Sick

It was Donald Trump who let Anthony Fauci run the COVID response when the pandemic hit.  It was Dr. Fauci who saved millions of people despite the fact that the very administration he worked for got in his way.  While Dr. Fauci led the effort to stop the spread of le covíde, Trump gave his administration the blessing to look for a COVID vaccine in Operation Warp Speed.  The vaccine saved millions more lives.

Now, because Dr. Fauci's pushback against Trump in 2020 has put him on his Trump's enemies list, the Republican Senate is prosecuting and persecuting him over how he handled COVID.

Dr. Fauci did make mistakes in handling COVID.  Because he was dealing with a novel virus.  That's the whole point about a novel virus - you're going to make mistakes in dealing with it because no one knows a twit about it!  

Aware that the Senate committee who subpoenaed him to testify on the pandemic, Dr. Fauci pleaded the Fifth Amendment in response to questions from the committee's GOP members - especially Kentucky's Rand Paul, who put his libertarian values in a blind trust before the committee hearing began.   Dr. Fauci has since been held in contempt.

This has all happened at a time when Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is in charge of America's public health and is voicing skepticism about vaccines.  And in the wake of Dr. Fauci's inquisition, leading virologists - may of whom the same Debbie Downers who kept shooting down our optimism like clay targets whenever it seemed that the pandemic was abating (and of course, it wasn't) - are warning that those of us who lived through a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic might live to see another pandemic of such magnitude.  Some of them aren't saying "might" - they're saying "will!"  And an anti-vaccine, anti-science administration is in charge. 

If Hakeem Jeffries becomes Speaker of the House in January, we should hope that Trump and Vance are taking medical advice from RFK Jr.  Then maybe Jeffries will become President by February. 

COVID Ci, COVID Ça

Oh, wonderful.

New strains of COVID are popping up just in time for winter - subvariants of Omicron calle BQ.1 and XBB - that can evade prior immunity and vaccination.  Anthony Fauci (below), who is stepping down as  director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases soon, just said that the pandmeic "certainly isn't" over.

When will it be over?  There certainly isn't an answer.

What am I looking forward to doing in the near and far future?  That's a question I can easily answer - absolutely nothing.  And going into New York City, near where I live, certainly isn't on the agenda any time soon thanks to increasing crime in the city and a truncated schedule for my local bus line that's based on the idea that they roll up the sidewalks at night in the Big Apple (the last bus for home leaves at 8:30 P.M.).

Unless we can wrap ourselves in bubble wrap, the only thing we can look forward to in 2023 is getting COVID again.

COVID Continues

I was optimistic that the daily COVID case rate, spiking thanks to a new sub-strain of Omicron, would resume its downward trend once it got warmer in the spring, but after a chilly April, it's only beginning to get warm now and the seven-day new case average has already doubled over the past month.

And to make things even more disheartening, Dr. Anthony Fauci (below), after having declared an end to the pandemic in the U.S., quickly backtracked and said that the "acute phase" of the pandemic is over in the U.S. and that we're still in a pandemic. Some experts are actually expecting another surge - in the Southern states this summer.  But things are quiet for now, right?  Judge for yourself - Dr. Fauci skipped the White House Correspondents Dinner to avoid getting sick - despite being vaccinated - due to his age (he's 81, two years older than President Biden). 

Well, things should be done in my area for awhile by June, at least.  In fact, I was planning to go to a local art museum that opens to visitors for free every first Thursday evening of the month on June 2 to see a special exhibit.  June is usually the last month the museum has free first Thursday nights before resuming them in the fall.  I figured that going this Thursday, the first Thursday of May, was too soon.  Except for one thing; there won't be a June free first Thursday this year, so if I want to see this special exhibit, I have to go this week. 

And after that, I don't see myself returning to this museum any time soon.  Or doing much of anything else locally; there's a film festival every year in my area, and this year the festival is in October.  Thanks to COVID, and thanks also to high ticket prices, I don't expect to go to a movie at the film festival, and I have unsubscribed from the e-mails the festival organizers send out.  Dropping out of life's pleasures, of course, is nothing new to me, as I've made clear in the past month and change. 😢    

COVID-22

After all, that's what the Omicron strain really is.

Omicron is a new disease that is nothing like the original Wuhan strain of COVID, and it's creating more havoc than even the Wuhan strain did when there were no vaccines.  Mainly because one thing vaccines did not take care of was access to vaccines. But it's also because the virus has mutated to the point where vaccines are less effective.  What if a future strain is completely vaccine-resistant?

