More scary pandemic news
It becomes more and more unclear how our president in this coronavirus pandemic can keep claiming, as he did in the debate: “We have a vaccine that’s coming, it’s ready. It’s going to be announced within weeks, and it’s going to be delivered.”
It is especially unclear now that we’ve learned the Trump administration in 2019 quietly shut down the vaccine safety office that since 1987 had been dedicated to the long-term safety of vaccines.
Health experts say now that plans to track coronavirus vaccines and their safety are fragmented and “behind the eight ball.”
This bombshell came Friday from The New York Times. And what it means is that government researchers face a monumental challenge: How to monitor the health of hundreds of millions of Americans to ensure the eventual vaccines don’t cause harm. Here’s the quandary, according to The Times:
“Purely by chance, thousands of vaccinated people will have heart attacks, strokes and other illnesses shortly after the injections. Sorting out whether the vaccines had anything to do with their ailments will be a thorny problem, requiring a vast, coordinated effort by state and federal agencies, hospitals, drug makers and insurers to discern patterns in a flood of data. Findings will need to be clearly communicated to a distrustful public swamped with disinformation.”
We’ve recounted on this page before – even as recently as last week – how the global health security office that was to coordinate pandemic response was disbanded in 2018 by the Trump administration in the name of “reorganization” to streamline so-called bureaucratic bloat. The next year, the National Vaccine Program Office met a similar fate, according to this new story by The Times.
Dr. Nicole Lurie, who was assistant secretary for preparedness and response at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services during the 2009 H1N1 pandemic, told The Times that the loss of the vaccine safety office was especially costly once the coronavirus pandemic hit.
“The coordinated leadership for stuff like this would likely come from the National Vaccine Program Office,” she said.
So now what?
Sure, the drug companies that profit from the vaccines do tracking research. But do we want to trust it just to them?
Climate plans from different planets
CNN’s Chief Climate Correspondent Bill Weir hit the nail on the head Friday when he pointed out that the truest, most tragic and unintentional statement of Thursday’s presidential debate came from moderator Kristen Welker when she tried to herd the candidates as the debate wound down:
“We’re running out of time so we gotta get on to climate change.”
Her questions brought plans “from two different planets,” Weir wrote.
Trump, from somewhere in orbit, asserted: “We have the Trillion Trees program. We have so many different programs.”
No, there are no other programs, Weir wrote. “Instead the president hit a gusher of lies, confusion and insistence that the U.S. remain reliant on fossil fuels, despite the overwhelming evidence” that natural disasters like those of 2020 are just the beginning.
Biden, feet planted solidly on earth, said “Global warming is an existential threat to humanity. We have a moral obligation to deal with it.” And he ticked off parts of his plan – highway charging stations for electric vehicles, retrofitting buildings to save energy, harnessing wind and solar energy.
Wouldn’t you know it – Trumped piped up again: “I know more about wind that you do.” Sound familiar?
Trump said wind is extremely expensive and kills birds. He also said solar “doesn’t quite have it yet.”
Weir’s CNN piece, however, trumps our extraterrestrial president.
Earlier this month, a renewable energy company called NextEra was deemed more valuable than ExxonMobil. And for some time already, the International Energy Agency declared that “solar projects now offer some of the lowest cost electricity ever seen.”
But what would we expect? Trump is the man who has never been as rich as he claimed and who has bankrupted his own businesses multiple times – and will likely do it again.
Weir penned the best debate comment of the week with this: “Running against such arrogant science denial, Biden could probably shoot a spotted owl on Fifth Avenue and not lose support of the Sierra Club.”
Thank goodness, someone can make us laugh in this sad season.
Trump dreams of suburban women
“Suburban women, will you please like me?” pleaded President Donald Trump a couple of weeks ago at a rally in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. “Please. Please.”
If you think it sounds a little like the 1960s hit from the Everly Brothers, “All I Have To Do Is Dream,” well – you, too, are old enough to remember – and you’re right.
The thing is, Trump is just going to have to keep on dreaming, because he’s lost us gals. Or at least most of us.
For much of the country, polarized views about the president haven’t budged since 2016, when he eked out a narrow Electoral College victory while losing the popular vote. But white women in the suburbs have changed their minds over the past four years big time, leaving the president crying.
New polling in swing states by The New York Times and Siena College shows Joe Biden leads by 23 points among those women. The women aren’t just over Trump. They’re over him with a vengeance.
Among men, the race is tied.
Enough said.