It Appears As Though Trump Wants To Kill As Many Americans As He Can Before He's Forced Out Of The White House

 

The scope of the disaster of the pandemic in the U.S. is the most blatant indictment of Trump's "leadership" so far.

The kind of actions-- by government and populace-- needed to defeat the pandemic went quickly into effect in east Asian countries-- from China, Taiwan, Japan, Hong Kong and South Korea to Vietnam, Thailand and Singapore. And it worked. The pandemic may have started in east Asia, but no one complained that wearing a mask or social distancing was an unacceptable infringement on their freedoms-- and the pandemic is pretty much under control across the region, certainly in comparison to the U.S. or Europe.

Over the weekend, 697,396 new cases were reported. 99,174 of those cases were reported in the U.S. It was a very different story in mask-wearing, social distancing east Asia. These were reported new cases for Saturday and Sunday:

• Japan +1,225
• South Korea +164
• China +26
• Hong Kong +21
• Thailand +17
• Vietnam +11
• Singapore +10
• Taiwan- 0

The combined population of these 8 countries is 1,821,626,954. The population of the U.S. is 331,584,544. The U.S. has 25,296 cases per million residents. Japan has 733 cases per million residents. South Korea has 491 cases per million residents. China has 60 cases per million residents. Thailand has 53; Taiwan 22; Vietnam 12.

The data-driven Financial Times report on the pandemic crisis on Sunday noted that "by late February new cases in China were in decline, and attention had shifted to two new areas of concern, one a regional neighbour and the other further afield. Alarms were raised in South Korea in mid-February after a single super-spreader sparked more than 1,000 cases in the city of Daegu in a matter of days. Between February 17 and 25, the country’s confirmed case count rose from 31 to 1,146-- a 37-fold increase in just eight days, with cases doubling every day and a half. Meanwhile, in Europe, all eyes were on Italy as a cluster of infections began spreading through the northern region of Lombardy. Both trajectories looked bleak, but the countries’ fortunes quickly diverged. South Korea acted quickly, taking advantage of legislation passed in response to the 2012 Mers crisis that allows for extensive surveillance of its citizens during an infectious disease outbreak. A comprehensive contact-tracing operation was put in place, partnered with a rapid expansion of testing. On March 20, South Korea was carrying out 100 tests for every positive one that came back, the same day it recorded its 100th death. It took Italy three more months and 34,000 deaths to reach the same testing levels."

The US entered the crisis already particularly vulnerable among western nations due to many residents being without health insurance and a lack of paid sick leave in many areas. Moreover, in Donald Trump, it had a president who consistently downplayed the severity of the disease that he would eventually contract.

In the absence of a co-ordinated federal response, state and local governments introduced their own measures to contain the virus. Loosening of restrictions has been similarly fragmented, and in some cases started before evidence suggested local outbreaks were under control.

The complex patchwork of often contradictory state-level measures can be visualised using an index developed by political scientists at Oxford university’s Blavatnik School of Government to summarise the overall stringency of responses to the pandemic.

When the virus claimed thousands of victims in the spring, the centre of the crisis was New York City, its suburbs and similar cities in the north-east; vast swaths of the country were largely unaffected. As the year wore on, startlingly different geographical patterns emerged. Once confined to the most densely populated cities, the virus seeped out into small-town and rural America, with places such as Hancock county, Georgia, (population: 8,457) registering among the highest death rates in the country. By early October, the overall death rate was highest in counties classified as the small towns and rural areas-- and lowest in large urban counties.

Another invaluable data provider is CovidExitStrategy.org and this map the published yesterday shows each state's progress towards a new normal. Two states are in decent shape: Maine and Vermont. California, Oregon, New York and New Hampshire don't look good but the the rest of the country looks terrible and most of it is in an "uncontrolled spread." If you want all the numbers, study the website. This map gives you can idea of the horror-show we're facing thanks to Trump's version of "leadership."