Numerous experts have speculated that Omicron is so contagious that the latest surge of infections - already plummeting in South Africa, where the Omicron strain was first detected, and beginning to recede in the United Kingdom - will give us so much immunity in the form of antibodies, in tandem with vaccinations, that it will end the pandemic once the virus can't infect anyone. "Driven by the inexorable, inevitable spread of the Omicron variant and the use of vaccines, the global population will generate immunity to this virus," Australian physician Nick Coatsworth told a news site from Down Under.  Dr. Julian Tang, a respiratory-science professor at Leicester University in Britain, concurs.  "The virus will evolve itself out of the pandemic strain very soon and become milder, more transmissible to the point where you may only need to think about vaccinating the more vulnerable members of the population," he said.

To assume such a thing would mean that there's no chance of the virus mutating into something more contagious, as everyone assumed when Delta was receding. But it obviously did.  And so there's no reason to assume that a new strain - the next Greek letter to be used is pi, by the way - won't be worse than Omicron.  The only solution to avoid new mutations (I won't call them variants, a variant is a German station wagon) and prevent contagion (I won't say "transmission;" it's a virus, not a radio signal!) is to vaccinate more people.

That's where we're really far off.  

In a good deal of the world, many countries have met or exceeded the World Health Organization's year-end goal of vaccinating 40 percent of its populations, even with so much misinformation of and resistance to vaccines.  In the Western Hemisphere, every country has met that goal except for Guatemala, Bolivia, Surinam, Haiti, Jamaica and a few of the countries in the Lesser Antilles.  In Africa, however, you can count on one hand with fingers to spare every country that met that 40 percent standard at the end of 2021.  In Nigeria, the most populous country in Africa and, at 211 million people, the seventh most populous country in the world, the full-vaccination rate is a pathetic 2 percent.  And there are other undervaccinated countries in Europe and Asia, as well.  

World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has declared that the booster programs of wealthy nations lead to the hoarding of vaccines by these same wealthy nations and deny poorer countries the ability to get more vaccines, which will thus prolong the pandemic by allowing new strains - especially one that throws the proverbial finger to vaccines by evading them completely and making them worthless - to proliferate.  Dr. Anthony Fauci and U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy have disputed this, insisting that there are plenty of vaccines for everyone, including boosters, and Dr. Fauci has noted the numerous vaccine supplies the U.S. has already donated for the rest of the world.  American protests of the World Health Organization's lecturing, however, seem irrelevant in light of all the donated vaccines that have expired or have arrived in poorer countries without any plan to distribute them.  One must conclude that the plan to vaccinate the world is not getting anywhere.

Or maybe it is.  As of December 21, the latest date for which data is available, 48.3 percent of the world's population have been fully vaccinated - about 3.76 billion people, with 4.49 billion people, or 57.5 percent of the world's population, have gotten at least one dose.  And if you look at the chart below - click on it to enlarge it and see it better - the vaccination rate is going upward in a steady diagonal climb, with a couple of big jumps in the spring and summer of 2021. 

It's for that reason, as the seriousness of the Omicron surge makes itself clear, that World Health Organization Director-General Tedros (he's Ethiopian, they go by first names there) sees hope and optimism for the pandemic to end in 2022. On the other hand, maybe Omicron will end the COVID plague and turn the virus into an endemic contagion, like the flu.  But we still have to get the rest of the world vaccinated to prevent future strains.  If not, we won't end the pandemic.  The pandemic will end us. 😢 😭

Ninety Days In the Hole

I'm hibernating for the winter.

I m staying home for as much as I can this coming winter, and, with few exceptions,  I'm not coming out until spring. 

It's all because of Omicron, a COVID mutation so fierce it forced the cancellation of the Rockettes' Christmas show at Radio City Music Hall in New York City. 

It; also because, even as breakthrough infections are becoming par for the course with Omicron, the symptoms. contrary to popular wisdom, are not less severe than the symptoms from the very severe Delta strain.  Or so say scientists in a recently published paper out of England (a place I will never, ever see).

Thanks to not enough people getting vaccinated and thanks to not enough effort to vaccinate the Third World, this pandemic will continue indefinitely.  Or, at least through winter.  One epidemiologist is predicting a "viral blizzard" for winter.  This is in tandem with the possibility of a literal blizzard.  Then we'll all have to stay home.

Dr. Anthony Fauci (above) says that we can still overcome COVID and end the pandemic and that we can't give it up.  Me, despite having been vaccinated and boosted, I've given up already.  But only because everyone else has.  

