Brain Warp

Trump is trying to act like John F. Kennedy, a President with better skills and better hair.  Trump is launching Operation Warp Speed, an effort to have a COVID-19 vaccine ready by the end of the year or early 2021.  He's tapped Moncef Slaoui (below), former CEO of pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline, to head the effort.

A least one expert on developing vaccines says that it would be difficult to pull off when most vaccines take more than a year and agreed with Dr. Anthony Fauci that the 8-to-9-month timeline set forward is extremely difficult.  The expert's name?  Moncef Slaoui.

"Frankly, 12-18 months is already a very aggressive timeline," Slaoui admitted in an interview with the New York Times.  

Meanwhile, Trump is pushing for the country to reopen, saying that it's either a choice of reopening or staying closed.  Democrats such as Andrew Cuomo and journalists such as Chris Cuomo and, I'm sure, more Democrats and journalists not named Cuomo (including a guy you might have heard of, Joe Biden), are saying that its not whether to reopen, but how to reopen.  But Trump doesn't want to frame it like that, saying that anyone who advocates testing and tracing is getting in the way of reopening.  This may be how Trump ultimately gets re-elected, in which case we might as well just make like cannibals with indisposition and throw up our hands.  Because I don't think Slaoui is going to be able to pull off a vaccine in nine months or less.

I want to be wrong, but I know I'm not.

Also, I think no one is going to fall for Trump's insistence that reopening doesn't require testing and other preventive measures, or his insistence that America is back, vaccine or not - despite the rapidly growing unemployment rate.  I may be wrong, but I hope I'm not.