Trump's version of leadership has always been highlighted by infighting and chaos. It's how lesser men control situations in business and politics. It doesn't work for anyone but the leader. It's a disaster in a national challenge-- like the pandemic. Philip Rucker took it on yesterday with a Washington Post deep dive focusing on the catastrophic response to the pandemic: Trump’s den of dissent: Inside the White House task force as coronavirus surges. "Atlas shot down attempts to expand testing," he began. "He openly feuded with other doctors on the coronavirus task force and succeeded in largely sidelining them. He advanced fringe theories, such as that social distancing and mask-wearing were meaningless and would not have changed the course of the virus in several hard-hit areas. And he advocated allowing infections to spread naturally among most of the population while protecting the most vulnerable and those in nursing homes until the United States reaches herd immunity, which experts say would cause excess deaths, according to three current and former senior administration officials. Atlas also cultivated Trump’s affection with his public assertions that the pandemic is nearly over, despite death and infection counts showing otherwise, and his willingness to tell the public that a vaccine could be developed before the Nov. 3 election, despite clear indications of a slower timetable. Atlas’s ascendancy was apparent during a recent Oval Office meeting. After Trump left the room, Atlas startled other aides by walking behind the Resolute Desk and occupying the president’s personal space to keep the meeting going, according to one senior administration official."

Discord on the coronavirus task force has worsened since the arrival in late summer of Atlas, whom colleagues said they regard as ill-informed, manipulative and at times dishonest. As the White House coronavirus response coordinator, Deborah Birx is tasked with collecting and analyzing infection data and compiling charts detailing upticks and other trends. But Atlas routinely has challenged Birx’s analysis and those of other doctors, including Anthony S. Fauci, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Robert Redfield, and Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Stephen Hahn, with what the other doctors considered junk science, according to three senior administration officials.

Birx recently confronted Vice President Pence, who chairs the task force, about the acrimony, according to two people familiar with the meeting. Birx, whose profile and influence has eroded considerably since Atlas’s arrival, told Pence’s office that she does not trust Atlas, does not believe he is giving Trump sound advice and wants him removed from the task force, the two people said.

Pence did not take sides, but rather told Atlas and Birx to bring data bolstering their perspectives to the task force and to work out their disagreements themselves, according to two senior administration officials.

The result has been a U.S. response increasingly plagued by distrust, infighting and lethargy, just as experts predict coronavirus cases could surge this winter and deaths could reach 400,000 by year’s end.

...On Saturday, Atlas wrote on Twitter that masks do not work, prompting the social media site to remove the tweet for violating its safety rules for spreading misinformation. Several medical and public health experts flagged the tweet as dangerous misinformation coming from a primary adviser to the president.

“Masks work? NO,” Atlas wrote in the tweet, followed by other misrepresentations about the science behind masks. He linked to an article from the American Institute for Economic Research-- a libertarian think tank behind the Barrington effort-- that argued against masks and dismissed the threat of the virus as overblown.

Trump and many of his advisers have come to believe that the key to a revived economy and a return to normality is a vaccine.

“They’ve given up on everything else,” said a senior administration official involved in the pandemic response. “It’s too hard of a slog.”

Infectious-disease and other public health experts said the friction inside the White House has impaired the government’s response.

“It seems to me this is policy-based evidence-making rather than evidence-based policymaking,” said Marc Lipsitch, director of the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “In other words, if your goal is to do nothing, then you create a situation in which it looks okay to do nothing [and] you find some experts to make it complicated.”

These days, the task force is dormant relative to its robust activity earlier in the pandemic. Fauci, Birx, Surgeon General Jerome Adams and other members have confided in others that they are dispirited.

Birx and Fauci have advocated dramatically increasing the nation’s testing capacity, especially as experts anticipate a devastating increase in cases this winter. They have urged the government to use unspent money Congress allocated for testing-- which amounts to $9 billion, according to a Democratic Senate appropriations aide-- so that anyone who needs to can get a test with results returned quickly.

