That’s not a coincidence—they deliberately delayed reporting the trial results until after the election because they were worried that good news would help Trump.
So which is it: 1) The mRNA vaccine was rushed out without sufficient clinical trials; 2) The results from the clinical trials were delayed to hurt Trump.
You can’t have both you know. So far the far-right argument has been entirely based on scenario 1, but it’s certainly interesting to know that scenario 2 also exists for some people.
Operation Warp Speed was a signature effort of the Trump administration. As a result, the claim that the vaccine was being “rushed out without sufficient clinical trials” was made by just about all of Trump’s critics.
Nine months from formulating the vaccine to a successful Phase 3 trial is record speed. There’s no way the vaccine was held up to somehow politically hurt the president.
I’m a Trump critic and I was happy with the priority given to Operation Warp Speed. It’s the only thing he did right during the pandemic. But a lot of the MAGA crowd are anti-vaxxers, so he’s been trying to distance himself from the successful vaccine operation.
>But a lot of the MAGA crowd are anti-vaxxers, so he’s been trying to distance himself from the successful vaccine operation.
Exactly. Trump himself killed his own stance and delayed initatives that cost thousands of lives. Probably killed off a lot of his voter base to boot. if he managed to convince people to lockdown he may have still be president in 2020-2024.
The clinical trials were all done well before the election, and the FDA could have issued the emergency use authorizations in October, but they held off for a few weeks under the explicit political pressure discussed in the story I mentioned.
When it comes to “anti-vaxxers”, a lot of people, including both Biden and Harris, were outspokenly skeptical of any vaccine that would have been approved under a Trump administration (https://www.politico.com/news/2020/09/05/kamala-harris-trump...), so frankly this is largely an artifact of political polarization.
