Covid-19 Vaccine and Curious Timing
Let’s begin today with a quiz:
Does anyone actually believe that Pfizer didn’t know its Covid-19 vaccine was safe and 90 percent effective before Election Day?
Of course they knew.
Would news of the vaccine have tilted the razor-thin election results in favor of Donald Trump, who was mocked relentlessly by Joe Biden for truthfully saying, “we’re about to turn the corner” on the coronavirus?
Undoubtedly.
So why did Pfizer wait until six days after Election Day to make the announcement that gave hope to people beaten down by shutdowns and sent the stock market soaring? (Except Zoom stock, that is. Shares in the most-annoying-way-to-hold-a-meeting company dropped $86 or 17.37 percent yesterday.)
A generous way to look at Pfizer’s decision to hold off was that the company got spooked when Joe Biden and Kamala Harris began throwing shade on the vaccine. Their reckless statements risked turning a large portion of the population into anti-Covid-vaxxers.
Still, the timing of the announcement WAS political. It was clearly delayed until after Nov. 3 to affect the outcome of an election. That’s disturbing behavior from a company that will slurp up nearly $2 billion from American taxpayers in the coming months.
Worse, a company spokesman initially claimed that Pfizer wasn’t part of Trump’s Operation Warp Speed. Eventually, the pharmaceutical company admitted it was part of the program with its $1.95 billion deal to produce 100 million doses of the vaccine that will be distributed to Americans free of charge.
Nice try, though.
If all goes well, Pfizer’s two-shot vaccine could be distributed to front-line workers and other high-risk folks before the end of the year.
It could be widely available to the public later in the winter.
Despite the politics, this is excellent news. It means power-drunk governors will eventually be forced to lift their oppressive and absurdly long emergency orders and the people can gather together, perhaps this spring, for community mask burnings.
One more question: Why do you suppose that Joe Biden waited until six days after the election to announce that lockdown fanatic Ezekiel Emanuel would be part of his Covid advisory team?
Here’s what The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board had to say about Emanuel:
Ezekiel Emanuel has advocated extreme lockdowns during the pandemic no matter the economic or public-health harm.
On June 30 he told MSNBC: “You have to actually have people at home, close nonessential businesses, stop bars, stop indoor dining, have everyone wearing face masks. These are the things we need to do. And, by the way, just doing it in isolated places is not going to solve it either. You need to do it nationwide.”
As recently as July 29, he wrote in The New York Times that “schools should open only in places that have fewer than 75 confirmed cases per 100,000 people cumulatively over the previous seven days, and that have a test positivity rate below 5 percent.” Even countries in Europe that are locking down again are keeping schools open as the evidence is clear that children are largely not vulnerable.
If Joe Biden intends to listen to the advice of a far-left zealot who believes it’s worth wrecking the economy, stomping on the Constitution, imperiling the mental health of Americans and depriving kids of an education to “slow the spread” of a virus that is 99.98 percent survivable for most of us, we’d better pray that the vaccine is widely available before Biden takes office.
Or things will get much worse in America before they get better.
