A car collided with part of Biden’s parked motorcade tonight in Wilmington — it just rammed into an SUV that had closed down a street while Biden attended a campaign event.

The circumstances weren’t clear; Biden and the First Lady loaded into their vehicle and left. Police demanded that the driver open the door. It wasn’t clear whether the driver was responding.

New: Biden told CNN that he thinks any US recession would be only a "very slight" one, while reiterating his long-stated belief that the US will avoid it altogether.

bloomberg.com/news/articles/… Biden also told CNN that the US has gamed out responses if Russian President Vladimir Putin uses a nuclear weapon in Ukraine, per @Jordanfabian.

bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

Biden has arrived for his Warsaw speech. Biden: "In this battle, we need to be clear-eyed: this battle will not be won in days and months either. We need to steel ourselves for the long fight ahead."

A long line of guests has formed, waiting to get in to President Biden’s Warsaw speech at 6 p.m. local time (or 1 p.m. in Washington.) The scene for the speech at the Royal Castle.

Good morning, Brussels ☀️🇧🇪

Today, President Biden will meet with NATO leaders and the NATO Secretary General; then he’ll meet G-7 leaders; then he’ll speak to a European Council Summit after speaking to its president, Charles Michel. Then he’ll hold a press conference. During the NATO session, Ukraine's president did not specifically reiterate his ask for a no-fly zone or for NATO membership, per U.S. officials.

He called for more support. U.S. officials and allies are discussing sending, among other things, anti-ship missiles, per officials.

"Russia has attacked not just us, not just our land, not just our cities, it went on a brutal offensive against our values," Ukraine's Zelenskiy says while speaking to U.S. lawmakers. Zelenskiy invokes Pearl Harbor and 9/11 in pleading for more U.S. help against the Russian attack.

The pages of U.S. history are filled with reasons the U.S. will understand what Ukraine is going through, he says.

"We need you right now," he says.

The latest from the White House on the protests that have closed a key bridge between Detroit and Canada

1) The administration is focused on "resolving the blockage" at the border, per a statement. Cabinet and senior staff have been working to bring this to a swift end, it says. 2) @SecMayorkas and @SecretaryPete spoke with Canadian counterparts today about the blockades and Homeland Security Advisor Liz Sherwood Randall is due to this evening.

(The White House has regularly ruled out backtracking on its trucker vaccine mandate, fwiw.)

Justice Breyer spoke about the ongoing fight for America, invoking the words of Washington and Lincoln. "It's an experiment," he said.

Breyer said his wife paid each of their grandchildren to memorize Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, and then recited passages himself. His recitation included repeating this original line: "We are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure."

"My grandchildren and their children, they'll determine whether the experiment still works."

The irony is that Biden had just declined to discuss Russia and Ukraine, after lamenting that reporters don't tend to cover the topic of a meeting (inflation and competition and pricing, in this case) if he talks about other things.

https://twitter.com/W7VOA/status/1485739204877430785

(The question in, er, question was from Fox's @pdoocy, who was among the reporters yelling questions out as the pool left. Doocy asked whether Biden would discuss inflation and whether it was a political liability for him.)

Biden's team welcomes a new testing coordinator, @T_Inglesby, an MD and longtime health preparedness expert on leave from Johns Hopkins.

Inglesby tells me the testing shortage will ease, and that there won't be another production slowdown this summer. 🧵
bloomberg.com/news/articles/… "It is going to get better and better. I can't tell you the day, but I can tell you it's going to get better and better," Dr. Inglesby said. "We're going to keep moving and doing everything we can do."

Scoop: The U.S. government expects to have about 4 million courses of Covid-19 treatments on hand by the end of January, including about 3 million courses of Merck's pill and 250,000 of Pfizer's. (The pills could be cleared as soon as today.)
bloomberg.com/news/articles/… The U.S. is also expecting ~300,000 more doses of GSK's monoclonal antibody by then - & are in talks to order 600,000 more, I'm told. They'll also have by then about half a million courses of AstraZeneca’s pre-exposure drug for the immuocompromised, who vaccines work poorly for.