Opposition Research by Nancy Ohanian

But Atlas, who is opposed to surveillance testing, has repeatedly quashed these proposals. He has argued that young and healthy people do not need to get tested and that testing resources should be allocated to nursing homes and other vulnerable places, such as prisons and meatpacking plants.

...The president gave voice to this mind-set during an NBC News town hall Thursday night, when he declined to answer whether he supported herd immunity. “The cure cannot be worse than the problem itself,” Trump told host Savannah Guthrie.

But medical experts disagreed, saying it is dangerous for government leaders to advocate herd immunity or oppose interventions.

“We’d be foolish to reenter a situation where we know what to do and we’re not doing it,” said Rochelle Walensky, chief of the division of infectious diseases at Massachusetts General Hospital and a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. “This thing can take off. All you need to do is look at what’s happened at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue over the last two weeks to see that this thing is way faster than we’re giving it credit for.”

...Trump’s notion of a vaccine as a cure-all for the pandemic is similarly miraculous, according to medical experts.

“The vaccines, although they’re wonderful, are not going to make the virus magically disappear,” said Tom Frieden, a former CDC director who is president of Resolve to Save Lives. “There’s no fairy-tale ending to this pandemic. We’re going to be dealing with it at least through 2021, and it’s likely to have implications for how we do everything from work to school, even with vaccines.”

Frieden added: “Remember, we have vaccines against the flu, and we still have flu.”

Still, Trump has ratcheted up his push for vaccines over the past several months, intensifying the pressure on government scientists, federal regulators and pharmaceutical executives. He has had one end date in mind: Nov. 3, which is Election Day.

Trump has envisioned a greenlit vaccine as the kind of breakthrough that could persuade voters to see his management of the pandemic as successful and thus upend a race in which virtually all public polls show him trailing Democratic nominee Joe Biden.

...The relationships between FDA officials and White House staffers have grown more acrimonious since September, when details of stricter FDA vaccine guidance were reported by The Post. Trump and White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows-- who has involved himself in the work of health agencies to a degree other officials consider inappropriate-- have repeatedly challenged Hahn over his agency’s proposals and rules, much to the FDA commissioner’s frustration.

Trump is asserting control over the messaging campaign around a vaccine. His politically minded aides in the White House have taken over the government’s communications effort, as opposed to health or scientific communicators at the relevant agencies.

For example, White House aides have sought to persuade Moncef Slaoui, head of “Operation Warp Speed,” the government’s initiative to mass-distribute an eventual vaccine, to speak more positively about the vaccine, and sometimes he has pushed back on their talking points, two officials said.

Trump routinely has told his political advisers that a vaccine would be ready by the time he stands for reelection. And he has plotted with his team on a pre-election promotional campaign to try to convince voters a vaccine is safe, approved and ready for mass distribution-- even if none of that is true yet.

These are some of the ingredients of a public health disaster, experts say.

“The one thing you can’t do-- and it’s what everybody fears, it’s what the pharmaceutical companies fear, it’s what everybody on the inside fears-- is that the government would, because of political purposes or because other countries put a vaccine out before us, truncate the normal process you’d accept for a safe and effective vaccine,” said Paul A. Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, a professor of vaccinology at the University of Pennsylvania and a member of the FDA’s vaccine advisory council.

Trump’s view of the FDA has darkened considerably in recent weeks. The president now believes-- despite the absence of any such evidence-- that officials there are working against him to slow-walk vaccine approval as “some sort of ‘deep state’ push to keep him from winning reelection,” according to an administration official. Trump has said as much himself.

“New FDA Rules make it more difficult for them to speed up vaccines for approval before Election Day. Just another political hit job! @SteveFDA,” the president wrote in an Oct. 6 tweet, tagging Hahn’s Twitter handle.

Trump’s conspiratorial view of the FDA is shaped in part by White House trade adviser Peter Navarro and others in the president’s orbit, both inside and outside the government. Saad B. Omer, director of the Yale Institute for Global Health, said the atmosphere of pressure and recrimination, nurtured by the president, is “very concerning.”

