Simplest answer is no. 12-18 months is ridiculously fast for a novel vaccine to go from concept to deployment. Like unprecedented fast. Any faster and I am going to be very leary about the process.
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If we’re lucky he won’t think to speed up the process by testing on his concentration camp kids.
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Well, some other strains of corona-virus do exhibit seasonality and transmission declines in the summer months. But of course ALL of the health professionals said that it was WAY too early to have any idea whether that is true of the strain that causes COVID-19. But of course Trump repeats that it will probably go away in the summer ANYWAY. Worse than being a liar, he simply repeats what he wants as if that will cause it to happen. It is as if he has no “object permanence,” Nothing that is not right in front of him really exists, so whatever fantasy he wants can be conjured into reality just by saying it often enough. Management by wishful thinking.
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Well, hate to point out the irony, but you’ve suggested “Pepto-Bismol” for a headache the news has given you and it won’t do a thing for that. It’s for “diarrhea, heartburn, nausea, and upset stomach.”
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This is going to be the culmination of everything we’ve watched unfold over the past 3+ years.
- He is completely ignorant about the topic at hand and WILL NOT make any effort to learn anything about it
- He only cares about how things affect HIM. Therefore he only cares about how a coronavirus outbreak affects his press coverage, poll results or reelection chances
- He and the enablers he has surrounded himself with will use their positions and platform to inflate any good news/accomplishments, downplay risks, demonize critics and hide bad news
- Whenever possible, he will guide government response in ways that help his friends and hurt his enemies (like the response to hurricanes in Texas vs Puerto Rico)
- That whole party runs on nothing but fear and conspiracy theories now, so look for that to become a factor. Maybe something like "the Liberal/Never-Trumper egghead scientist have a cure/vaccine, but are keeping it quiet until after the election
- At every opportunity Trump/The White House/Fox News will tell us that Trump is a genius whose every decision was correct, those that died deserved it and the Democrats would have actively encouraged gravely ill foreigners to enter the country across our undefended borders.
- Finally, we’ve watched this guy long enough to know that he HAS TO be thinking that if things get bad he can just declare martial law and “postpone” (cancel) the election, while blaming the lying, cheating Democrats
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I agree with all those points, and it makes my rather ill that I do. Especially the last one, which I see as increasingly likely. I have already seen Fox News pushing the idea that “healthy lifestyle and positive attitude” will protect you from covid-19. So is you die, it’s your own fault. Assholes gonna asshole, so yeah.
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He may or may not be right. There is a very strong correlation between death rates and co-morbidity. Being male doesn’t help. The correlation with age is striking.
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-age-sex-demographics/
Which brings up an interesting intersection with politics. How old are many of the presidential candidates? These stats imply a 34% chance at least one of Trump or the top 4 Democrats will die i the next few months (assuming they all catch it, which given all the travel and personal interaction campaigning entails, is possible).
The male correlation may be factitious. It’s largely based on the numbers from China, where 50% of males smoke and >2% of women smoke. Distinct possibility that “male” may actually mean “smoker.” The sex difference does not seem to be as dramatic outside of China. Now age and comorbidities, absolutely a factor.
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Prediction: Eventually some propagandist is going to publish a map showing there are more coronavirus cases in counties that are more likely to vote for Democrats. The truth is that there will be more people with the disease in places where there are more people in general (duh), and that it has been long recognized that people in more densely populated areas tend to vote for Democrats.
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But yes, that can certainly be spun as “Look, its a democrat disease!!”
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I disagree with that. Aging white middle class people are especially susceptible to fatal cases of COVID-19.
This whole thing reminds me of Thabo Mbeki’s handling of the HIV crisis in South Africa.
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“Aging,” yes. The rest I suspect will not pan out. The survival of the 15-20% who require medical intervention will largely revolve around access to such medical intervention. That burden will probably not fall disproportionately on white middle class folks. Just guessing, but I suspect that it will be more darker and poorer. But who knows? 
(/s)
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This is so very true - and this tendency is especially strong with the kind of moderately successful, white middle-aged business types (of whom DJT is the archetype).
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been in a business hotel bar (I travel a lot for work) and listened to a bloviating jackass give his completely uninformed opinion on climate change, economics, politics, health “the negros”, etc. etc. They think that because they got promoted to VP or president of a small company in Topeka that they are clearly the best and brightest our world has created and that their insights on all topics are valuable and accurate.
As a trained paleoclimatologist I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve had to dispel the “climate models don’t allow for clouds” and “sunspot activity drives the climate” canards for these fucksticks.
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Yeah, I’d heard heard that too, which could explain the difference. But so could the age/co-morbidity scale. Men tend to get one of these co-morbidities sooner (which is why women outlive us). Being sicker within any particular cohort could skew the numbers.
Another theory is that women’s generally better respiratory immune response than men is giving them a survival advantage.
OTOH, since there are more elderly women than men, you’d also expect the mortality rate to be higher for women. So until someone teases out the specific relationship with smoking, I’ll just echo the official stats.
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This came up a lot during the healthcare debate. John Mackey of Whole Foods suggested we could drastically reduce healthcare spending by eating more low fat, plant based, nutrient dense foods (in other words we should all line up to buy what he’s selling and ignored the fact that only a fraction of the population can afford it). This led to someone (Wonkette?) famously suggesting that John Mackey should eat a bag of low-fat, nutrient dense dicks.
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The virus is especially deadly for the elderly but doesn’t much care whether those elderly people are Trump supporting science denialists or not. As for “white and middle-class“ I don’t believe those are major factors at all.
Let’s just drop the Darwinism talk here, it is both counterfactual and gross.
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Buy what if it was a really good vaccine…
…?
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