Today’s edition of quick hits:
* Vaccine news: “Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccine is 94 percent effective at preventing symptomatic illness and appears to prevent the spread of the virus as well, according to documents released Tuesday. The findings set the Moderna vaccine up for emergency use authorization by the Food and Drug Administration by the end of this week, meaning Americans could soon have two highly effective Covid-19 vaccines, after the first shots of Pfizer-BioNTech’s vaccine were given to health care workers on Monday.”
* On a related note: “Senate Democrats are pressing the Trump administration to explain whether the United States could soon face a critical shortage of Covid-19 vaccine doses, citing recent reports that the White House passed on Pfizer’s repeated offers to purchase additional shots.”
* A practical concern: “State leaders say they are short billions of dollars in funding needed to successfully provide Covid-19 vaccinations to all Americans who want to be inoculated by health officials’ June goal.”
* New York: “President Donald Trump’s company can’t use the attorney-client privilege to shield an engineer’s documents from a property-valuation probe by New York state’s top lawyer, a judge ruled. The Trump Organization failed to provide evidence to justify extending the privilege to communications between the company’s former land-use lawyer and an engineer whose work was used to appraise a property at the center of the probe, state Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron ruled Tuesday in Manhattan.”
* Even Putin is letting Trump down: “President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia congratulated Joseph R. Biden Jr. on Tuesday on having won the American presidential election — more than a month after the Democrat became the U.S. president-elect.”
* Sanctions: “The United States has imposed long-anticipated sanctions on NATO ally Turkey over Ankara’s procurement and testing of a Russian-made S-400 air defense system.”
* SCOTUS: “The Supreme Court declined Monday to revive a Kansas law that required showing specific proof-of-citizenship documents before registering to vote, ending a fight that had continued for years.”
* Speaking of SCOTUS: “The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday ruled in favor of houses of worship in Colorado and New Jersey that opposed capacity limits on worship services.” * I find this baffling: “The state of Tennessee, despite facing an unprecedented explosion of COVID-19 cases, plans to scale back testing offered through local state-run health departments as soon as next week, NewsChannel 5 has learned.” * The latest Team Trump appointments: “The Pentagon named eight new members to the Defense Policy Board on Monday, including Trump loyalist and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, less than a month after purging many of the group’s influential members.” * Quite a story out of Michigan: “The Republican-led Michigan House of Representatives quickly stripped a lawmaker of his committee posts after he indicated there could be violence during Monday’s Electoral College vote. But it’s apparently only for the remainder of this term, which ends Dec. 31. Republican state Rep. Gary Eisen said in a radio interview Monday morning on WPHM-AM in Port Huron that he was going to participate later that day in an apparently disruptive mystery event involving the Electoral College vote and that he couldn’t rule out violence.” See you tomorrow.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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