Delta Blues

The World Health Organization has decided to name variants of the SARS CoV-2 virus after Greek letters because it has decided that naming a virus or variant after where it was first detected is stigmatizing and discriminatory.  Apparently the only people who are going to be stigmatized now are . . . the Greeks.

The decision is retroactive, starting with the British variant, though the idea of stigmatizing the people who once ruled half the world across 24 time zones is sort of ridiculous.  The British variant is now called the Alpha variant, the South African one is called the Beta variant, the Brazilian one is called the Gamma variant, and the new one from India is now called . . . the Delta variant.

That out of the way, the Delta variant of SARS CoV-2 promises to be exponentially worse than any variants proceeding it.  It's already raging in Great Britain and it is likely to come to the United States.  The good news?  The mRNA vaccines available today are effective, provided you get both doses of one.  And there's the rub; only 42 percent of Americans have been fully vaccinated so far, and anyone with a partial vaccination will be as likely to catch the Delta variant and possibly die as anyone who doesn't get a shot at all.  Dr. Anthony Fauci (below) has stressed that people in the U.S. need to get vaccinated as quickly as possible to prevent that.

Oh yeah, the pace of vaccination is slowing.  It's still going up a couple of tenths of a percent every day, but as long as a minority of Americans have both doses of Pfizer or Moderna, none of that will matter once the Delta variant gets here.  Oops!  Correction: The Delta variant is already here!  It now accounts for more than 6 percent of all infections in the United States.

We may be a couple of Greek letters away from a variant that no vaccine will be able to stop if not enough folks get a jab.  Get fully vaccinated, people!  I did.  

And having just had my teeth and gums deep-cleaned, I can honestly tell you that a dozen shots of Novocain in your mouth are far more painful than a COVID shot could ever be.  

Doctor, Doctor, Give Me the News

Where we are in the COVID pandemic depends on how you view it.  And two of President Biden's top COVID advisers are looking at the same data and coming away from it with different conclusions as if the data were an ink blot test.

CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walnensky, who last week said she had a sense of impending doom as signs of a fourth surge in COVID cases started up, said a few days ago that vaccinated people can't get or spread COVID based on the available data but then walked it back ("walked it back" - I'm beginning to detest that saying) by suggesting, well, maybe you can get and spread the virus even if you've been vaccinated. "The evidence isn’t clear whether they can spread the virus to others," she said.  "We are continuing to evaluate the evidence."

And how many vaccine-hesitant Americans won't bother to get vaccinated if they think they'll get COVID one way or another?

Dr. Anthony Fauci, however, has a slightly different - and more optismtic - view.  He doesn't deny that  a fourth COVID surge is very possible.  But he does believe that a fourth surge can be blunted very effectively, citing the fact that four million people received vaccinates on the day before Easter and noting that more vaccinations are to come.  He assured CNN's Jim Acosta that this pandemic is not going to last forever and that a return to life as we knew it or something like it is imminent.  He seems to suggest that once enough of us are vaccinated, the general population will be impregnable from a SARS CoV-2 mass infection.

I hope he's right, because if he's not, it won't just be the rabbit that dies. 😱

Maybe not a good expression to use on this Easter Monday . . . 😢 

COVID Continues

I don't know where we really are with the COVID pandemic . . .

Johnson & Johnson has released data for its new COVID vaccine, which doesn't have to be kept at temperatures well below freezing.  While the results from Johnson & Johnson are not as great as the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, it works well enough against common strain and is very effective in preventing severe infections.  Novavax should have a vaccine ready soon, and that should increase the supply of vaccines even as the vaccinations themselves are increasing.  But minority populations remain underserved, and while vaccinations are increasing at a decent clip, the British and South African strains have taken hold in America and could lead to an increases of infections with frightening rapidity.

Also, people in Third World countries need to be vaccinated - or the pandemic will go on for another four years, which means say goodbye to the Paris Olympics, never mind Tokyo.  (More on the Games some other time.) Fortunately, the single-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine should take care of that, and now that the United States has joined the Covax global-vaccination consortium that aims to vaccinate as many people as possible in the poorer countries, the Biden administration should be able to get those inoculations done, as Dr. Anthony Fauci has recently suggested.  (Yeah, yeah, I know, why not let China vaccinate the Third World, since they gave the Third World infrastructure and COVID!)   So that has to count for something.

All things considered, though, the pandemic should still continue for many more months.  I just hope that the exact number of months isn't in the double digits.

