Philadelphia Weather: Some Wet Flakes Tonight

Kate Bilo has the latest forecast.

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This is particularly true of Biden, who worked closely with police unions during his time as a senator—when he was at the forefront of anti-crime legislation that has since become a primary target of reform advocates—and has since made concerted efforts to bring law enforcement organizations into the fold as stakeholders in developing policy.The decision on Monday to kill the national police oversight commission that Biden had promised to create during his first months in office, for example, came at the urging of both law enforcement groups and reform advocates who argued that it was redundant. Instead, the administration announced that its primary focus would be on passing the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, which would, among other things, ban chokeholds and no-knock warrants in drug cases, require the use of de-escalation techniques before use of deadly force, and eliminate qualified immunity for law enforcement.Asked about how much effort the White House would put into getting that bill passed, Psaki pledged Biden would “use the power of his presidency to move it forward.”“The strong consensus from all of these [civil rights] groups is that the work should be focused on trying to pass the George Floyd Act, and the commission would not be the most constructive way to deliver on our top priority,” she said Tuesday. “So we are working together collectively to do exactly that. There are steps that we certainly will work in conjunction to take as they are possible. And some of them we've signed through executive orders, and we’ll continue to communicate with these groups about what is most effective.”But police union stakeholders have already marked the issue of rolling back qualified immunity a red line.“The biggest sticking point is qualified immunity,” said Andrea Edmiston, director of governmental affairs at the National Association of Police Organizations (NAPO), a lobbying group that represents more than 1,000 police units and associations—which in turn represent roughly a quarter million working and retired police officers. “We’ve heard from a lot of our members who are really worried that qualified immunity will go away.”Qualified immunity, in short, shields government officials, including police officers, from being sued in civil court for violating a suspect’s constitutional rights in the course of the performance of their duties as long as those duties were carried out in “subjective good faith”—that is, if an officer believes their actions are reasonable in the moment. Critics of the protection say that it encourages police abuse without accountability, while law enforcement advocates say that it protects officers from frivolous lawsuits and potential financial ruin.Police Union Bosses to Biden: You’re Pissing Us OffEven as public polling suggests a growing national consensus on the need for police reform in the context of racial justice, the two sides are increasingly at odds over the bill that the Biden administration has now made the gold standard for police reform. According to law enforcement groups that have been at the table, putting the George Floyd Act at the center of the administration’s focus for police reform could be the final straw for the police unions that Biden has courted for decades.“If they break a law or knowingly violate someone’s constitutional rights, yes, that has to be addressed,” Edmiston said. “But if this officer is acting in good faith, and you take away qualified immunity, then that opens that officer up to being sued—and officers don’t make a lot of money, right? Suddenly, they’ll lose their life savings, they’ll lose everything.”Edmiston noted that NAPO, as well as other law enforcement advocacy organizations, has been welcomed to the table by members of Congress seeking the input of police groups in the legislation. But while some aspects of the bill have gotten qualified support from law enforcement stakeholders—including mandated data collection for use-of-force statistics, and a national decertification database that would prevent officers fired for misconduct from being hired by police forces in other states—the sticking point of qualified immunity is seen as both a nonstarter in law enforcement circles.“You’re going to get police officers to do absolutely nothing other than being an observer,” said said Tom Scotto, president emeritus of the Detectives’ Endowment Association, one of the three major police unions in New York City, who also served as president of the NAPO. Scotto, who called measures eliminating qualified immunity “absurd,” worked closely with Biden during the drafting of the 1994 crime bill from which the future president would later distance himself. “Every piece of action you take is now subject to some civilian getting an ambulance chasing attorney.”Meanwhile, the removal of qualified immunity, which has already been passed in some states, is a baseline requirement among reform advocates.“It is clear that the only way to end the scourge of police violence is to immediately divest from policing institutions that, from their inception, have been used to oppress Black people,” said Paige Fernandez, a policing policy advocate in the American Civil Liberties Union’s justice division. “You don’t reform police—you remove their responsibilities and reallocate taxpayer money into harm-reducing solutions. 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If Biden wants to lead on that, that’s the question. How do you do that?”Black lawmakers on Tuesday told reporters that the president intends to do so by pushing for the George Floyd Act.“We know we’re going to have other meetings to develop our next steps, but we are moving forward,” said Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX), after an Oval Office meeting between Biden and Congressional Black Caucus leadership. “And we were able to discuss those very openly with the president today.”Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