SCOOP: The FDA is set to authorize the Covid-19 treatment pills from *both* Pfizer and Merck. An announcement is expected this week. It would open up two significant treatment options for severe cases. A big milestone.

With @JenniferJJacobs and @RobertLangreth on @TheTerminal. A reminder: these pills are for if someone *gets* Covid, and if they're higher risk. They are part of the toolkit, whereas vaccines are another part of the toolkit that either stop you getting it in the first place (yay!) or substantially limit the severity.

CDC data is overcounting shots as "first doses," when they're instead boosters or 2nds.

It means more people are fully vaccinated & boosted, but also more are fully unvaccinated.

Signals are the overcount is in the millions. No one knows. Scoop &🧵:
bloomberg.com/news/articles/… The issue is how shots are recorded -- no one disputes the number of shots administered. But they're concentrated in fewer arms.

If you can't link a shot to others (like my 2nd dose being linked to my 1st) it's sort of a straggler and the fallback is calling it a first dose.

Stakeholder reaction to Biden's vaccine mandate announcement today

🧵

The American Federation of Government Employees said it expects "to bargain over this change prior to implementation, and we urge everyone who is able to get vaccinated as soon as they can do so.” The National Treasury Employees Union said the requirement for federal workers "is a step the government, as an employer, has the legal right to take." It said it'll watch it closely to ensure medical and religious exemptions.

Details of Biden's new Covid plan🧵

👉Requiring vaccinations for all federal workers, federal contractors and 17 million health care workers
👉Requiring companies with 100 or more employees to either require vaccinations or test staff weekly. (Those that don't risk cash fines.) 👉Requiring companies of the same size to give paid time off to get a shot
👉Requiring some education staff (head start programs, DOD schools, etc) to be vaccinated
👉The TSA is doubling fines for people who refuse to mask on planes etc
👉They're still moving ahead with boosters

SCOOP: Biden will announce today that he'll share 20 million more vaccine doses abroad by the end of June, pushing the total to 80 million.

This is the first time he'll share vaccines actually authorized for U.S. use: Pfizer, Moderna and J&J.

Story on @TheTerminal.

Thread 👇 Until now, the U.S. under Trump then Biden has gobbled up U.S. production. It wasn’t an export ban, per se, it was just them being first in line.

This has allowed the U.S. to race ahead on vaccinations as other countries remain desperate for shots.

The recap of the CDC's big announcement yesterday -- vaccinated people can mostly abandon masks, except in some places (and there's no way to know who is truly vaccinated).

Still, it's a key milestone for the U.S. in its path out of the pandemic.
bloomberg.com/news/articles/… What now? Well, other dominoes will fall. The CDC has a bunch of other guidance that will be updated to reflect it. That could change things for schools, for instance.

@emmarcourt and I break it down here:

bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

!!!!
The CDC, just now: "Anyone who is fully vaccinated can participate in indoor or outdoor activities, large or small, without wearing a mask or physical distancing. If you are fully vaccinated, you can start doing the things that you had stopped doing because of the pandemic." This from the @CDCDirector: "We have all longed for this moment when we can get back to some sense of normalcy."

She didn't list any exceptions. "Once you are fully vaccinated, two weeks after your last dose, you can shed your mask."

Confirmed: the CDC will ease mask guidance for *fully vaccinated* people today, saying they can ditch a mask in most (but not all) instances as evidence mounts that vaccines are working and vaccinated people are proving very unlikely to transmit the virus.

https://twitter.com/JonLemire/status/1392887133476638721

(Deleted an earlier tweet with an error.)

Biden's team keeps saying Trump left them literally no plan on Covid -- but they inherited a vaccination program already meeting their target, kept some of the same people and are pledging much of the same stuff. It's complicated.

With @rileyraygriffin:

bloomberg.com/news/articles/… For instance, Biden has repeatedly said they'll use the Defense Production Act to speed things up, but Trump used that repeatedly. (Peter Navarro was a "DPA freak," one source told me.) It's a double edged sword: moving something to the front of the line bumps something else.

Trump returns, on the @POTUS account, and says he is looking "at the possibilities of building out our own platform in the near future." Twitter has already deleted them.