Getting To Work

President Biden hit the ground running as soon as he took office.  I can imagine him sitting behind the Resolute desk for the first time, exhaling contentedly,  and saying to the staff assembled in his presence, "Okay, let's get to work!" 

That he did.  In advance of presenting a plan for getting out of the pandemic and rebuilding the economy - at a cost of nearly two trillion dollars - he signed numerous executive orders that set policies on COVID (including a face-covering mandate for federal properties), expanded food assistance and expedited stimulus checks to very low-income Americans, and raised the minimum wage to $15 an hour for the federal workforce.  He also signed executive orders putting the United States back in the Paris Agreement on climate change and also putting the country back in the World Health Organization.

The latter order has provided immediate results.  Dr. Anthony Fauci took part in the World Health Organization's conference meeting virtually this past week and provided invaluable counsel to the gathering on how the world can combat the pandemic.  At his first White House press conference since President Biden's inauguration, Dr. Fauci said he felt liberated in being able to speak the truth directly to the press.  Gee, I wonder what liberated him?

President Biden knows it's gong to take more than executive orders to make lasting change, and he's going big and aiming high, hoping to appeal more on patriotism than on partisanship to get his very expensive domestic program passed in an evenly divided Congress.  He gets it.  He knows that we don't need another New Deal.  He knows that we need another Great Society.  The pandemic exposed a lot of inequities that have to be addressed so we don't merely go back to where we were on March 10, 2020, the day before COVID was declared a global pandemic.

We need to . . . build back better.    

COVID Relief

Assuming Donald Trump remembers to sign this bill while plotting a coup against President-elect Biden (and the less said about that here, the better), people all across America will be getting financial relief necessitated by the pandemic, thanks to a bill passed this week by Congress.  Among the highlights of the COVID relief package that also funds the government through September 30, sourced here from an e-mail I got from my state's senior U.S. Senator, Robert Menendez, are:

• $600 stimulus checks for adults and children 
• $300/week in additional unemployment assistance 
• $284 billion to support small businesses, non-profits, and faith-based organizations 
• $82 billion to help reopen schools 
• $69 billion for vaccines, testing and tracing, community health and provider support 
• $45 billion to support transportation 
• $25 billion in rental assistance (and longer eviction moratoriums) 
• $13 billion in additional nutritional support $10 billion for childcare assistance 
• $7 billion to increase access to broadband Internet

As well as a whole lot of other things.  Alas, the bill does not include emergency finding for state and local governments, but it doesn't include liability protection for companies that might have allowed its workers to contract COVID, either.  President-elect Biden will certainly have to go to Congress to get more aid. 

We're also getting COVID relief in the form of two COVID vaccines,  courtesy of Pfizer and Moderna, and Dr. Anthony Fauci got the vaccine yesterday, which should give confidence in the vaccine and lead to maximum vaccination ("max vax") for herd immunity.  But that will take months, not weeks, and as much as I want a shot, I'll have to wait awhile for it.  Indeed, the pandemic still has such a long way to go that I don't expect 2021 to be the good year I had originally expected 2020 to be. Which is why I did not wish anyone a happy new year in the Christmas cards I wrote out this year.  That would have been emotionally and intellectually dishonest.

Keep Feeling Vaccination

It's not the end, or even the beginning of the end, but more likely the end of the beginning.

Pfizer announced a new COVID-19 vaccine that has achieved 90 percent efficacy in clinical trials, far more than the minimum efficacy requirement for a vaccine in he U.S., which I believe is about 70 percent.  It could get federal approval within a month.  But that doesn't mean the pandemic will end in America any time soon.  It still needs to be manufactured in large enough quantities to vaccinate as many people as possible, and the incoming Biden administration has to convince as many people as possible to get it, which could take months - say, eight or nine months at best.  So we're going to have to spend a good deal of 2021 keeping our distance from each other and going into banks dressed like we're about to rob them.

And, there's the question of storage.  Pfizer says the vaccine has to be stored at -68° Celsius, or -90° Fahrenheit.  Although it could be ready by the beginning of summer, you can imagine that it would take a lot of storage space and energy to store at ninety below a vaccine for people to get when it's ninety above outside.

Still, this is a positive step and an encouraging sign.  And it should be noted that, with other drug companies working on COVID vaccines, there could be many more opportunities for inoculation to finish off this pandemic.  But thanks to Trump making a hash out of the U.S. response to COVID-19,  as many as 800,000 to maybe 1,000,000 Americans may be finished off before it's over.  COVID cases are coming it at record-breaking daily numbers as I type this, and deaths are likely to be on the rise.  The only good news is that the COVID mortality rate continues to decline among those who have the disease - 2.3 percent at last check, compared to 5.6 percent in April.

