Democrats are rightfully getting nervous about the most plausible Trump October Surprise: Announcement of some emergency approval of a vaccine, followed by heartwarming pictures of the Dear Leader overseeing the first shots for a diverse group of elderly people. A common reaction here (DKos) has been intense suspicion of any vaccine that might become available in a few months, with claims that it’s sure to be some dangerous scam. My point here is that this understandable reaction is suicidal for individual medical choices, for the psychology of pandemic response, and for politics.
Operation Warp Speed is not a Trump invention. It’s a rebranding of an Obama initiative to develop new vaccine platforms capable of rapid response to the viral challenges that epidemiologists knew were coming. The vaccine work of Moderna, the first US vaccine developer to get to Phase 3 trials, was jump-started under Obama by a $25M 2013 DARPA grant and a 2016 BARDA grant ( > $8M). Rumor has it (I don’t have documentation) that Obama personally asked a group of scientists if they were really still culturing vaccines in chicken eggs, and whether they could develop something much better. That’s how the mRNA vaccine work got off the ground.
There are no guarantees that the Moderna vaccine will do as well in large-scale trials as it has in preliminary tests. Likewise there are no guarantees for the Pfizer mRNA vaccine (developed in Germany), or the Oxford adenovirus vaccine, etc. Nevertheless, it is highly likely that several of the many vaccines under development will work pretty well, and should be distributed on an accelerated schedule. Good treatments will be here sooner. Dexamethasone has just been found to be very useful in severe cases. Remdesivir is scarce now, but production is ramping up. Nebulized interferon, EIDD-2801, etc. are being tested. Monoclonal antibodies, probably much more effective, are coming next. Help is on the way.
Remember, currently about 5000 people a day are dying world-wide, about 1000 of them in the US. In the US and many other countries, people are getting exhausted with maintaining precautions and are becoming more reckless. Psychologically that makes sense if the choice is simply to delay the inevitable or to start living normally now. It makes no sense if the choice is to hang on for a few months and then get back to normal or to throw caution to the winds and risk being one of the last people to die of Covid-119 before treatments and vaccines come.
We hate Trump. We know he’s a liar. We know he shows depraved indifference to human life. That is not sufficient reason to reject a life-saving medicine developed from an Obama program.
We know people are often unrealistically optimistic, and use that to justify recklessness. That is not a reason to promote unrealistic pessimism that also leads to recklessness.
We know that people are desperate for a technical fix, and might buy fake ones from an old snake-oil salesman. But when there are real technical solutions, the last thing we want to do is play the part of fuddy-duddy bureaucrats in some Ayn Rand cartoon, stalling progress while the heroic Leader acts decisively. That way lies defeat.
So here’s the bottom line.
1.Vaccines that are coming pretty soon are likely to be extremely valuable, so to reject them for political reasons would be personally suicidal .
2.The realistic hope for effective treatments and vaccines soon is crucial for motivating people to hang on and keep being cautious now, rather than giving up. Therefore, for immediate public health reasons spreading unwarranted pessimism is suicidal.
3.Trump will falsely claim that he, not Obama, took the key steps to make vaccines available at “Warp Speed”. Therefore, quibbling and naysaying as effective vaccines come in view, rather than proudly taking credit, will be politically suicidal.
Postscript:
I’ll address some points before they arise in the comments, to keep the discussion focused on the core issues. Here’s what I’m not claiming:
1. That any particular vaccine is a sure bet to be safe and effective.
2. That it’s a sure bet for any vaccine at all to be sterilizing enough to give herd immunity.
3. That it’s normal for the head of the vaccine task force to have large investments in one of the candidate vaccines.
4. That our for-profit drug development system is either efficient or humane.
5. That our wildly expensive and cruel healthcare system is as good as the universal systems used by the rest of the developed world.
6. That we can trust that the Trump vaccine distribution will not be another clusterfuck.