Member of Biden’s transition press corps tests positive for coronavirus

A member of President-elect Joe Biden’s transition press corps tested positive for Covid-19 on Wednesday, according to the White House Correspondents’ Association — potentially exposing incoming administration officials to the highly contagious disease just weeks from Inauguration Day.

The infected individual “is experiencing mild symptoms and is now isolating,” WHCA President Zeke Miller, a reporter for The Associated Press, said in a statement. The individual “had previously served in the protective pool on Monday and Tuesday.”

Medical advisers on Biden’s transition team “are still in the process of conducting contact tracing and evaluating potential close contacts,” Miller said, and a pool of journalists “that was not in contact with this individual” is in Delaware covering the president-elect.

The news comes as Biden and his advisers are still debating when he will receive the recently authorized coronavirus vaccine, which he has already committed to taking publicly.

“We’re working on that right now. I don’t want to get ahead of the line, but I want to make sure that we demonstrate to the American people that it is safe to take,” Biden said Wednesday, speaking at an introductory event for his Transportation secretary pick, Pete Buttigieg.

Biden’s campaign went to great lengths during the 2020 White House race to practice social distancing and other mitigation measures, both to shield the septuagenarian candidate from infection and to model healthy behavior for Americans.

President Donald Trump and his allies frequently mocked Biden for his strict following of public health guidance, which resulted in diminished crowd sizes for the Democratic nominee’s campaign events or entirely virtual appearances which Biden made from his Delaware home.

Meanwhile, Trump continued to headline large-scale, in-person rallies with no mask-wearing or social distancing requirements. Numerous top campaign aides and senior administration officials became infected across three separate White House outbreaks, and Trump himself ultimately was hospitalized with Covid-19 in October.

Biden’s most high-profile brush with the virus came as a result of Trump’s own infection, when the two candidates participated in their first televised debate in Cleveland just days before the president’s positive diagnosis.

More recently, Vice President-elect Kamala Harris was forced to cancel a weekend of campaign travel in October after her communications director and a member of her flight crew tested positive for Covid-19.

Biden’s transition team has already signaled that his adherence to coronavirus-related health directives will carry into his White House and influence the operations of the next administration. On Tuesday, the president-elect’s inaugural committee advised Americans against traveling to attend his swearing-in and previewed a “reimagined” ceremonial parade.

Louisville mayor blasts proposal to only extend eviction ban by 30 days

Mayor Greg Fischer of Louisville, Ky., president of the United States Conference of Mayors, warned Tuesday that the looming expiration of the federal eviction moratorium represented a “real-time present danger to the entire country.”

In a POLITICO Live town hall event focused on housing inequality, Fischer also criticized a provision included in the $748 billion compromise stimulus bill that would extend the ban, issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, by one month.

“Let’s think about that for a minute. Thirty days,” Fischer said. “[When] most people know that they’re going to have a problem coming up, they’ve got to start planning well before 30 days. So to Band-Aid this problem right now in the midst of this pandemic is unconscionable.”

The CDC’s eviction ban is set to end on Dec. 31, but the package proposed by a bipartisan working group of senators would push the expiration date to Jan. 31. Congressional leaders were due to meet Tuesday afternoon with an aim to negotiate some form of relief measure before the end of the week.

Instead of a month-long extension of the eviction ban, however, Fischer called for a “longer-term solution” that could be tied to economic recovery and the implementation of vaccine distribution programs.

“In the meantime,” Fischer said, “what cities are doing … are assisting with eviction prevention programs, either through rent assistance, utility assistance, [or] working in the courts to make sure that there’s somebody right there when somebody has an eviction problem.”

Local leaders are also working with landlords “to make sure that they know what their avenues are, so that they can collect their rent” through grant services and other resources, Fischer said. But “when we find bad actors out there, in terms of landlords, we’re able to come down on them with consequences.”

Black and Latino tenants are likely to be disproportionately hurt by the end of the eviction ban, as they are twice as likely to rent as white people. The mass evictions could exacerbate the country’s racial wealth gap while also rendering millions of families homeless during the most deadly stage of the pandemic.

Slaoui urges Trump to encourage supporters to get vaccine

The scientist leading the Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed beseeched the president on Tuesday to use his platform to promote the newly arrived coronavirus vaccines to his core supporters.

“There's a whole fringe of the population that listens to the president very carefully, and therefore he has an important role,” Moncef Slaoui said on CNN. “I know he has been very supportive of the vaccine development, so I hope he will be, of course, as supportive of its usage.”

While President Donald Trump championed the vaccine's arrival on his Twitter account, the amount of public attention he's devoted to the development has been dwarfed by his fixation on casting doubt on the integrity of the presidential election he lost and his attempts to overturn its results.

Trump over the weekend tweeted that he was “not scheduled to take the vaccine but look forward to doing so at the appropriate time.”

Anthony Fauci, the federal government’s leading infectious disease expert, said on Tuesday that Trump and President-elect Joe Biden should be inoculated as a matter of national security.

“For security reasons, I really feel strongly that we should get them vaccinated as soon as we possibly can,” he said on ABC’s “Good Morning America.” “You want him fully protected as he enters into the presidency in January. So that would be my strong recommendation.”

Slaoui said he agreed with Fauci’s recommendation, noting that both Trump and Biden are in their 70s.