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In August, after the businessman filed a lawsuit against the Western Australian state government over mining contracts, a newspaper photoshopped his head onto Dr. Evil from Austin Powers, and ran it with the headline “$30 BIIIIILLION”—a reference to both the character’s catchphrase and the amount Palmer requested in damages. The next day they did it again; this time, Palmer’s head was on a cane toad. The headline read “PEST.”Their message may not have landed. On Sunday, the former member of parliament shared a graphic of the flyer on his Facebook page. Headlined “COVID-19 VACCINE CONCERNS” and addressed to “Men and Women of Australia,” the caution-tape yellow document outlined Palmer’s personal angst about the vaccine, even though he has no medical training of any kind.The signed statement—which also ran as a full-page ad in the Murdoch-owned paper, The Australian in March—included multiple falsehoods already debunked by the country’s Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA). Most notably, Palmer referred to the Australian government’s “emergency use” approval of the vaccine on the general population. In fact, while other countries including the United States and the U.K. have protocols for “Emergency Use Authorizations”—a legal authority that allows them to distribute unapproved treatments when medically necessary—the TGA does not.There isn’t any special authorization the TGA granted the vaccines; they are still being reviewed through a six-stage process that is also applied to all other vaccines in the country. While the administration has committed to an expedited schedule, they say it does not involve skipping steps or relaxing standards. For that reason, only the Pfizer and AstraZeneca vaccines have been approved, and only for the first stage, which they call “provisional determination.”“The Therapeutic Goods Administration provisionally approved these vaccines after a complete assessment of all the available data,” the department wrote in a statement on its website. “No part of the process has been rushed, and there was no emergency authorisation granted. The TGA does not have an ‘Emergency Use Authorisation’ pathway for COVID-19 vaccines.” (The TGA, which did not respond to The Daily Beast’s request for comment, issued a warning last week against distributing the Astra-Zeneca vaccine to those under 50, because of two cases of blood clots).Elsewhere in the flyers, Palmer referred to two Australians who “became ill” after receiving an oversized dose of the Pfizer vaccine. While two patients did receive extra doses of the jab back in mid-February, they showed “no signs of an adverse reaction.” Australian Chief Medical Officer Paul Kelly told Australia 9News that early clinical trials of the Pfizer vaccine had experimented with larger doses of up to four times the current recommendation.“During those trials,” Kelly said, “the side effect profile was minimal, particularly in older people.” (Neither Palmer nor Kelly responded to The Daily Beast’s request for comment).“It made me really angry, to be honest,” Gorman said of the flyers, “because Clive Palmer is someone who has just tried to insert his way into national debates for his own business interests or because he has vendettas against various people.”As an example, Gorman pointed to Australia’s federal election in 2019, in which Palmer invested some $89 million of his own money campaigning. That is “far above what either major political party would spend in a national election,” Gorman said, “and his model of splashing cash to sort of boost his ego and put out misinformation at the worst possible time is unpatriotic.”The billionaire’s anti-vaxx promotional materials, of which there are several versions, have caught the attention of public officials as high as the prime minister. PM Scott Morrison attacked the messaging campaign last month as “complete rubbish,” and “misinformation, pure and simple.”The attacks marked something of an about-face for Morrison, who publicly backed a legal challenge from Palmer over the summer to Western Australia’s “hard border,” which had been closed to stymie the spread of COVID-19. The federal government later withdrew its support, which Gorman said had been poorly received by the Western Australian public, in part due to Palmer’s reputation. In response to the case, the state’s premier, McGowan, called Palmer “Australia’s greatest egomaniac.”Not long after, Shadow Health Minister Mark Butler flagged the flyers to the Australian Electoral Commission, urging the organization to investigate whether they should be considered political communications. Palmer, who served a single term in Parliament from 2013 to 2017 , formed a political party when he ran with a familiar slogan (“Make Australia Great”). He deregistered the party upon leaving office, but reactivated it in 2018, and continues to run candidates. Butler argued the flyers amounted to campaign materials and should be treated as “official party material.”“The COVID vaccine rollout and the government's response to the pandemic generally are very clearly going to be big election issues in the lead up to the 2021 or 2022 federal election," Butler told the Australian news organization, ABC News. "Clive Palmer, who is so closely associated with the party he began, is spewing misinformation in exactly the same way he runs an election campaign.” McGowan and Butler did not respond to The Daily Beast’s request for comment.Their accusations came just months after Palmer was charged with fraud and corporate misconduct over political advertisements for his party in July. Prosecutors accused Palmer of diverting some $10 million from his own businesses to the group (then called Palmer United) in 2013, which he would later use to foot the bill for a $60 million campaigning spree. If he is found guilty, the offenses could entail lengthy prison sentences.Dabbling in medical conspiracy is not a new development for Palmer; he has been waging a year-long misinformation campaign against the science and legality of Australia’s coronavirus response since the start of the pandemic. In March 2020, the billionaire announced plans to acquire or manufacture more than one million doses of hydroxychloroquine—the malaria treatment endorsed by President Trump as a COVID-19 cure, despite a total dearth of evidence that the drug has any impact on the disease.The lack of evidence did not bother Palmer. The next month he bought nearly 33 million doses of the drug to distribute for free among Australians. In an infographic published to his foundation’s website, titled “The COVID-19 Hydroxychloroquine Story,” he boasted of plans to make “resources available to fund clinical trials.” The next day, Palmer advertised the move with three full-page ads in prominent national newspapers—all of them owned by Murdoch’s News Corp.Why Is the Right So Obsessed With Hydroxychloroquine?Gratuitous use of hydroxychloroquine can pose a danger to patients who have not been prescribed the medication. The TGA has warned that the medication poses “well-known serious side-effects to patients, including cardiac toxicity potentially leading to sudden heart attacks, irreversible eye damage and severe depletion of blood sugar potentially leading to coma.” According to the Guardian, the TGA later opened an investigation into whether the ads breached their drug advertising rules.In 2021, Palmer’s faith in fast-tracked medical research seems to have waned, and he pivoted from boosting faulty drugs to questioning clinical studies. In the Australian outlet ABC News, the vice-president of the Australian Medical Association, Chris Moy, offered Palmer a suggestion: “Clive, we’ll leave the mining to you and you leave the medicine and the science to us.”“The problem is, say somebody doesn’t get the vaccination because of his message, which is clearly not based on any particular expertise on his part,” Moy added. “What happens if they later get COVID or even die later? He'll be completely removed from direct responsibility for it, but as far as I’m concerned, he’s as responsible as any doctor who does something wrong."Read more at The Daily Beast.Got a tip? Send it to The Daily Beast hereGet our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

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