So staffers at the White House can rest easy. 😜 (The latest victims of Trump's moronism?  Ben Carson and Corey Lewandowski.)  My advice to President-elect Biden is to have the place deep-cleaned before he moves in.  In the meantime, Mr. Biden, there's always Blair House across the street. 

The Biden White House will certainly push vaccines, as more vaccines proven to work come on line.  I hope to get vaccinated as soon as possible.  Dr. Anthony Fauci, who according to polls, is the most trusted man in America right now - a position Walter Cronkite once occupied - said he plans to get the vaccine as soon as one is ready and available, and if he gets it, certainly most other people will.  (I'm sure Walter Cronkite would have gotten one, too.)   And, to respond to the inevitable assertion from anti-vaxxers - including my friend Margrit in upstate New York - that I shouldn't put so much chemical junk in my body . . . no worries, I'm used to that.  I eat Pop-Tarts, you know. 😛

And since Pop-Tarts, like revenge, are sweet and best served cold, I feel like having one to celebrate Biden avenging Barack Obama by taking out Trump. 

Forget 2021

While it's already been said quietly and out loud, it's pretty much a done deal.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, who knows more abut COVID-19 than anyone else, says that the country and the planet won't return to the status quo ante that existed before the pandemic until December.

Next December.

The vaccine should be ready by this December at the earliest, or some time in early 2021, but it will take months before it's widely available to enough people to stop it and tame it like the flu.  By the end of 2021, of course, many people will not survive it, and many businesses and cultural institutions will be gone forever as well.

So, whether Trump or Biden wins, we still have some difficult days, weeks, and months ahead. And to those of you who were hoping that 2021 would be better . . .

Eat your reality sandwich!    

Rage Against Trump

My only problem with the House of Representatives impeaching Trump when it did is that it did it soon.

Thanks to Bob Woodward's latest book, "Rage," which comes out on September 15, there's plenty of proof for impeachment and enough to ensure a conviction in the Senate.

Seems Trump know how bad COVID-19 was back in late January and early February but he didn't want to tell anyone how bad it would get because he didn't want to panic anyone and cause the economy - his only strong suit in the 2020 presidential campaign - to crater.  But it did crater, largely in part because Trump tried to downplay the pandemic, which he continues to do today without embarrassment.  Information he had that could have saved lives and even his Presidency was cast aside for political reasons.

Oh yeah, there's more.  Woodward has assembled numerous indictments of Trump's ability to lead - that is, he has none - from people as diverse as Rex Tillerson, James Mattis and Anthony Fauci.  Especially indicting is Woodward's quote from former Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coats, writing that Coats "continued to harbor the secret belief, one that had grown rather than lessened, although unsupported by intelligence proof, that [Vladimir] Putin had something on Trump. . . ..  How else to explain the president's behavior? Coats could see no other explanation."

And, of course, no one can see another explanation either.

Woodward also reveals that Trump's association with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un has gone far beyond détente and blossomed into a full "bromance," with Trump gushing over Kim's abilities as a leader and agreeing with him that Barack Obama is a rhymes-with-glass-pole, Trump telling Woodward that Obama is "overrated" as a leader and laughing at the idea that blacks are victims of systemic racism, a belief that Woodward, a privileged white man like Trump, subscribes to.

As does everyone else with a brain.

I hope the election ends with a Biden victory, and I hope the time between now and November 3 passes soon.  I don't think I can take much more. 

And in the meantime, can we impeach Trump again? 

The One Percent Fallacy

The conventional wisdom about Donald Trump is that he's always lying, like when he told a crowd at an Independence Day speech in Washington that 99 percent of COVID-19 cases are "harmless."  At the same time, Dr. Anthony Fauci says we're in a place that is "really not good" when it comes to the virus, with Trump, a self-professed "stable genius," countering that Dr. Fauci is providing a "false narrative."

"I think we are going to be in very good shape," Trump said, a sentiment echoed by Mike Pence yesterday.

Pure fiction, all of it, but Trump's comment about the virus being 99 percent harmless isn't technically a lie. It is a statement based on a gross misunderstanding of a fact offered up back in March by, ironically, Dr. Fauci himself.

