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Shortages have grown so bad that hospitals have resorted to using Twitter to plead for more oxygen. At least 20 patients in a Delhi hospital died Friday, according to CNN, after additional oxygen supplies were delayed.

“The volume is humongous,” Jalil Parkar, a senior pulmonologist at the Lilavati Hospital in Mumbai, told CNN. “It’s just like a tsunami.”

The death toll has also begun to overwhelm crematories, raising concerns that, as bad as the official figures are, the true situation in India could be far worse. According to the New York Times, crematories are in some cases reporting more cremations in a day than the number of officially reported deaths.

And on Monday, the Washington Post reported that in Surat, a city in India’s western Gujarat state, crematories are dealing with up to five times as many dead as normal. In one case, the steel chimney pipes melted from overuse.

i…don’t know what to say. my god. https://t.co/DTginGDWjT pic.twitter.com/LzeiFwiFAH

— Charlie Warzel (@cwarzel) April 20, 2021

Despite the magnitude of the crisis, India has yet to impose a new national lockdown, as it did in March 2020. And while some cities and states are imposing their own lockdowns, almost-certain superspreader events — such as massive political rallies and a major Hindu religious festival — are continuing.

According to the BBC, millions of Hindus from around India have gathered for the Kumbh Mela festival in northern India, where attendees take a dip in the Ganges River.

And Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has kept up campaign events for his Bharatiya Janata Party in the state of West Bengal, declaring that “India had defeated Covid last year and India can do it again.”

At the same time, the Indian government has successfully petitioned Twitter to take down posts critical of its response to the crisis. According to BuzzFeed News, more than 50 critical tweets, from public officials, journalists, celebrities, and citizens, were taken down.

A US policy is contributing to India’s woes

As Vox’s Katelyn Burns reported last week, a vaccine shortage has also exacerbated the crisis — and international trade policy is contributing to that shortage.

Though India has substantial vaccine-manufacturing capacity, both the US and Europe have imposed limits on exporting crucial raw materials, hampering India’s vaccination effort. The country is home to almost 1.4 billion people, but only about 21.4 million people — or about 1.59 percent of the population — have been fully vaccinated, according to Johns Hopkins University.

It’s unclear, however, whether the US will revise its policy in response to the crisis in India. On Thursday, State Department spokesperson Ned Price deflected when asked about the policy at a press briefing.

Price said that the current policy was under the “purview” of the United States Trade Representative (USTR), the agency that oversees trade policy, but suggested that the Biden administration was prioritizing getting shots in American arms.

“What I will say broadly is that the United States first and foremost is engaged in an ambitious and effective and, so far, successful effort to vaccinate the American people,” Price said. ”That campaign is well underway.”

“United States first and foremost is engaged in an ambitious and effective and, so far, successful effort to vaccinate the American people”, US State Dept when asked about #COVID vaccine raw materials export to India pic.twitter.com/YvzhuaAv3n

— Sidhant Sibal (@sidhant) April 23, 2021

The export limits, however, are by no means the sole cause of India’s vaccine woes, nor would lifting them be a panacea as the coronavirus crisis there deepens.

Among other problems, the current surge in cases could stall a vaccine rollout even if vaccine availability increased, as Vox’s Jen Kirby has reported:

It’s a lot harder to massively ramp up a vaccination campaign in a country that is already floundering because of a health crisis. The same nurses or technicians deployed to vaccinate people are often the same personnel who need to attend to Covid-19 patients or conduct testing and contract tracing.

That could intensify the coronavirus surge, which could further stall the vaccination campaign, creating a dangerous cycle.

There are other problems as well, including lockdown fatigue, government failures, and a new Covid-19 variant emerging in India.

“The public sentiment [in India] is of denial, fatigue, and fatalistic surrender,” University of Michigan biostatistician and epidemiologist Bhramar Mukherjee told Kirby this month. Not only are mass religious and political events going forward, but according to the Hindustan Times, mask-wearing and social distancing at those events have largely gone by the wayside.

That fatigue is only compounded by how economically devastating India’s first lockdown was for the country. Some 32 million people fell out of the country’s middle class, according to Pew Research Center, and the number of people living in poverty in India, defined as those living on $2 per day or less, increased by 75 million.

Adding to the crisis are concerns about a new virus variant spreading in India. The variant, a “double mutant,” with two identified mutations, may be more transmissible than other strains of the coronavirus.

Little about the variant is known for sure yet — according to Bloomberg, it’s still unclear whether, or to what extent, the new variant, B.1.617, is driving India’s catastrophic spike in cases and deaths — but the mutant is quickly becoming the dominant strain in parts of India.

