Vaccine Delivery Announcement Tonight May Foreshadow Republican Convention Vaccine Bragging

Tonight the Trump Administration announced it was setting November 1 as the day to start Covid vaccine distribution. The United Parcel Service, a consultant working with the involved federal agencies, said it would conduct test delivery runs in September. This is practice for delivery of a hypothetical vaccine, not a real one yet.)

UPS, headed by Wes Wheeler, is working with the so-called Operation Warp Speed, comprised of the Center for Disease Control, the Food and Drug administration, and the Department of Agriculture.

There is no particular reason to make this announcement today.  Except one.  Tonight is the moment between the end of the Democratic National Convention, and the start of the Republican National Convention. 

The Democratic Convention spoke to the terrible cost and Trump mismanagement of the epidemic. Now is the moment to lay more bits and pieces of the groundwork for President Trump to highlight that his Administration is making election promises of early progress on the vaccine.   

Public health observers have said that a vaccine would go through the long trials for safety and effectiveness and be done much later. They would not see a practical need to assert readiness on November 1. They have said that an inadequately tested vaccine could never receive approval.
But, the Trump Administration does have an administrative route to favorable FDA treatment. It has been largely forgotten, but there was a time when President Trump was a rabid enthusiast for treatment of the virus by hydroxychloroquine. The scientists saw no evidence to support the drug, and it could not get regular approval.

So, President Trump got it sanctioned by an “Emergency Use Authorization.” Eventually further tests for hydroxychloroquine came back negative and the Emergency Use Authorization was quietly dropped. The same administrative process could be used for premature and highly inappropriate release of vaccines.

At the Convention, President Trump can weave together the announcement about distribution, the funds and arrangements for testing the vaccine, and, in his back pocket, the process for emergency use authorization that can occur without satisfying the FDA’s normal standards for safety and efficacy. All through September and October, announcements can be made by the White House or contractors or agencies of this or that step of progress on this or that aspect of development and distribution of the vaccine. And his campaign can try to keep the public focuses on the exaggeration of dubiously rapid progress, and take away attention from President Trump’s concrete worsening of the pandemic this whole year by mismanagement.