Here's the deal.  Back in March, Dr. Fauci projected that the death rate among people who contract COVID-19 cases would likely be about one (1) percent.  That may have been so, but Trump has obviously taken this to mean that 99 percent of Americans who get COVID-19 would recover and be fine after that, just like most people recover from the flu - which, like COVID-19, is caused by a coronavirus.  But the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 is far more deadly, as Dr Fauci noted that the death rate from the flu is 0.1 percent, meaning that COVID-19 kills ten times as many people as the flu.  And, truth be told (but not by Trump), those who do recover from COVID-19 can and likely will have health problems later on as a result of having had the disease.  

Oh yeah, Dr. Fauci's estimated mortality rate for this pandemic may end up being too optimistic. As of yesterday, July 8, 2020, about 3,038,800 Americans have contracted COVID-19, with a death toll of about 131,700.  Based on those figures, the mortality rate is actually 4.3 percent.  Though, to be fair, it was actually higher at the beginning of the pandemic.

And amidst all this, Trump is officially taking the United States out of the World Health Organization and trying to force localities all over America to reopen their schools for live and in person instruction.

The presidential election can't come soon enough.

Sing a Song of Sick Pence

With COVID-19 going full tilt boogie in the South and West, the White House's COVID-19 task force felt it necessary to have a news briefing yesterday, the first in two months,Missing was Donald Trump, who proposed his infamous "disinjectant" cure for the virus at the earlier briefing.

Vice President Mike Pence, in effort to put a positive spin on the COVID crisis, praised Trump for showing bold an effective leadership early on in the pandemic and cited as evidence the progress made by states like New York and New Jersey (wait a minute - don't they have Democratic governors who openly defied Trump?), as well as other states like Connecticut and New Orleans (wait - isn't New Orleans a city in Louisiana?), and went on to talk about the robust economic recovery taking place (with 13 percent unemployment?).   Yeah, we're doing so well, the European Union might ban Americans from entering their countries.  

Pence dodged and weaved questions about social distancing and wearing masks in public, and he was, tellingly, the only member of the COVID-19 task force who doffed his mask to speak but did not put it back on after speaking.  He defended Trump's recent rallies, citing the right of people to peaceably assemble without addressing the rallies' violations of Centers for Disease Control guidelines.  It's worth noting that when Pence started speaking, the Dow Jones Industrial Average, down at about 600 points, recovered a bit, going up to about 510 points or so below the previous close.  Once the media dissected and disemboweled Pence's remarks, however, the Dow reversed course and closes yesterday at 730 points down.

If Pence was trying to help Trump regain the initiative on the pandemic and bruise Joe Biden a bit, he failed spectacularly.

Is there any positive news from the task force briefing that isn't a lie? Yes.  Dr. Anthony Fauci, who has been walking a fine line between leveling with the American people and not selling himself out to Trump, said that the virus could be contained and eventually extinguished if Americans do everything within their power to fight it, with a COVID-19 vaccine, which could be available within a year, being "the nail in the coffin" of the pandemic.

Pence's happy talk, meanwhile, was another nail in the coffin of Trump's - and Pence's own - political carer.

Whither a COVID-19 Vaccine?

Dr. Anthony Fauci says he has seen nothing as deadly and nightmarish as COVID-19.  It's already infected seven million people worldwide, two million of them in the United States, with 413,000 deaths worldwide and 116,000 deaths in the U.S.  He also believes that the virus isn't going to simply run its course, as SARS did, and that a vaccine is going to be needed. 

COVID-19 has already devastated and upended so many of us, either directly or indirectly, that all seems hopeless three months into a pandemic that Dr. Fauci is all but suggesting will last until the end of time.  But there is a ray of hope.  Dr. Fauci has been looking at the race to develop a vaccine and he sees the possibility of not one vaccine but two or more being developed . . . and by early 2021 at the earliest.

There's a caveat, of course.  There have to be several tests and phases of testing before an effective safe vaccine can be found.  Dr. Fauci has been wrong before about this virus - he once said that you didn't have to wear face coverings if you didn't show any COVID-19 symptoms - and some skeptics insist that late 2021 or early 2022 is a more realistic time for a vaccine to be made available. Inevitably, people have been asking this one simple question - 

Can a COVID-19 vaccine be found?

Can?  Can?  It must!

A vaccine is our only way out of this mess.  We can't do the simplest thing these days without spreading or catching the virus. That includes breathing.  No amount of social distancing our staying at home is going to end this pandemic.  We must have a vaccine ready, and the sooner we get one, the better.  Failure is not an option!  Because the idea of staying six feet apart, spending most of our time at home, and wearing face coverings whenever we do go out - even when social distancing is feasible  - isn't my idea of a new norm.  It's more like a dystopia.

