In a statement released on Monday, US biotech company Moderna said it would seek American and European emergency approval for its Covid-19 vaccine candidate, after stage-three trials showed it to be 94.1 percent effective against the deadly coronavirus.
President Donald Trump called on the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to "ACT QUICKLY!" in approving the jab, and called his administration's 'Operation Warp Speed' vaccine development program a "great modern day miracle."
That Trump would both seek speedy approval and claim credit for Moderna's breakthrough is no surprise. In a Thanksgiving address to US troops on Thursday, the president promised that vaccine delivery would "literally... start next week and the week after," adding that the military would aid in doling out doses to seniors, healthcare workers and other frontline staff first.
Trump's boast of a "modern day miracle" also comes after US drugmaker Pfizer delayed its announcement of an effective vaccine until five days after this month's election. Though Pfizer insisted that it could only declare the shot effective on the eve of its announcement, Trump accused the company, along with the FDA, of deliberately withholding the information to hamper his re-election bid.
Trump then switched tack and bragged of Operation Warp Speed's role in aiding Pfizer's vaccine development, before the company clarified that it had not actually taken any government money to fund its research.
Moderna, however, took $1.5 billion to develop and produce 100 million doses of its vaccine candidate, giving Trump ample opportunity to claim credit.
Though Joe Biden, who already proclaimed himself the next head of the US, has repeatedly accused Trump of bungling his response to the coronavirus, the president has remained typically cocky. "If you had a different administration with different people, what we've done would have taken, in my opinion, three, four, five years," he told reporters earlier this month.
"We are rounding the curve. The vaccines are being delivered - literally it will start next week and the week after, and it will hit the frontline workers and seniors and doctors, nurses... we're going very quickly," Trump said on Thursday, during a Thanksgiving address to US troops stationed overseas.A vaccine would at least mean that politicians can't claim that the lockdowns are because they're 'waiting for a vaccine', and it would reveal that the tyrannical lockdowns actually barely conceal a more nefarious agenda. However it also exposes those in the West to danger, because these vaccine trials have been plagued with problems:
"This normally would have taken four or five years, just getting it through the FDA," he added.
And for good reason, partlcularly so for those companies using unproven and highly experimental methods.
Trump has repeatedly noted that the military would take some part in doling out the vaccine, but has left its exact role a mystery in public comments. While Americans are unlikely to receive injections out of the back of a humvee, the Department of Defense has closely coordinated with other government agencies in the push for the jab, dubbed "Operation Warp Speed." Part of that work has meant helping pharmaceutical companies establish "pop-up sites" to conduct vaccine trials, for example, providing logistics support and even double-wide trailers for the tests.
Though state governors have the option of using National Guard units to help move doses of the vaccine, distribution itself will largely be left to manufacturers, which work through networks of commercial shippers. The military will, however, monitor the distribution process through an "operations center," with the main spokesman for Operation Warp Speed, Paul Mango, telling reporters: "They will know where every vaccine dose is.
"If a vaccine dose is at risk of expiring, they will guide the movement of that to someplace else," he said.
To the list of the enemies threatening the security of the United States, the Pentagon has added WikiLeaks.org, a tiny online source of information and documents that governments and corporations around the world would prefer to keep secret.The NYT explained that the Pentagon had prepared a secret 2008 plan in which they plotted how to destroy WikiLeaks, including by purposely leaking to it false documents with the hope that the group would publish the fakes and forever obliterate their credibility — a dastardly scheme which was ironically leaked to WikiLeaks, which promptly posted the document on its website.
Comment: Either Kuehl believes dining in restaurants is dangerous, or she doesn't. And if she doesn't think it's dangerous enough to avoid it herself, she shouldn't be voting to ban it for everyone else. Just another instance of the elite enacting rules for the rest of us that they don't feel the need to follow themselves - proof that they don't take this viral threat seriously (as they shouldn't).
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