Good morning. I'm James Holman from the Washington Post and this is the Daily

202 for Friday, May 1st. In today's news, the government races to develop a vaccine that could be fielded nationwide by January.

Hundreds of protesters, some carrying guns, Storm Michigan's capital.

And Mike Pence's staff threatens a reporter who revealed that they knew

masks were required in the Mayo Clinic.

But first, the big idea.

Senior U.S. officials are beginning to seriously explore proposals for punishing China or demanding

financial compensation from Beijing for its handling of the coronavirus

pandemic. The move could splinter already strained

relations between the two superpowers at a perilous moment for the global

economy. In private, President Trump and AIDS have discussed stripping China of its sovereign immunity,

aiming to enable either the US government or individual coronavirus victims to sue China in court for damages.

Legal experts say an attempt to limit China's sovereign immunity would be extremely difficult to accomplish, if not impossible, and would almost certainly require congressional

legislation. Some administration officials have also discussed having the

United States cancel part of its debt obligations to China. Asked about this on

Thursday, Trump said that things could get tough if he started playing

games like that. He explained that canceling interest payments to China could undermine

what he called the sanctity of the dollar, but he added that there are other ways to levy extreme

penalties on China such as raising one trillion dollars by imposing tariffs

on all Chinese imports. Now some of the president's top political

advisors have been encouraging him to take a more forceful swing at China

because they think it will help him get reelected. They're planning an ad campaign that Trump has signed off on to attempt to rebrand Joe Biden as

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