“They’re recklessly endangering lives”
Another day another lies conference:
Donald Trump started off the press conference by doubling down on his assertion that there will be “a hundred million vaccine doses by the end of 2020”. He said that vaccines should be ready by “mid-October”.
Trump criticized Joe Biden for spreading “anti-vaccine theories” by saying that Trump is trying to politicize a vaccine by rushing its development before the election. potentially foregoing safety precautions.
“They’re recklessly endangering lives,” Trump said, saying that if Democrats were in the same position, the would be saying how important vaccines are.
It’s not anti-vax to say Trump is making bullshit promises because he wants to win the election. Quite the contrary – a pretend vaccine is no use to anyone.
It’s of course important to remember that health experts have reiterated that a vaccine on Trump’s timeline is highly unlikely.
And that Trump lies more easily than he does almost anything else.
But no, other people are “confused” says the genius.
…a reporter asked the president why he said a vaccine would be available by mid-October when Redfield told a Senate panel today that a vaccine would likely be available in the “second or third quarter” of 2021 at the earliest.
“I think he made a mistake with that statement,” Trump said. “When he said it, I believe he was confused. I’m just telling you we’re ready to go.”
Aka he’s just lying.
He makes reckless claims – he’s not very good at thinking about how such claims could backfire on him.
Trump, continuing to contradict what Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director Robert Redfield said earlier today, just said at a press conference that “under no circumstance would [the vaccine] be as late as the doctor said.”
He can’t know that. Sensible people don’t make absolute claims like that, because they know it’s reckless.
Donnie Pinhead is also saying Redfield is wrong to say masks are important.
Trump again contradicted Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Robert Redfield once again, saying that Redfield “made a mistake” when he said that masks are “the most important, powerful public health tool we have.”
“I might even go so far as to say that this face mask is more guaranteed to protect me against COVID than when I take a COVID vaccine,” Redfield told a Senate panel Wednesday.
Trump said that a vaccine will be more effective as masks have to be “handled very gently, very carefully”. Trump said that he has seen people at restaurants not being careful with their masks.
And that’s why he does campaign events where very few people wear masks at all. Ok.
I suspect there are readers of this blog who actually know the answer. If an approved and safe vaccine existed say a week ago (as far as we know that is not the case), how many doses could conceivably be produced by ‘mid-October’ if multiple manufacturers pooled their resources?
given that to the best of public knowledge no approved vaccine currently exists and therefore multiple manufactures have not started spooling up production, it does sound remarkably like another lie designed to ‘prevent panic’.
Even if it were true would there be enough people willing to get it to make a difference?
Following the vaccine production tangent – I’ve been reading this blog by a pharma industry insider who’s been posting about the various ongoing vaccine development efforts. Now my basis for thinking he’s fairly trustworthy is based on two factors: his writing is better than most journalists and he wrote some entertaining things about "Things I Won’t Work With" including the classic "Sand Won’t Save You This Time</a>". So take that supposed reliability for what it's worth.
Back to the original tangent – it seems at least a couple of the bigger vaccine developers have started mass producing their candidates in the hope that their concurrent phaseII/phaseIII trials work out – but even if all goes swimmingly that's probably looking at early 2021 for widespread deployment.
I'm just going to shameless quote the best part from that post (on chlorine trifluoride):
Well I screwed up the link tags somehow and got put in moderation. :-)
OK, so which Russian-backed Twitter propaganda account is he following?
A group of parents has descended on one of our local school systems demanding they lift the mask requirement. They said “masks don’t help”. I presume they were parroting the Donald.
To his credit, the superintendent, who waffled for months before requiring masks, has basically said his choice is mandatory masks or closing the schools. He told them it is important to keep the schools open.