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The Man With the Plan to Beat the Pandemic: I’ve never covered a moment that simultaneously merits so much despair and so much hope. It’s dizzying. The Biden administration takes office with over 25 million Covid-19 cases nationwide, over 420,000 Americans dead, and new, highly contagious variants of the virus stalking our future. It’s as grim a situation as I’ve seen. But for the first time, we can do more than hide. We can immunize. Getting a population of 330 million to herd immunity is a hellishly difficult undertaking in the best of circumstances, and these are not the best of circumstances. Still, speed matters: Getting to herd immunity a few months faster could save hundreds of thousands of lives. Dr. Vivek Murthy was surgeon general under Barack Obama, and is Joe Biden’s nominee for the same position. He’s also co-chair of Biden’s coronavirus task force. In this episode, Murthy walks me through the Biden administration’s plan to beat the coronavirus. We discuss America’s bot by The Ezra Klein Showratings:
Length:
58 minutes
Released:
Mar 2, 2021
Format:
Podcast episode
Description
If you watched this past weekend’s Conservative Political Action Conference, you heard a lot of debunked election conspiracies, dire warnings about “cancel culture” and unwavering fealty to Donald Trump. What you didn’t hear was much in the way of policy ideas to raise wages, improve health care or support families. This is the modern G.O.P.: a post-policy party obsessed with symbolic fights and curiously uninterested in the actual work of governing. But does it have to be that way?Ramesh Ponnuru is a senior editor at National Review, a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a Republican wonk who is pushing his party in a more responsible, policy-centric direction. We discuss:— Why Republicans have lost interest in policy.— Whether Trump would have won the presidency if Senate Republicans had passed a big stimulus bill before the 2020 election.— Why Ponnuru thinks the Republican Party’s 2024 hopefuls have learned the wrong lesson from Trump’s 2016 victory.— The conservative case for a universal child allowance.— Why so few Republican politicians have openly endorsed the Romney child allowance plan — and what that says about the tensions within the party’s coalition.— What it would take for Republicans to move away from being a “business owners’” party and toward being a “parents’” party.— Why Ponnuru thinks Republicans should support limiting, or outright banning, just-in-time scheduling practices.— Whether there was ever a mass constituency for Paul Ryan’s version of conservatism.— Who are the most important emerging voices on the political right today.And much more.Recommendations: "The Great Debate" by Yuval Levin"The Upside-Down Constitution" by Michael S. Greve"Popular Crime" by Bill James"The Chronicles of Narnia" by C.S. LewisYou can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of "The Ezra Klein Show" at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein.Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected].“The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Rogé Karma and Jeff Geld; fact-checking by Michelle Harris; original music by Isaac Jones; mixing by Jeff Geld.
Released:
Mar 2, 2021
Format:
Podcast episode
Titles in the series (100)
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