“These are people who have dedicated their lives to working in public health and medicine and research,” he said. “To think that in the biggest public health event of their lives they would sleep an extra hour or slow-walk this for any reason is absurd.”

He added, “It’s like how an ambulance drives faster than a regular car because it’s an emergency, but even an ambulance driver is not foolhardy. They don’t want to drive over the bridge.”

'A lot of political pressure'

The distrust in Washington has trickled down to the states, where friction has increased between several governors and the administration over the vaccine process.

Some governors and officials close to them privately have expressed alarm about Trump and his aides laying the groundwork for a rushed vaccine announcement. The president has delegated much of the state outreach to Pence, who in regular calls with governors has come across as a smooth salesman for Trump’s speedy approach. The vice president has encouraged governors to help build confidence for eventual vaccines among their constituents.

Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker (D), whose state is the site for vaccine trials, said in an interview, “I certainly fear there is a lot of political pressure being applied.” He said his state is preparing for a vaccine rollout, but would carefully evaluate the integrity of any announcement emanating from the White House.

“Nobody has told me that it’ll be ready by November 2nd or anytime before the election,” Pritzker said. “But [Trump] will no doubt claim such a thing because of the cocktail of drugs that he seems to be on now. He’s liable to say anything that isn’t true.”

The concerns are not limited to Democrats. One Republican state official who works with the Trump administration and spoke on the condition of anonymity to preserve that relationship, said, “It’s what I would call soft power. Pence comes on these calls and sounds normal and upbeat, and basically says, ‘Stand with us.’”

The official added, “We all want a vaccine, right? We obviously want it. We’ll take it. But we don’t really know if they’ll do this right.”

The politicization of the process has damaged public credibility in an eventual vaccine. A Gallup poll released this month found that 50 percent of Americans said they would be willing to take a coronavirus vaccine approved by the FDA “right now at no cost.” That is a sharp decline from 61 percent in August and 66 percent in July.

During a virtual task force meeting led by Pence on Sept. 21, Washington Gov. Jay Inslee (D) said, “There is a substantial concern,” according to an audio recording of the meeting. “A significant part of that problem is the president’s continued anti-science statements that are contradictory to his medical advisers in so many different ways.”

Inslee asked Pence directly, “Have you discussed with the president how he’s been eroding public confidence in our efforts, including the vaccine approval? Have you discussed that with him? Have you urged him to stop this behavior?”

Pence did not directly answer the question. Rather, he replied, “We think you and all the governors on this call have a great responsibility to make sure the public knows while we’re moving rapidly and while there may be differences in opinion about various events, we just don’t want any undermining of confidence in the vaccine.”

The vice president added, “I can assure you the president will continue to speak clearly about that process.”

Inslee later said in an interview that Pence was anything but assuring.

“There is a pressure campaign,” Inslee said. “We need to follow science and not this distortion campaign... The people are on to [Trump]. They know he is trying to turn this into an electoral issue.”

...Trump has used Atlas to back up his own rejection of medical expertise. At Thursday’s NBC News town hall, a Florida voter asked the president whether after contracting covid-19 he now believed in the importance of mask-wearing.

“I’ve heard many different stories on masks,” he said.

When Guthrie challenged him by noting that all of his health officials were united in advocating masks, Trump countered by invoking Atlas.

“Scott Adkins,” Trump said, mispronouncing the doctor’s name. “If you look at Scott, Dr. Scott, he’s from-- great guy-- from Stanford, he will tell you.”

“He’s not an infectious-disease expert,” Guthrie said.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Trump replied. “Look, he’s an expert. He’s one of the experts of the world.”

Back to Gov. Pritzker for a moment. Illinois is in a catastrophic situation right now-- full-fledged pandemic crisis back after a long summer lull. Sunday, Illinois reported the most new cases of any state-- 4,245, bringing the statewide total to 347,635-- 27,434 cases per million residents. What made everything turn south again? Pritzker blames Trump and his allies. He was on CNN's State of the Union Sunday and told Jake Tapper that "People are not following the mitigations, because the modeling is so bad at the leadership level, the federal level. We are trying to get the word out and you're trying to continue to convince people to do the right thing but it is the president's allies in our state, all across the state, who are simply saying to people don't pay any attention to the mitigations, don't follow the rules."