Already, the variant made up about 70 percent of virus samples collected in late March — an increase of more than 50 percent from three weeks earlier, according to the Wall Street Journal.

“India had a double whammy,” T. Jacob John, a retired virology professor at India’s Christian Medical College, told the Journal. “We let our guard down when the variants were spreading. It was the worst time to do so.”

Former Sen. Bob Dole, who advocated for recognition of the Armenian genocide throughout his career, also tweeted his appreciation for Biden’s words — alongside documents showing his own attempts at gaining recognition of the genocide in Congress in the 1970s and ’80s.

Hurrah for @POTUS! I’m very pleased to hear that he has officially recognized the Armenian genocide. This is a proud and historically significant moment for the United States, for Armenia, and for Armenians around the globe. It’s been a long time coming. pic.twitter.com/UQJ39aPkDg

— Senator Bob Dole (@SenatorDole) April 24, 2021

“This is a proud and historically significant moment for the United States, for Armenia, and for Armenians around the globe,” the 97-year-old former presidential candidate wrote. “It’s been a long time coming.”

Biden is taking a new approach to the US-Turkey relationship

The vehemence of Turkey’s response to the US recognition of the Armenian genocide isn’t particularly surprising, as the topic has long been a point of international contention for Turkey.

Specifically, allegations of genocide are viewed as “insulting Turkishness” by Turkey — an offense that has elicited criminal charges in the past — because they implicate people who helped found the modern state of Turkey after the Ottoman Empire collapsed in 1922.

Turkey’s aggressive efforts to push back on attempts to recognize atrocities committed against Armenians during World War I as genocide makes Biden’s decision all the more exceptional.

Previously, Turkey has responded to countries acknowledging the genocide by recalling diplomats, including ambassadors to Germany and the Vatican. On Tuesday, in anticipation of a statement from Biden on the matter, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu warned that there could be consequences to Biden’s words.

“Statements that have no legal binding will have no benefit, but they will harm ties,” Cavusoglu said. “If the United States wants to worsen ties, the decision is theirs.”

As Vox’s Amanda Taub explained in 2015, such concerns over strategic interests in the region have long meant that the US and allies like the United Kingdom have avoided designating mass atrocities against Armenians as a genocide.

Turkey is a key US ally — especially now, as the US relies on Turkey’s cooperation in the fight against ISIS in Syria. US officials have compromised on how they refer to the killings. When Obama makes a speech to commemorate the anniversary of the genocide on Friday, White House officials say he will use the term “Meds Yeghern” instead of “genocide.”

Likewise, the United Kingdom has not recognized the genocide, apparently out of concern that doing so would jeopardize its relationship with Turkey. A leaked Foreign Office briefing from 1999 stated that Turkey was “neuralgic and defensive about the charge of genocide.” Therefore, the “only feasible option” was for the United Kingdom to continue to refuse to recognize the killings as genocide, because of “the importance of our relations (political, strategic and commercial) with Turkey.”

However, the Biden administration has already taken a harder line on the US relationship with Turkey than previous administrations. As a candidate, Biden labeled Erdogan an “autocrat” in an interview with the New York Times, and last month his administration condemned “significant human rights issues” in modern-day Turkey, including the jailing and alleged torture of journalists, activists, and political dissidents.

While it’s unclear exactly what the fallout from Saturday’s announcement will look like, other factors have already chilled the US-Turkey relationship. In December of last year, for example, shortly before Biden took office, the US imposed sanctions on Turkey for purchasing Russian military hardware. In 2019, the US also removed Turkey from its joint F-35 stealth fighter program over the same purchase.

Turkey is a powerful country in a critical region. It is part of NATO. Our relationship matters. But President Erdogan’s success in blackmailing & bullying the US (and other countries) not to recognize the Armenian Genocide likely emboldened him as he grew more repressive. 4/7

— Samantha Power (@SamanthaJPower) April 24, 2021

On Saturday, former US ambassador to the UN Samantha Power, who is also Biden’s nominee to run the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book “A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide, argued that the decision was an important step in pushing back on Erdogan’s growing authoritarianism.

“Turkey is a powerful country in a critical region,” Power wrote on Twitter. “It is part of NATO. Our relationship matters. But President Erdogan’s success in blackmailing & bullying the US (and other countries) not to recognize the Armenian Genocide likely emboldened him as he grew more repressive.”

According to a recent poll by the Public Policy Institute of California, only about 40 percent of California voters support a recall vote, and Newsom has launched a full-fledged “Stop the Republican Recall” campaign to oppose the effort.

Jenner has criticized Newsom for “over-restrictive lockdowns” and high taxes, and also hit the governor for attending a dinner party with lobbyists during the height of the pandemic last year.

