Biden and the states confront a fast-morphing virus, while Republicans have already started looking to 2022. It’s Tuesday, and this is your politics tip sheet.
Where things stand

President Biden has said that nothing is more important to him right now than containing the coronavirus.
But as the rubber meets the road, it’s increasingly clear just how tough it will be to establish a national plan for confronting the pandemic — especially after former President Donald Trump refused to organize a broad federal response.
In New York, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced that he would delay the openings of mass vaccination sites at Yankee Stadium and Citi Field because the city didn’t have enough doses to distribute. Many New Yorkers have had their inoculation appointments canceled as the city waits on more vaccines.
Hopes dimmed yesterday that Merck might become the third pharmaceutical company in the United States to develop a working vaccine that could be approved by the F.D.A. Merck said it was abandoning two experimental vaccines because they did not produce a strong enough immune response against the virus.
And there’s growing evidence that the virus is morphing more quickly than experts had thought, with new variants emerging that make it more difficult to contain. Yesterday, two drug makers reported that their vaccines, while still effective, are slightly less potent against the variant from South Africa.
With the virus starting to slow down after a weekslong surge, California officials announced yesterday that they were lifting stringent restrictions across much of the state.
But the announcement came only after the state government had drawn criticism for the apparent inconsistency of its response. Hospitals in Southern California and other parts of the state are still overwhelmed, and experts worry that new variants of the virus — including one that was recently found in more than half of test samples collected in Los Angeles — could lead to another surge.
In Chicago, the school district and the teachers’ union are locking horns over the city’s plan to bring elementary and middle school students back for in-person learning next week. The union had resisted returning to classrooms until teachers had begun to receive vaccines, or the city’s positive test rate fell below 3 percent.
The conflict offers a possible cautionary tale as the Biden administration pursues its stated goal of reopening schools as soon as safely possible.
Biden will temporarily bar noncitizens from entering the United States from South Africa, and will extend Trump’s similar bans on travel from Brazil, Britain and Europe, his press secretary announced yesterday.
The coronavirus variant in South Africa has particularly worried medical experts. A similar one has been detected in Brazil, though it is believed that the two strains developed independently. On Monday, health officials in Minnesota said they had documented the first case of infection with the Brazilian variant; the South African one is not believed to have reached the United States.
The New York Times
Me: Yesterday, two drug makers reported that their vaccines, while still effective, are slightly less potent against the variant from South Africa. – well they won’t say their vaccines don’t work, will they? Was me, I’d be pissed off rigid, if I was given 2 shots of a vaccine, whose long term results on the body is unknown, to find that my vaccine shots don’t protect me from newer strains which automatically replace the virus strains such as Covid-19 with something much more virulent, bearing in mind you can’t catch Covid, you have to catch Coronavirus first and then allow Covid to to “grow” from that infection, then you find out if your vaccination works or not.