Pritzker told the viewers that Trump is "modeling bad behavior. He doesn’t wear a mask in public. He has rallies where they don’t encourage people to wear masks in public. Truly, this is now rhetoric that people understand, particularly in rural areas in my state, 'Well, the president doesn’t wear a mask; we don’t need to wear a mask. It’s not that dangerous.' The truth of the matter is that it is very dangerous."

The Donald Is A Ticking Time Bomb-- But Let's Hope It Isn't A Nuclear one

 

Opposition Research by Nancy Ohanian

Did you watch the "loyalty dinner" scene in Billy Ray's excellent mini-series, The Comey Rule? Writer-director Ray and actor Brendan Gleeson portray Trump as a repulsive mob boss demanding personal loyalty from an very uncomfortable James Comey. Comey made a half-assed attempt to placate Trump but Trump wasn't buying it and it led to Trump's smear campaign against him and eventual humiliating firing.

Something tells me Trump's animus towards Dr. Anthony Fauci is even greater than his hatred for Comey was-- but, for whatever reason, Trump has felt he couldn't fire him before the election. No doubt Fauci will get his walking papers in November.





On Monday Fauci told Jake Tapper that the Trump campaign should stop running a misleading ad that implies Fauci:

a- thinks Trump did a good job on the pandemic
b- is endorsing or even voting for Trump

Neither a nor b is true and Fauci said he thinks "it’s really unfortunate and really disappointing that they did that. It is so clear that I am not a political person and I have never either directly or indirectly endorsed a political candidate. To take a completely out-of-context statement and put it in what is obviously a political campaign ad, I thought, was really very disappointing."

Here's the deceitful ad in question, which Trump refuses to stop running, even though it has been debunked as completely false and even though Fauci doesn't want to be associated with Trump's campaign:





Fauci's official statement to the media: "The comments attributed to me without my permission in the GOP campaign ad were taken out of context from a broad statement I made months ago about the efforts of federal public health officials."

Fauci replied to a question from Tapper about the safety of Trump's super-spreader campaign events. More of what Trump will absolutely see as disloyalty to himself: "We know that is asking for trouble when you do that. We’ve seen that when you have situations of congregate settings where there are a lot of people without masks, the data speak for themselves. And now is even more so a worse time to do that... It's going in the wrong direction right now, so if there's anything we should be doing, we should be doubling down in implementing the public health measures that we've been talking about for so long, which are keeping a distance, no crowds wearing masks, washing hands doing things outside as opposed to inside, in order to get those numbers down... We’re entering into the cooler months of the fall and ultimately the cold months of the winter and that's just a recipe of a real problem. If we don't get things under control before we get into that seasonal challenge."

And Fauci's not the only insider unhappy with the way things are going pandemic-wise. A startling-- but not unpredictable-- NY Times piece yesterday, Trump’s Virus Treatment Revives Questions About Unchecked Nuclear Authority. This is something Ted Lieu has been talking about for several years because, as David Sanger and William Broad reported "Even before the president was given mood-altering drugs, there was a movement to end the commander in chief’s sole authority to launch nuclear weapons." Doctors say the steroids he's on can produce delusions, euphoria, bursts of energy "and even a sense of invulnerability."

Trump’s long rants and seemingly erratic behavior last week-- which some doctors believe might have been fueled by his use of dexamethasone, a steroid, to treat Covid-19-- renewed a long-simmering debate among national security experts about whether it is time to retire one of the early inventions of the Cold War: the unchecked authority of the president to launch nuclear weapons.

Mr. Trump has publicly threatened the use of those weapons only once in his presidency, during his first collision with North Korea in 2017. But it was his decision not to invoke the 25th Amendment and turn control over to Vice President Mike Pence last week that has prompted concern inside and outside the government.