“This isn’t the California we know,” Jenner said in her Friday statement. “This is Gavin Newsom’s California, where he orders us to stay home but goes out to dinner with his lobbyist friends.”

According to Axios, which first reported Jenner’s campaign announcement Friday, several former Trump campaign officials, including campaign manager Brad Parscale and pollster Tony Fabrizio, are already on board with Jenner’s campaign, although Parscale isn’t expected to take on a formal role.

Jenner, who is transgender, previously supported Trump, even appearing at the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio. She publicly walked back her support in October 2018 in response to Trump administration attacks on trans Americans.

But a Jenner adviser told Axios Friday that, in a recall election, Jenner would run “as someone that’s socially liberal and fiscally conservative” and steer away from the label of “Trump Republican.“

“This will be a campaign of solutions,” Jenner said Friday, “providing a roadmap back to prosperity to turn this state around and finally clean up the damage Newsom has done to this state.”

Advisers also say that Jenner, who starred on the reality TV show Keeping Up With the Kardashians, will benefit from substantial name recognition, according to Axios. Jenner first rose to fame as a decathlete, winning Olympic gold medals in the 1970s, and renewed her visibility as part of the Kardashian media empire.

But celebrity gossip site TMZ has reported that Jenner’s famous family members will not campaign on her behalf, in part because of political differences. And although Jenner renounced her support of Trump, at least one prominent LGBTQ rights organization has come out against her candidacy, too.

Jenner “spent years telling the #LGBTQ+ community to trust Donald Trump. We saw how that turned out. Now she wants us to trust her?” the organization Equality California tweeted Friday. “Hard pass.”

The Covid-19 pandemic has boosted a longstanding recall effort

Recall efforts are common in the 19 states that allow them, but as Vox’s Jerusalem Demsas has explained, they’re not often successful. In Newsom’s case, however, the pandemic — and his ill-advised dinner at a high-end Napa Valley restaurant in the midst of it — have landed him in a tight spot.

Although the recall effort itself, which was filed on February 21, 2020, predates the widespread Covid-19 crisis in the US, the deadline to collect signatures was extended by a judge in November last year, and Newsom’s apparently maskless dinner at French Laundry the same month gave it a boost.

As Demsas reported, “Newsom’s hypocrisy and decision to dine at a $350-per-person establishment while so many of the state’s residents suffered from the economic downturn and residents were being warned against holiday gatherings with family was a mobilizing moment for the recall effort.”

EXCLUSIVE: We’ve obtained photos of Governor Gavin Newsom at the Napa dinner party he’s in hot water over. The photos call into question just how outdoors the dinner was. A witness who took photos tells us his group was so loud, the sliding doors had to be closed. 10pm on @FOXLA pic.twitter.com/gtOVEwa864

— Bill Melugin (@BillFOXLA) November 18, 2020

Despite Jenner’s announcement Friday, however, the recall isn’t yet set in stone. Signatures are still being verified, and although counties face an April 29 deadline to report how many signatures they received, voters will have a chance to remove their signatures if they choose, according to CalMatters.

Still, at least 1.2 million valid signatures have been received so far, meaning that a recall is expected to go forward.

If it does, Californians will have to answer two questions: Do they want to recall Newsom, and, if so, who do they want to replace him?

Actually removing Newsom from office takes a simple majority of voters, and winning the election to replace him takes only a plurality, according to CalMatters — but there’s no limit to how many candidates can run. This could lead to a massive, chaotic field of challengers.

In addition to Jenner, previous Republican gubernatorial nominee John Cox, who lost to Newsom in 2018, is in the running, as is former San Diego mayor Kevin Faulconer, also a Republican.

In 2003, California voters recalled Gov. Gray Davis, a Democrat. Out of a field of more than 100, bodybuilder and actor Arnold Schwarzenegger won the election to replace him with less than 50 percent of the vote; he eventually served two terms as a Republican governor.

“It’s an expensive, distracting pain in the ass for Californians if it happens,” Newsom spokesperson Dan Newman told Vox last month. “In the Davis recall we had 135 candidates and it was a total circus. Some people think we could have 10 times as many candidates this time around.”

But as Demsas points out, the California electorate looks much different than in 2003. The state is more heavily Democratic, and Newsom’s favorability rating has hovered well above where Davis’s stood at the time of his recall. As a result, pollsters suggest that Newsom stands a good chance of riding out this recall campaign.

Things are also looking up in California from a public health perspective: The state has among the lowest rates of new Covid-19 infections in the country, and more than 40 percent of Californians have received at least one vaccine dose.

But with a recall effort already rolling, Jenner’s entrance into the race marks another wrinkle in Newsom’s hectic tenure as governor — and her celebrity could make for a more difficult fight.

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