Is Biden 'starting from scratch' with covid vaccine plans? What does it mean to start from scratch? Merriam-Webster says it is "to begin from a point at which nothing has been done yet." Nothing? Covid-19 vaccines were already developed and nearly 1 million doses were being administered daily by the time President Biden took office Jan. 20. The vaccine rollout under former president Donald Trump was seen as haphazard by many experts and state officials. But a questionable plan is not the same as no plan. Interviewed by Axios, Vice President Kamala Harris said: "There was no national strategy or plan for vaccinations. We were leaving it to the states and local leaders to try and figure it out. And so in many ways, we're starting from scratch on something that's been raging for almost an entire year!" Notice how she adds "in many ways" right before "starting from scratch." The idiom loses much of its punch, but it takes a careful reader to thread the needle here and notice the rhetorical feint. Harris earned Two Pinocchios. In fact, the Biden administration has embraced concepts first developed under Trump, such as a plan (barely sketched out by the Trump team, with no implementation) to vaccinate people through pharmacies. In terms of what's new, Biden's team came up with federally run vaccination sites such as those operated by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Enjoy this newsletter? Forward it to someone else who'd like it! If this email was forwarded to you, sign up here. Did you hear something fact-checkable? Send it here; we'll check it out. Tilting at 'frozen' windmills Millions of households in Texas lost electrical power this week amid a blast of cold weather. Fossil fuel interests and their allies in the Republican Party immediately blamed renewable energy sources ("frozen wind turbines") and trashed the Democrats' proposed "Green New Deal," warning that it could produce similar outages nationwide if implemented. The claims then spread on Fox News, over and over, on several of its top-rated shows. "So this shows how the Green New Deal would be a deadly deal for the United States of America," Gov. Greg Abbott (R-Tex.) told Fox host Sean Hannity, a frequent purveyor of right-wing misinformation. Some wind turbines did freeze, but Texas could have prevented it by outfitting them for cold weather. Moreover, the wind turbine issue is a straw man. The real culprit? Texas relies mostly on natural gas, and its power grid was poorly prepared to deal with severe winter conditions after years of deregulation, as energy experts told The Washington Post. "Wind accounts for just 10 percent of the power in Texas generated during the winter. And the loss of power to the grid caused by shutdowns of thermal power plants, primarily those relying on natural gas, dwarfed the dent caused by frozen wind turbines, by a factor of five or six," The Post reported. Pipelines froze. Pumps slowed. Diesel engines to power pumps wouldn't start. Power plants went offline. A nuclear reactor went dark. All because the state, which rarely experiences cold weather, did not invest in preparations after years of deregulating its energy market. These claims earned Four Pinocchios. We're always looking for fact-check suggestions. You can reach us via email, Twitter (@GlennKesslerWP, @rizzoTK, @mmkelly22) or Facebook. Read about our process and rating scale here, and sign up for the newsletter here. Scroll down for this week's Pinocchio roundup. | By Adriana Usero, Glenn Kessler and Meg Kelly ● Read more » | | | | 
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