Among those who have long argued for the need to rethink presidents’ “sole authority” powers are former Defense Secretary William J. Perry, considered the dean of American nuclear strategists, who has cited the fragility of a nuclear-weapons control chain and the fear that it can be subject to errors of judgment or failure to ask the right questions under the pressure of a warning of an incoming attack.

A Culture Of Violence by Nancy Ohanian

 

Mr. Trump’s critics have long questioned whether his unpredictable statements and contradictions pose a nuclear danger. But the concerns raised last week were somewhat different: whether a president taking mood-altering drugs could determine whether a nuclear alert was a false alarm.

...Peter D. Zimmerman, a physicist and former government arms scientist, said few things better illustrated the confused nature of the American effort to prevent a single individual from launching a nuclear strike than the “two-man rule” in nuclear silos, submarines, bombers and the nation’s coast-to-coast atomic complex.

The rule requires the presence of two authorized people for any step involving access to the armaments or the launching of a nuclear strike. “No unaccompanied person ever approaches a nuclear weapon,” Dr. Zimmerman wrote in a 2017 opinion essay. “It’s a basic precaution against theft, misuse or sabotage.”

But it does not apply to the commander in chief, whether in the Oval Office or at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center.

A president could misjudge the situation or become impulsive, Dr. Zimmerman noted in an interview. “And the consequences,” he said, “would be horrendous.”

I asked Ted Lieu about the bill he introduced several times seeking to deal with this problem before it becomes a catastrophe. "No one should have the sole authority to start a nuclear war-- least of all Donald Trump," he told me this morning. "That is why Senator Ed Markey and I have introduced the 'Restricting First Use of Nuclear Weapons Act' for the past three congressional terms. We believe that a nuclear first strike constitutes an act of war and thus requires congressional authorization. It is important to note that our legislation does not prevent a president from responding to a nuclear threat in kind-- it just prevents a president from unilaterally starting a nuclear war. There are a myriad of risks associated with not having clear restrictions on a nuclear first strike. There is a risk of miscalculation or misunderstanding escalating to an all-out nuclear war. And there is also the risk that a president becomes completely unhinged and orders a nuclear strike on a whim. We all recall hearing the terrifying stories of the end of the Nixon presidency. I believed in 2016 what I still believe now: launching a weapon that has the power to kill millions of people is an obvious act of war. Regardless of who sits in the Oval Office, Congress has the constitutional duty to decide when a nuclear first strike is warranted."

Back To Normal? Oh, Sure

My best friends keep asking me when I think we'll be able to go traveling again. Are we going to France, Italy, Spain, Thailand, Morocco, India...? And when? My gut tells me it isn't going to be soon. I don't see 2021 as a year when things start heading back to normal.

On Wednesday Dr. Fauci sounded an optimistic note when he spoke to the Wall Street Journal CEO Council, telling the business chieftains that an effective vaccine and public-health measures could put the coronavirus pandemic "behind us" and that a return to a "reasonable form of normality" is possible by end of 2021. The Journal's Betsy McKay reported that he said "With a combination of a good vaccine together with good public health measures, we may be able to put this coronavirus outbreak behind us, the way we put the original SARS behind us." I suppose that was to calm Trump down after he flipped out about CDC head Robert Redfield's Senate testimony on Wednesday in which he said it would take a year before a COVID vaccine is generally available and that people should get used to wearing masks. Redfield responded to the senators "when" questions like this: "If you’re asking me when is it going to be generally available to the American public so we can begin to take advantage of vaccine to get back to our regular life, I think we’re probably looking at third-- late second quarter, third quarter 2021."

Trump blew his top and called him "confused" when he predicated that he thinks it will take a year before a coronavirus vaccine will be "generally available to the American public." Trump is telling voters "we’re going to have a vaccine in a matter of weeks." Redfield said there may be something available for first responders in November or December, which is not a message Trump wants out there. "I think he made a mistake with that statement," said Señor Trumpanzee. "When he said it, I believe he was confused. I’m just telling you we’re ready to go."

