andyrebell

So you don't think for the final stage of these clinical trials they should attempt to be proactive and try the campaign in an area which doesn't yet have but will have an uptake in the infection rate in the next few weeks like Utah according to CNN? Or do you think it should be done in a place like Florida which already has the massive infection so it won't really slow it down without a much larger campaign than a third stage trial would offer. There are apparently a few states whose numbers might go in the wrong direction who that could help slow it as well as gathering additional data from a larger study set.

Pulaski

Also, going purely off the reported demographics of deaths from covid-19, become younger, wealthier, and paler.

civilservant

A good percentage of it can. It is incumbent on a leader to demonstrate the way forward for the public good. He has singularly failed to do that.

Those that support him take his lead.

In his own words: 'No I don't take responsibility at all'

Pulaski

I am not an expert on clinical trials, and apparently you aren't either. .... So I am not sure where trials would take place, but I would guess that they would be local to the university(ies)/ institution(s) performing the trials, and as there are thousnads of cases in every state, I would guess that there is an adequate prospective test population for a trial in the local area of any university.

I have no idea what you mean by "campaign" - maybe you're still entrenched in your mindset of Donald Trump personally vaccinating people?

civilservant

I agree with Pulaski, you are misunderstanding the purpose of the trials. Yes the effectiveness will be gauged, but it's more about establishing the safety of the prospective vaccine by exposing many many multiples of people to it.

Put it this way, there was a potential Ebola vaccine that was muted awhile back, but it included a potential projected 2% infection rate, of a disease that kills 50-80% of it's victims.

Put another way, that vaccine if it were real and introduced to the whole US population of 300 million, would have killed 3-4.8 million people.

andyrebell

You think if they had this breakthrough in April moving to final stage testing in May - with a view to rollout starting in October which happens - that Trump wouldn't be on the campaign trail 3 weeks before the election giving a few of his supporters the vaccine in front of the cameras. He would be doing that saying whatever he saying using the word great several times like a tape recorder. But now that won't happen. This breakthrough in the vaccine has come too late to save him. Events have moved against him and his handling of this outbreak will cost him the election.

Pulaski

That is entirely pointless speculation, though I would like to take the opportunity to point out that you were repeatedly told this back in March and April, by several people here on BE, including me, that there was negilible chance of a vacine being available before the spring or summer of 2021, at the earliest.
Your qualifications to be a political pundit on US elections are as flimsy as your qualifications to discuss the development and testing of vaccines. You have, quite clearly, absolutely no awareness of the situation "on the ground" across much of the US, and you are relying on the same media that confidently predicted, right up to the moment that the polls closed, that Hilary Clinton was going to trounce Donald Trump in 2016 to predict that Joe Biden will beat Donald Trump in 2020.

There are several reasons why this assumption is invalid, most notably that the shutdowns have cost tens of millions of jobs, whereas the coronavirus will probably have killed "only" around 250,000 by the time election day comes, and those deaths are primarily in demographics that are generally not Republican voters anyway - either because of ethnicity, or because Deomcrat voters are concentrated in large cities, as are coronavirus victims. In short there are many more votes to be gained by bashing Democrat governors for shutting things down than there are to be lost by the coronavirus deaths.

andyrebell

But you needed a better leader than Trump in this crisis America will not forget that. Without the Coronavirus he would have won again I am sure but not with this. Had the leadership been better the death toll would be lower. All Biden has to say is he would have done it better. And besides all the bashing of democratic governors won't turn California or New York Republican and give 85 college votes to Trump and don't they need 330 to win? Biden has a quarter of what he needs right there. He will work mark my words.

And surely there was no alternative but to shutdown and save lives? Unless you would be happy seeing 1 million americans dead so people can have jobs. The leader who oversaw that would be impeached I am sure.

Pulaski

You obviously didn't read what I wrote, or just decided to ignore it, for whatever reason. ..... There are massively more votes available regarding unemployment resulting from shut-downs than will be lost due to covid-19 deaths, and Donald Trump is going to utterly roast the Democrat governors who shut down states and threw millions out of their jobs.

And Donald Trump doesn't need either New York or California to win the presidency, and I don't think any Republican president has won either since Ronald Reagan did.

