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Two of these are everything and two of these are (likely) nothing.
Let’s spend our collective Tuesday figuring out which is/are which.
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A.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin has signaled anew that he’s still not ready to back his party’s $2 trillion social and environment legislation, then talked to President Joe Biden as party leaders scrambled for a pathway to advance the long-stalled package — preferably by Christmas.
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B.
Gerard Baker making the anti-Biden case in a Wall Street Journal column:
So the Biden plan for inflation seems to involve adding to a huge increase in demand while quietly hoping that workers will get further squeezed to avoid a wage-price spiral of the kind we saw in the 1970s. All this while the Fed is so far behind the curve it can’t see the curve.
If it doesn’t sound like much of a plan, don’t worry, it’s only transitory.
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C.
BEIJING — Chinese President Xi Jinping is set to meet virtually with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday, China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said Monday.
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D.
CAPE TOWN, South Africa — Omicron appears to cause less severe illness than earlier variants of the coronavirus but is more resistant to the two-dose Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine widely used in South Africa, according to the first major private study since omicron was first detected last month.
The study by Discovery Health, South Africa’s largest health insurer, of 211,000 positive coronavirus cases showed that risk of hospital admissions among adults who contracted covid-19 was 29 percent lower than in the initial pandemic wave that emerged in March 2020.
However, the study found that the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine provided just 33 percent protection against infection, much less than the level for other variants detected in the country so far. At the same time, the vaccine provided 70 percent protection against severe complications that would require a patient to be hospitalized, the study found, calling that “very good protection.”
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