Nor did Trump enjoy Redfield telling that senators that he believes masks are "the most important, powerful public health tool we have" to fight the pandemic. "This face mask is more guaranteed to protect me against Covid than when I take a Covid vaccine." Noted epidemiologist Dr. Señor Trumpanzee called that "a mistake... Masks have problems too... A lot of people did not like the concept of mask initially, Dr Fauci didn’t like it initially." At his disastrous ABC News town hall on Tuesday night in Philly, Trump continued disparaging masks, telling a questioner that "a lot of people think the masks are not good," citing waiters as "a lot of people."

Trump also blew up when Biden noted that Trump isn't believable when he talks about a quick vaccine. The Washington Post's Sean Sullivan reported yesterday that most Americans distrust Trump on the question of a safe vaccine, "raising doubts about the president’s ability to put the health of Americans before politics... 'I trust vaccines. I trust scientists. But I don’t trust Donald Trump,' Biden said. 'And at this point, the American people can’t, either.' Biden also raised the possibility of President Trump pressuring agency officials to sign off on a vaccine that scientists are not yet confident in, to gain an electoral advantage."

Biden cast doubt not only on Trump but also on those around him. Asked whether he trusted the CDC and FDA, Biden said he did not trust “people like the fellow that just took a leave of absence.” He appeared to be referring to Michael Caputo, assistant secretary for public affairs at the Department of Health and Human Services, who urged Trump’s supporters to prepare for an armed insurrection and accused scientists in his agency of “sedition.”

As Biden addressed reporters, he attacked Trump’s handling of the pandemic and comments in an ABC town hall defending his administration’s response, despite widely documented problems with it. Biden urged Americans to ask themselves how it made them feel to hear Trump say he would not have done things differently.

Biden said people should not expect results just because the president is talking up the possibility of a vaccine. “Scientific breakthroughs don’t care about calendars any more than the virus does,” he said. He warned that politics should have no place in the production of a vaccine.

The Democrat’s position has become a point of contention in the campaign, with Trump accusing Biden and his running mate, Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D-CA), of spreading “anti-vaccine rhetoric.”

At a Wednesday news conference, Trump said Biden’s comments were “anti-vaccine” and “hurting the importance of what we’re doing.” He added, “I know that if they were in this position, they’d be saying how wonderful it is.”

Biden said he would have no problems endorsing a vaccine-- provided it met certain criteria. If the administration greenlights a vaccine, Biden said, “who will validate it was driven by science? What groups of scientists?”

He added that Americans must be confident “distribution will be safe and cost-free,” with a plan that is “without a hint of favoritism.”

...Biden also lambasted Trump for not aggressively encouraging mask-wearing and alleging that waiters do not like to wear them. The Democrat defended his own calls for a national mask mandate, saying he would seek to implement one by working with governors but was not completely sure yet what legal authorities he would have to deploy such a rule. (He said his advisers think they can create a mandate.)

It's worth remembering that just half of American bother using the annual influenza vaccine, even when it is given away free in supermarket pharmacies and when doctors tell their patients to get it. I suspect an awful lot of Americans are going to be far warier of any vaccine rushed onto the market to coincide with Trump's reelection efforts.

So... going back to my original question about renting a villa in Tuscany, a riad in Marrakech or a hut on Koh Pi Pi, The Atlantic's Joe Pinsker speculated yesterday that There Won’t Be a Clear End to the Pandemic and that "the collective sense of closure we’re all longing for may never arrive. Instead, brace for a slow fade into a new normal."