We need a vaccine urgently.  Maybe we couldn't go on living our lives the way we were before COVID-19 - carbon emissions and all that - but we certainly can't go on living our lives the way we're living them now.

There are 159 possible vaccines being developed.  The odds are that at least one or two of them have to be ready in a few months.

Stupidity Is Contagious

COVID-19 has become like an annoying pop star whose songs always make you cringe when you hear them; you avoid it as much as you can and hope it goes away but you know you're going to have to deal with it for a long time.

In that spirit, The Centers for Disease Control recently completed a series of guidelines for how individuals and businesses should adapt to COVID-19, especially when it comes to reopening stores and offices.  I say "completed" because the White House has refused to issue them, calling them too excessive and intrusive, even though the guidelines (which still got out, albeit unofficially) could give Trump what he wants - an improving economy by November.

Meanwhile, the White House has been ignoring the very recommendations the COVID-19 task force has been advocating for the past nine weeks - except for testing, which has been going regularly in the West Wing even as Trump says it's not necessary (and he also thinks we won't need a vaccine either).  Then Trump's valet tested positive for the virus, then Mike Pence's press secretary Katie Miller (wife of xenophobic Trump adviser Stephen Miller) also tested positive, and now the CDC's own director, Dr. Robert Redfield, may have been exposed to the virus and is, therefore, self-quarantining. 

And so this guy.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, who has been at the forefront of fighting the COVID-19 crisis and has been giving the soundest, most professional advice in how to deal with it, has been following his own advice, but thanks to numerous White House staffers who aren't following it (lest they get Trump upset), he's now having to quarantine himself to ensure that he doesn't possibly give the virus to anyone else. Though blocked from testifying before a committee of the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives, he is still going to testify by virtual hookup before the Republican-dominated Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee.  (Its chair, Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, will be leading the committee from home - he too is under self-quarantine after being exposed to a staffer with COVID-19.)  Though outnumbered, Democrats in the committee will still be able to ask Dr. Fauci relevant questions.  Such as, "What the hell is going on?"

The plot is beginning to unravel, but if the American people buy all of Trump's bunk that the economy will recover and that he's the best person suited to handle our way through the virus and its aftermath, this country is finished. There won't even be an aftermath.  Trusting Trump to guide us to the other side of this pandemic is like having the confidence to cross the Pacific in a plastic laundry basket.

Remdesivir

Remdesivir.  You've heard about it.  The drug that can fight coronavirus.  Yes, it sounds like a breakthrough.  But it's a breakthrough in the sense that the Beatles' second album was a breakthrough.  It's a positive step, but it's not the climax.  It's not a Sgt. Pepper-style moment; that would be the vaccine, which probably won't happen until some time next year (though it could happen earlier - we'll see). 

So what does Remdesivir do?  It lowers the mortality rate among COVID-19 patients - from 11 percent to 8 percent - and it also helps patients leave the hospital sooner after eleven days rather than fifteen.  Those numbers are encouraging but they could be better.  That's why Dr. Anthony Fauci has said that this is only a first step.  But it shows that there is a drug that works to some extent against this damn virus, and it could lead to effective therapeutics on the way to a vaccine.

Oh yeah, whatever progress we make between now and November, Trump should get no credit for it.  His asinine "leadership" is what got us off to a rocky start from far behind in the first place. 

Death of a Presidency

Last week Donald Trump finally got the message and told everyone to buckle in for a rough few weeks as the coronavirus pandemic is likely to get worse before it gets even worse.  Doctors Deborah Birx and Anthony Fauci told him that even if everyone stays at home except for going to out for necessities and stays six feet apart when they do go out, the death toll could be as high as 200,000. We already have over 200,000 active cases, more than another country.)

And so, Trump finally leveled with the American people and told them the truth.  Except for one thing - he absolved himself of all blame again.  He blamed New York and New Jersey for responding to the coronavirus too late (New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy had a task force meeting about the virus as early as February 2), he said that impeachment distracted him from the crisis at the time he was calling it a hoax (and Mitch McConnell concurred with him), and he refused to admit that there weren't enough tests for the virus (I'm so dumbfounded, I can't even think of something to say here in parentheses).

