I spent the morning at a vaccination event for teachers and school personnel.
It was a massive operation with lots of moving parts, but I just want to tell you about one piece of it.
In the picture, you can see Georgina filling a syringe with vaccine from the vial.
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That's her designated job at these events: fill syringes.
She's excellent at it, and her skill is absolutely crucial.
Why?
Because, given that she's done it thousands of times, she's learned how to get six or even seven doses out of a vial that officially contains only five.
I watched her work for several minutes.
Basically, she's perfected the art of getting every last drop.
It's remarkable how significant that skill is.
Every time she can get seven doses, that translates into a 40% increase in vaccine supply from that vial, right there at the final stage of the process.
Day after day, that one act is an enormous public service.
It made me think:
How few of us get to play such a pivotal role in directly helping so many people in such a profound and immediate way as Georgina does every day she shows up for work and does her level best.
To be honest, it doesn't feel like an exaggeration to say that my best hope for public service is to find a way to be as useful as she is on a daily basis.
For as often as we've acknowledged our health care workers in the last year, we likely still don't fully appreciate the resilience and ingenuity they've displayed in helping carry this nation through this ordeal.
So on behalf of all of us, and with total sincerity:
Thank you.
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One of the big questions facing Congress right now is how bold the next recovery package needs to be.
From my conversations, it feels like there’s a simple disconnect here.
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For lots of professionals, the economic recovery has already occurred. Their office may have done some layoffs early on, but folks have largely been rehired and things are chugging along.
You see this in the numbers for North Carolina.
Our financial and business services sectors have basically completely recovered in terms of job loss.
Lots of cynicism on whether we can ever break through with folks who have been deeply misled about the election.
First, we have an obligation to try.
Second, even if it's 90% unsuccessful, it's still plainly worth it. That feels like brutal defeat, but it's not - it's a win.
Yesterday I took one approach by providing an avalanche of counter-evidence.
A simpler approach - from Carl Sagan - is to say, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."
Make sure they know they're making an extraordinary claim, and ask for extraordinary evidence.
And for as frustrated as you may feel, imagine that it slowly dawned on you that *you* were actually the one who was wrong about the election - and how painful that would be, and the lengths you would go to to avoid dealing with that.
In my view, if you genuinely believe that the election may have been stolen, you owe it to yourself to at least check your beliefs against what you see below.
(And if, upon review, you determine that the evidence *does not* support a conclusion that the election was rigged, the next step would be to cast a skeptical eye toward the sources that repeatedly tried to convince you otherwise.)