If you told me there was a novel virus that had caused a global pandemic and cost nearly 200,000 Americans their lives, I’d ordinary be pretty pleased to learn that the president of the United States is “fixated” on finding a vaccine. After all, I wouldn’t want him spending all his time on the golf course during such a crisis.
With more than six million cases of Covid-19, the US has been reeling under a deadly health crisis but President Donald Trump seems too busy playing golf, as noted by rival candidate Joe Biden. Biden took to Twitter on September 5, saying. “Mr. President, enough with the weekend golf trips and erratic tweets. It’s time for you to get to work and control the spread of this virus.”
The problem is that President Trump is not actually focused on the public health aspect of this at all. He’s “fixated” on getting a bump in the polls if a vaccine is produced before Election Day.
President Trump is so fixated on finding a vaccine for the novel coronavirus that in meetings about the U.S. pandemic response, little else captures his attention, according to administration officials.
Trump has pressed health officials to speed up the vaccine timeline and urged them to deliver one by the end of the year. He has peppered them with questions about the development status and mass-distribution plans. And, in recent days, he has told some advisers and aides that a vaccine may arrive by Nov. 1, which just happens to be two days before the presidential election.
It’s famously difficult to capture the president’s attention, but he knows he hasn’t led in the polls in “such must-win states as Florida since Mr. Biden claimed the nomination in April.” His idea of “getting to work” to do something about the health crisis is shit-posting on Twitter and encouraging his supporters to vote twice. Therefore, his interest in a vaccine isn’t about saving lives but saving his own political career. And that’s not a good thing, but another indication that he’s looking for a short cut or an easy way out.
Sen. Kamala Harris criticized President Donald Trump’s push to have a coronavirus vaccine ready for distribution before Election Day, painting the president as willing to use his power for political advantage.
“I would not trust Donald Trump and it would have to be a credible source of information that talks about the efficacy and the reliability of whatever he’s talking about. I will not take his word for it,” Harris, D-Calif., said in an interview with CNN.
Obviously, Kamala Harris isn’t rooting against a vaccine. She’s saying that Trump wants to announce a vaccine is ready prematurely so that he can get some political benefit. She’s warning that Trump will announce a “cure” for COVID-19 before one is ready, and this will make people less trustful of vaccinations in general and cause lasting and needless loss of life.
At the beginning of this crisis, the president reassured us that warm weather would lower the infection rate and that one day the virus would simply disappear. Those things did not happen, but he’s still hoping for a miracle rather than working diligently to keep the infection rate low until a vaccine arrives. Insofar as he’s doing anything proactive, he’s pressuring the scientific community to speed up the vaccination process in ways that aren’t medically sound.
Harris, Democratic nominee Joe Biden’s running mate, also expressed skepticism that health experts would get the final say on the safety and efficacy of a vaccine.
“They’ll be muzzled, they’ll be suppressed, they will be sidelined because he’s looking at an election coming up in less than 60 days and he’s grasping to get whatever he can to pretend he has been a leader on this issue when he is not,” she says.
There’s plenty of evidence to support this prediction. For example, there’s Trump’s promotion of a treatment using a highly toxic plant that can kill you.
President Donald Trump and Mike Lindell, the creator of MyPillow and an avowed supporter, participated in a July meeting at the White House regarding the use of oleandrin as a potential therapeutic for coronavirus, Lindell confirmed to CNN.
Oleandrin is an extract from the plant Nerium oleander. The raw oleander plant is highly toxic, and consumption of it can be fatal.
“He was enthusiastic, as he is on everything that’s going to help people,” he told CNN, adding that Trump wanted the Food and Drug Administration to “do its course.”
On Friday, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) informed people not to use Oleandrin because it couldn’t “reasonably be expected to be safe” when used as a dietary supplement to protect against COVID-19.
That followed on the FDA’s earlier warning not to take the antimalarial drugs hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine because they won’t help with the coronavirus but can give you “serious heart rhythm problems…blood and lymph system disorders, kidney injuries, and liver problems and failure.”