Because Trump dragged his heels for so long on this damn virus - not even listening to his economic adviser Peter Navarro when he told Trump as far back as January that this virus could be serious - he deserves no credit for being so brave and honest at the eleventh hour.  It's too late for that.  That 200,000-death figure could have been a whole lot lower if he'd taken action sooner.  As far as I'm concerned, his Presidency - even if he's re-elected - is already over.

Call it another victim of the virus.

Somewhere in the past thirty-five years, an event being the equivalent of Annie Oakley missing Kaiser Wilhelm when she shot a cigarette out of his mouth during Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show when it played Berlin - allowing World War I to happen - put America on the course to a Trump Presidency.  What was that "Annie Oakley moment"?  Maybe it was Hillary's 2016 presidential candidacy. Maybe it was the Troubled Asset Relief Program that was passed to assuage the 2008 financial crisis, which led to the Tea Party. Maybe it was 9/11, which led to Bush the Younger getting elected to a second term. which led to the financial crisis, or the Lewinsky affair, which helped Bush the Younger get into office due to Clinton fatigue. Or when Al Gore's son got run over and almost killed by a hit-and-run driver in Baltimore in 1991, meaning that Bill Clinton, not Gore, ran for and was elected President in 1992.  Maybe it was the Bimini affair that killed Gary Hart's 1988 presidential campaign and his political career or even the plagiarism scandal that felled Joe Biden's 1988 presidential campaign, both leading to Michael Dukakis' failed presidential campaign against Bush the Elder and beginning a string of accidental Presidents who shouldn't have been there in the first place, leading all the way to . . . Donald J. Trump.  (Well, except for Obama, who would have likely been one of Hart's or Biden's successors in the White House.  He's that good a politician.)    Finally, something has happened that can change the course of American political history and set us on another course that we should have been on all along.

And wouldn't it be funny if that Annie Oakley moment was Joe Biden's plagiarism scandal - but now Uncle Joe comes along to get us back on track?  One can only hope. 

Alexander the Great

Trump has already lied about the seriousness of the coronavirus, saying it was contained (it's never been contained), that it's not different from the flu (it's deadlier), that anyone who wants a test can get one (uh, no. they can't), and that it could be over by July or August (which no one knows, although the virus's ability to spread in hot, humid Singapore is not a good harbinger for the American Northeast in the summertime).

This past Friday, even as Trump saw improvement - yes, improvement - in his overall approval ratings and his approval rating for dealing with coronavirus, Trump told even more lies about the COVID-19 disease, in a press conference, such as how therapies and drug treatments such as hydroxychloroquine are  effective prophylactic measures against coronavirus.  Dr,Anthony Fauci - no longer present at Trump's daily briefings - made it clear that none of this was proven to be true.  Trump also said that you should get tested it you have the sniffles or a sneeze - even though the main symptoms of coronavirus are a dry cough, shortness of breath, and fever.   He did tell one truth - that anyone who doesn't have symptoms of COVID-19 shouldn't get a test.  But he had to say this because there simply aren't enough tests for everyone, as opposed to, say, South Korea, which has the virus under control.  (Trump had also said that the Food and Drug administration had also approved chloroquine for COVID-19 treatment.  In fact, it didn't.)

Having dealt with enough of Trump's blather, NBC News White House correspondent Peter Alexander (above) asked Trump if it was "possible that your impulse to put a positive spin on things may be giving Americans a false sense of hope" by promoting drugs and therapies that may not be effective (and probably aren't).   Trump replied that he didn't think so, adding, "It may work, it may not work.  That’s all it is, it’s a feeling."   

Alexander then asked Trump if he could possibly communicate directly with to scared Americans.  "What do you say to Americans who are scared ,though? I guess, nearly 200 dead, 14,000 who are sick, millions, as you witnessed, who are scared right now. . .. What do you say to Americans who are watching you right now who are scared?"

No one - except those who know Trump inside and out - could have imagined Trump's response.

"I say that you’re a terrible reporter,” Trump said. “That’s what I say. I think that’s a very nasty question."

Dismissing Alexander and his association with NBC News and NBC's parent company Comcast - or "Concast," as Trump calls it - Trump added, "The American people are looking for answers and they're looking for hope, and you’re doing sensationalism," Trump said.  "Let's see if it works.  It might and it might not. I happen to feel good about it, but who knows, I've been right a lot. Let's see what happens."

What's happening is that hospitals are running low on supplies and efforts by politicians such as New York City mayor Bill de Blasio are banging their heads trying  to get the federal government to help them out.

NBC News defended Peter Alexander as a solid reporter who acted professionally.  Which he did.  We need more reporters like Peter Alexander to help us get through this.