Biden tries COVID cajoling, avoids new decrees that divide

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden’s message to the American people on confronting the omicron coronavirus variant comes with a heavy dose of cajoling. That’s while some other countries are issuing decrees to their citizens. America’s ideologically polarized reaction to vaccines and masks, and its federal system in which states have broad authority over health matters, limits some of the options Biden can exercise — at least without stoking political flareups that could distract from his urgent public health message. The director of global health for the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation, Jen Kates, says one of the major lessons the U.S. has learned from the pandemic is that “politics matters.”