And outside of the US, you are getting nothing about Biden. He is a decrepit old f@rt, who doesn't appear to have any policies, forgets what he is saying halfway through sentences, and is probably the only candidate that the Democrats could find who makes Donald Trump look eloquent. I have no idea why the Democrat party managers allowed him to get nominated, as surely there are younger, more dynamic Democrats who could have trounced Donald Trump. As with John Kerry, and Al Gore, it is almost like the Democrats want to lose .... though you could say the same thing about the Republicans and John McCain.

andyrebell

I didn't ignore I am just of the point that people can't be replaced but jobs will come back. He can roast the governors but he can't roast the voters that hate him in those democratic places or the ones that he has lost through 4 years of fooling around and acting the goat on the world stage. I would like to hear Trump make an argument for so called herd immunity survival of the fittest given that 1 million americans minimum would die. That would be a tough argument to make. It will be an interesting race to watch for sure. Biden will just say I would have lead better and been stronger on the issue.

Biden has dementia he probably has got it. It is a sad state of affairs that neither party for a while has been able to find a decent candidate not since Obama. All the younger ones dropped by the wayside in the primaries didn't they?. The party has to go with Biden now since people like Cuomo, and Lance-Bottoms the Atlanta Mayor and even Michelle Obama are not interested or not available so they could not have been pushed in at convention. But doesn't Biden VP pick cancel his issues out after all if he has it and can't do a full term who do you get? If he picks the right VP who knows....

robin1234

The one I most remember in that regard was Bob Dole in 1996. I just remember the day he was nominated, or the day it was clear he’d be the candidate, I remember thinking - end of story. Clinton has won the election.

civilservant

H.W won California in 88, but yep, it's been a long time.

Pulaski

But that just means that he would have shut down even more of American than actually happened, doesn't it? That might have been the best thing to do to control the pandemic, but when America doesn't have generous unemployment pay, or much of a safety net to help the unemployed, Americans are going to look for someone who wants to create jobs, and if Biden's angle is to say "I would have given better leadership on coronavirus" it is just going to sound like he wanted to throw even more people out of work.

You seem to be obsessed with the idea that 130,000 deaths is a lot, in America it really isn't. For starters it is only about 12 days worth of normal, average deaths in the US - there are about 11,000 deaths a day, every day in the US on average. Then somewhere between a quarter and a third of those deaths were in care homes - the elderly and frail, who were, to be blunt, just waiting to die. Then there is the fact that that deaths are significantly skewed racially, with apparently a black person twice as likely as a white person to die from coronavirus, and other racial minorities to also suffer disproportionately. Then there is the fact that the deaths, to date at least, were skewed towards New York, which is considered to be a Democrat stronghold, so it wouldn't matter if there is a backlast against Donald Trump in NYC, as he was very unlikely to win New York anyway. Other centers have been other large cities, which are generally islands of Democrat support even in states that are generally Republican leaning.

So, per above, across the vast majority of America, the "fly over" part, voters don't necessarily see themselves as being at great risk from coronavirus - for one or more of several reasons - they're not elderly, they're not in a large city, they're not an ethnic minority, and in most cases they either don't know anyone who died, or the person they know was elderly and/or unhealthy, and were "going to die soon anyway". And of course then there are those who just "rationalize" the death of grandpa as being "God's will".

So when it comes time to vote, large numbers of voters are going to vote based on their own self interest, which is work and jobs, not on sentimentality over a tiny percentage of deaths, mostly of the elderly who they either didn't know, or don't empathize with for one or more reasons. ..... For many Americans it would be like British voters voting based on what was happening in Barcelona, Berlin, or Athens. No matter how tragic, what is happening to you and your family locally, will (pardon the pun) trump what is happening hundreds or thousands of miles away in a city that is alien to you.

Please note I am not saying I agree with any of those statements, though I might agree with some of them, but I hope that this summary helps you understand a little of what is actually going on here, in the Amercica that the mainstream media seems to have lost contact with.

Jerseygirl

^^^^^^^^^^ I agree...’It’s the economy stupid’. ^^^^^^^^^^

retzie

There is the great unspoken risk factor of being overweight, though. And if there's one thing these parts of the country have in common...