“I think it is very important that our leaders — departing ones and arriving ones — are protected,” he said. “Both President Trump and President-elect Biden are both parts of the higher age group and therefore higher risk. So yeah, I think they should be vaccinated.”

The president tested positive for the disease in October, but Fauci and other experts say they should still get vaccinated due to the risk of reinfection.

“To be doubly sure, I would recommend that he get vaccinated, as well as the vice president,” Fauci said.

Trump also reversed plans to have White House staffers among the first to receive doses of the two-step vaccine, which press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said Monday was in order to ensure shots would be available to frontline health care workers and high-risk populations.

White House officials have told POLITICO they are continuing to hash out plans for a more limited universe of people to still receive shots in order to ensure government operations are not disrupted.

Biden vowed to take the vaccine in public as soon as it became available, and his transition team has been consulting with Fauci — who the president-elect has named his chief medical adviser — about the timing of when to do so.

Earlier Tuesday the Food and Drug Administration stated that the vaccine developed by Moderna was safe and effective for use in adults, positioning the drug for authorization as soon as this week.

The panel last week voted overwhelmingly in favor of a vaccine made by Pfizer based on similar mRNA technology, and FDA granted authorization for its use in people aged 16 and up Friday night.

“I think both vaccines will have a great impact on this pandemic going forward,” Slaoui said.

An independent FDA advisory panel will meet Thursday to consider recommendations for the Moderna vaccine that will be passed along to the agency, which is expected to authorize the shot soon after.

The federal government plans to ship out nearly 6 million doses of Moderna’s vaccine across 3,285 sites in the first week after the FDA gives the green light, according to Gen. Gustave Perna, Operation Warp Speed’s chief operating officer.

Biden’s inaugural committee tells Americans to stay home for his swearing-in

President-elect Joe Biden’s inaugural committee on Tuesday advised Americans against traveling to attend his swearing-in ceremony and related activities next month, instead rolling out initial public health protocols for the quadrennial event and previewing a “reimagined” parade.

The committee said in a news release that it was working “in close coordination” with the Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies “to ensure that the inauguration … honors and resembles sacred American traditions while keeping Americans safe and preventing the spread of COVID-19.”

The committee also revealed that Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris plan to take their oaths of office on Jan. 20 at the Capitol — the traditional site for the swearing-in — and that Biden will deliver an inaugural address.

“The ceremony’s footprint will be extremely limited, and the parade that follows will be reimagined,” the committee said, adding that it was “urging the public to refrain from any travel and participate in the inaugural activities from home.”

New members of the Biden inaugural committee announced Tuesday include chief medical adviser David Kessler, a former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration who is a co-chair of the president-elect’s coronavirus advisory board.

Stephanie Cutter, a veteran Democratic operative who headed up production for the party’s nominating convention in August, will serve as an executive producer for the committee, as will television producer Ricky Kirshner, who also oversaw the convention programming.

Rod O’Connor, another organizer of past Democratic National Conventions and a former chief of staff at the Energy Department during the Obama administration, will serve as a senior adviser to the committee.

Abuela is always right, and other lessons from Florida 2020

It's an unspoken rule not to talk politics at the dinner table — unless you have a podcast recording, then it's fine! POLITICO's Sabrina Rodriguez gets real with her Cuban family — abuela Diana, aunt Gloria and mom Martha — about their 2020 votes, and how Cuban Americans in Miami-Dade County helped Donald Trump win Florida. Then she talks to Scott Bland about whether the ultimate purple state is drifting red.

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First 'second gentleman' will teach at Georgetown Law next spring

Doug Emhoff, the husband of Vice President-elect Kamala Harris, will be teaching at the Georgetown University's law school in Washington, D.C., next semester, according to a press release from the university. He’ll serve as a “Distinguished Visitor from Practice” and a Distinguished Fellow of the Georgetown Law Institute.

“I’ve long wanted to teach and serve the next generation of young lawyers,” Emhoff said in a statement. “I couldn’t be more excited to join the Georgetown community.”

The course on entertainment and media law will be Emhoff's first teaching gig, according to a transition official. Until recently, he was a prominent entertainment and media lawyer and partner at DLA Piper in Los Angeles. Since Harris joined the Democratic ticket in August, Emhoff has been on a leave of absence from the firm and has plans to completely cut ties before Inauguration Day.

Jill Biden will also juggle her official role as first lady with teaching English at Northern Virginia Community College. This will be the first time in history that spouses of the president and vice president keep a day job.

Both the first and second spouses typically carve out their own pet issues — as second lady when her husband was vice president, Jill Biden focused on military families. Emhoff’s role as second gentleman has yet to be fully fleshed out by the Biden-Harris transition team.

“This role at Georgetown will be separate and apart from his official role as second gentleman, and Mr. Emhoff continues to work with the Biden-Harris transition team to develop the portfolio he will focus on to support the work of the administration,” a transition official with knowledge of the decision told POLITICO.

Though it’s not clear what that portfolio might be during the administration, Emhoff has recently said food insecurity would be one of his top priorities.

Biden to tap Denis McDonough for Veterans Affairs

President-elect Joe Biden will nominate longtime Obama aide Denis McDonough for secretary of Veterans Affairs, according to two people with knowledge of the decision.

McDonough served as former President Barack Obama’s chief of staff from 2013 until 2017. The Biden transition did not immediately respond to a request for comment.