Of course, the FDA didn’t feel the need to test the president’s theory that you can simply Lysol your lungs or shine a light up your ass to cure COVID-19, but that advice resulted in a big spike in accidental poisonings.
The simplest way to put this is that Trump kills people with his stupid immoral decisions. Now he’s fixated on something that might actually work, and he’s going to sabotage that too, because the politicization of vaccines makes people distrustful and less willing to use them. Even worse, pushing people to take a vaccine that isn’t ready could give people completely legitimate reasons to doubt the government’s safety assurances.
So, I’m not happy to learn that Trump is finally focused on a vaccine. I consider it terrible news, even though a vaccine is desperately needed to get us back to something resembling normal.
I just don’t see how a premature announcement of some faux vaccine is going to benefit him, even on the cusp of the election. I think it’s just a grand delusion on his part. No one , not even the most loyal Trumpster, is going to rush in to get it, the only ones who will stand up and tout this “miracle” are already known as his loyal sycophants. The general public, at large, is just going to wait until the larger scientific community is on board with a fully vetted vaccine. He has simply shown his cards so often that his attempt at bluffing now is just not going to persuade the people he thinks it’s going to persuade.
Trump has every intention of making sure a vaccine is available by the middle of October. How? By buying it from Putin. That’s the vaccine he’s counting on. With so many companies formally agreeing to not circumvent FDA rules regardless of what Trump wants, it’s the only one that will be ready.
And when Trump tells his followers to take it, they will.
Don’t think things can’t get worse with how the government is handling this, it can get far worse, and will.
I’m reminded of what the head of vaccine development at the CDC said a couple weeks ago:
‘If the administration forces us to approve a vaccine prematurely, that will be my red line, and I will quit’.
What an idiot! That’s not how gangsters work! They don’t insist you rob a bank right off, first they have you shop lift a pack of gum, then they have you steal from a store cash register, they they have you mug someone. Only then do they hand you a gun to rob a bank, once they have you in their pocket.
One week after that guy said that, Trump had the CDC approve blood plasma prematurely. Then he had them change the testing standards…specially to lower positive tests numbers, but also to prepare the table for a foreign, untested vaccines. It’s called incrementalism.
Like the old saw, if you want to boil a frog, start with cold water.
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You’re depressing, but you knew that.
Worth noting that the Russian vaccine study is fraudulent
https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2020/09/08/leading-scientists-question-highly-improbable-russian-vaccine-results-published-in-lancet-a71384
Anyone who isn’t a Trumper is going to wait until a different vaccine not rushed out under a FDA emergency use authorization is available. I bet he also quietly makes an executive order, no doubt illegal, that the maker cannot be sued if their vaccine kills people.
So this is Part 1 of their October Surprise. Barr’s “report” will be Part 2, once it’s clear the vaccine is not generating the coverage they want.
I doubt Science on Order is going to work too well. The rest of the world’s scientists are ahead of us, but Trump idiotically had to have us abandon membership in the World Health Organization at possibly the worst time in history (Doh!). (Paging Dr Biden…Dr Biden…you might want to start mentioning this!)
But the final act of the grand operatic tragedy “The Trials of Dr Fauci” will have to include a titanic confrontation between the protagonist Fauci (tenor) and the villainous President Trumpolini (bass). (Much like the Grand Inquisitor scene in Verdi’s “Don Carlo”.) Fauci will agonize over quitting or being fired for revealing the vaccine is a ginned-up phony, while the monstrous president demands loyalty or personal disgrace. (If anyone could actually write operas anymore, “Trump” would be a great topic…but I digress.)
The problem with Trump’s Vaccine Gambit is that it’s already not a surprise, so can’t function as an October Surprise, by definition. There is simply no doubt that Trump plans on having the government release some concoction purporting to be a Covid-19 vaccine before the election. But how that functions as a “cure” for his manifest incompetence to date is still a mystery. In any event, folks are already starting to vote, pre-“vaccine”…