He wrote that, like our travel plans, "The pandemic has rendered many activities unsafe, but thankfully it can’t stop us from fantasizing about them. A common balm that people reach for is the sentence construction 'When this is over, I’m going to ____.' It seems to help, if only in a fleeting way, for them to imagine all of the vacations they’ll go on, all of the concerts they’ll attend, and all of the hugs they’ll give, as soon as they’re able to. Unfortunately, the sublime post-pandemic period that so many are longing for will likely not arrive all at once, like a clock striking midnight on New Year’s Eve. If and when the pandemic is over someday-- in the sense that it’s safe to resume normal life, or something like it-- pinpointing its conclusion may never be possible. Internalizing that, and mentally bracing for a slow fade into the new normal, might lead to less angst. Whatever the end of the pandemic might look like, the United States is nowhere close to it at the moment; week after week, hundreds of thousands of Americans continue to test positive for COVID-19, and several thousand die from it. But when the threat of the pandemic does eventually subside, the process will likely be gradual and incremental. 'I don’t think there’s going to be, all of a sudden, one day when we can all go make out with people at the grocery store,' Julia Marcus, an epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School, told me. 'Our concept of how the pandemic will end is just as oversimplified as the way we’ve approached everything else about it.' As a matter of epidemiology, there’s no clear-cut criterion that determines a pandemic to be over. 'You can’t sign a treaty with a virus, so we have to settle for a kind of cease-fire,' says Stephen Morse, an epidemiologist at Columbia University. One intuitive end point is full-on eradication-- meaning that the coronavirus no longer circulates in humans or animals-- but that outcome is quite unlikely, in part because of how easily the virus could continue to reach still-susceptible groups of people anywhere on Earth even well into the future."

The way that people process the end of the pandemic could have to do with how abruptly their life changes after it. One theory for how people mentally perceive transitions from one event to another is that they notice when their expectations of what will happen next start to get upended-- “like the disorientation you feel when a movie abruptly shifts to a new setting,” says Lance Rips, a psychology professor at Northwestern University. Under this framework, if someone undergoes a big life change during the final stages of the pandemic (say, moving or getting a new job after a bout of unemployment), they might be more likely to register a turning point. But if instead they merely start going out more, day by day, that might not yield the same discombobulation that can mark moments of transition.

Even if people crave a swift restoration of normalcy, many have come to terms with the fact that they won’t get it. “Wearing a mask is just like making sure you pocket your keys at this point,” says Athul Acharya, a 34-year-old lawyer in Portland, Oregon. The pandemic “has now lasted long enough that I, at least, don’t find myself waiting for the end. Looking forward to it? Yes. But anticipating it as a thing that will happen in the tangible future? Not so much.”

But a gradual fade-out-- one without clear indicators about the safety of resuming normal activities-- might be particularly distressing for some people. “Those with generalized anxiety disorder, in which a person experiences uncontrollable worry over a range of topics, could really be suffering,” Sandra Llera, a clinical-psychology professor at Towson University, wrote to me in an email. “If we don’t have a clear-cut ending, those with a tendency to worry”-- whether they have a diagnosable disorder or not-- “might experience a lot of stress about when we can begin to safely return to business as usual.”

This sort of uncertainty probably will, in a way, manifest society-wide during the pandemic’s final stages, as a politically polarized nation bickers about whether it’s really over or not. “It’ll be just as much of a mess as everything else that’s happened so far,” Marcus, the Harvard epidemiologist, said.

This dispute won't exactly be new: The country has been having a debate about whether the pandemic is over practically since it started. In late March, President Donald Trump said he’d “love to have the country opened up and just raring to go by Easter,” and in mid-June, Vice President Mike Pence wrote an op-ed asserting that “panic” about a second wave of infections was “overblown.” (Since the piece was published, some 75,000 Americans are estimated to have died from COVID-19.)

When the pandemic is actually petering out, public-health experts may have even more trouble conveying the precautions people should take when going about their day. “The particular challenge of a lack of a concrete end is that there is … a much more complicated calculus of what people should be doing in their behavior,” Rachael Piltch-Loeb, a fellow at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, told me. In “a complicated, gray landscape,” she said, “there is more room for debate, error, and nuance in who should do what and when to protect themselves, their families, and their community.”