, Del. — President-elect Joe Biden on Tuesday assailed the Trump administration for failing to fortify the nation’s cyber defenses, and called on President Donald Trump to publicly identify the perpetrator of a massive breach of U.S. government agencies — a hack some of Trump’s top allies have blamed on Russia.

Biden, who is being briefed on high-level intelligence in preparation for taking office next month, said planning for the hack began as early as 2019. Several federal agencies, including the Treasury Department, have said they were targeted.

“There’s still so much we don’t know,” Biden said during a news conference in Wilmington, Delaware. “But we know this much: This attack constitutes a grave risk to our national security. It was carefully planned and carefully orchestrated.”

The U.S. government has not made a formal assessment of who was behind the attack, but both Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Attorney General William Barr have said all signs point to Russia. But Trump, who has long sidestepped blaming Moscow for its provocations, has not followed suit and has instead suggested — without evidence — that China may have carried out the hack.

The breach of the Treasury Department began in July, but experts believe the overall hacking operation began months earlier when malicious code was slipped into updates to popular software that monitors computer networks of businesses and governments.

From wire sources

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Feds sue Walmart over role in opioid crisis

WASHINGTON — The Justice Department sued Walmart on Tuesday, accusing it of fueling the nation’s opioid crisis by pressuring its pharmacies to fill even potentially suspicious prescriptions for the powerful painkillers.

The civil complaint filed points to the role Walmart’s pharmacies may have played in the crisis by filling opioid prescriptions and Walmart’s own responsibility for the allegedly illegal distribution of controlled substances to the pharmacies at the height of the opioid crisis. Walmart operates more than 5,000 pharmacies in its stores around the country.

The Justice Department alleges Walmart violated federal law by selling thousands of prescriptions for controlled substances that its pharmacists “knew were invalid,” said Jeffrey Clark, the acting assistant attorney general in charge of the Justice Department’s civil division.

Federal law required Walmart to spot suspicious orders for controlled substances and report those to the Drug Enforcement Administration, but prosecutors charge the company didn’t do that.

“Walmart knew that its distribution centers were using an inadequate system for detecting and reporting suspicious orders,” said Jason Dunn, the U.S. attorney in Colorado. “For years, Walmart reported virtually no suspicious orders at all. In other words, Walmart’s pharmacies ordered opioids in a way that went essentially unmonitored and unregulated.”

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Biden: Reversing Trump border policies will take months

WILMINGTON, Del. — President-elect Joe Biden says it will take months to roll back some of President Donald Trump’s actions on immigration, tempering expectations he generated during his campaign and one that may rile advocates pushing for speedy action on the issue.

His Tuesday comments echo those made by two of his top foreign policy advisers in an interview with Spanish wire service EFE on Monday hitting the brakes on rolling back Trump’s restrictive asylum policies. Susan Rice, Biden’s incoming domestic policy adviser, and Jake Sullivan, his pick for national security adviser, as well as Biden himself, warned that moving too quickly could create a new crisis at the border.

Speaking to reporters in Wilmington, Delaware Wednesday, Biden said he’s already started discussing the issues with the Mexican president and “our friends in Latin America” and that “the timeline is to do it so that we in fact make it better not worse.”

“The last thing we need is to say we’re going to stop immediately, the access to asylum, the way it’s being run now, and then end up with 2 million people on our border,” Biden said.

He noted that more funding is needed for more asylum judges to process claims, and promised that while he will work to loosen Trump’s asylum restrictions, “it’s going to take probably the next six months to put that in place.”

Mayor: Body cam not activated in police killing of Black man

COLUMBUS, Ohio — A police officer who shot and killed a Black man holding a cell phone in Ohio’s capital city early Tuesday did not activate his body camera beforehand, and dash cameras on the officers’ cruiser were also not activated, city officials said.

Because of an automatic “look back” feature on the body camera, the shooting was captured on video but without audio, said Columbus Mayor Andrew Ginther and the city’s department of public safety. As a result, there’s no way to hear what the 47-year-old man or the officer said during the interaction, Ginther said.

Neither the man nor the officer has been publicly identified.

Body camera footage from immediately after the shooting indicated “a delay in rendering of first-aid to the man,” the public safety department said in a news release.

“It is unacceptable to me and the community that officers did not turn on their cameras,” Ginther said during a news conference. Columbus Police Chief Thomas Quinlan echoed the sentiment in a statement a few minutes later.

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Critics say EPA allowing more time to fix lead-tainted water

The Trump administration overhauled the country’s widely criticized, 29-year-old framework to eliminate toxic lead from drinking water on Tuesday, but critics charge that the new rule gives utilities far more time than before to finally replace old, lead-contaminated pipes.

The new rules come six years after the Flint, Michigan, water crisis highlighted ongoing, dangerous exposure of children and others in the city to the neurotoxin in drinking water, and the failures of officials on all levels to adequately protect local families at the time.

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Andrew Wheeler said Tuesday the new regulation, proposed by the agency in 2019, “requires more replacements than ever before” for aging water systems leaching lead.

“It will help ensure that all Americans have access to safe drinking water, regardless of what zip code they live in,” Wheeler said. More than half of the residents of Flint were Black, and residents and advocacy groups have said systemic racism is behind the neglect of the water system and slow response to the crisis. Thousands of Flint children and adults were exposed to lead, which can damage young people’s development and cause behavioral problems.

Changes in the rule include newly requiring utilities to test their water at schools and day-care centers nationwide and requiring water systems to tell the public the location of lead service lines.