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      CDC's autumn vaccine hint fuels fears of pressure from Trump

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      Challenged last month on the government’s failure to contain the coronavirus in the United States, Mike Pence, the vice-president, said: “We think there is a miracle around the corner.”Pence might have been speaking from more than faith alone. On Wednesday, it emerged that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) had instructed states to prepare to distribute a coronavirus vaccine to healthcare workers and vulnerable populations – just in time for the 3 November election.For months, critics of the Trump administration have worried that the White House would pressure the Federal Drug Administration (FDA), the CDC and other agencies to rush a hasty coronavirus vaccine to market before the election.Now it appears that Donald Trump could be in a position – as the confirmed US death toll from Covid-19 approaches 200,000, and just as undecided voters are looking for a sign on which way to swing – to announce that a vaccine is imminent.Efforts to find a safe and effective US Covid-19 vaccine began the gold standard phase-three trial stage in July.The potentially propitious autumn timing of a vaccine for Trump does not mean that the vaccine or vaccines would be illegitimate, although federal regulators would have to rush the approvals process to move a coronavirus vaccine to market so quickly.Scientifically respected voices in the administration, including Anthony Fauci, the top federal infectious diseases expert, have been saying for months that vaccine development was moving swiftly.At the end of July, Fauci told Congress he was “cautiously optimistic” that a “safe and effective” coronavirus vaccine would be available to the public by the end of 2020. On Thursday, he said that news of a successful vaccine by October was “unlikely, not impossible”.Any rollout in late October of an initial wave of vaccine doses, for those who need them most, could be in line with the most aggressive vaccine timelines mooted by experts last spring. However, such an event would also dovetail remarkably with Trump’s political needs as the pandemic continues to be out of control in the US.Critics have been warning for months that Trump could try to rush a vaccine – or exaggerate the magnitude of an initial vaccine rollout, just as he has exaggerated the national testing capacity – in order to win re-election.Those critics have pointed out that a key agency in the process, the FDA, which would have to grant emergency use approval for any vaccine candidate to be distributed before the full completion of trials, has shown itself vulnerable to political pressure.After Trump touted the drug hydroxychloroquine as an effective coronavirus treatment, the FDA granted emergency authorization for the drug to be used that way – only to revoke the authorization after two months.Concerns about the FDA grew at the weekend as its commissioner, Stephen Hahn, told the Financial Times that he was prepared to issue emergency use authorization for a vaccine before the end of phase-three human trials, in which efficacy is tested in tens of thousands of human subjects.Hahn said the agency’s decision would be based on whether “the benefit outweighs the risk in a public health emergency”.The CDC did not appear to be advising states that a general rollout of a new vaccine was imminent, instead advising them that a vaccine could be ready soon.The CDC notified public health officials in all 50 states and five major cities to begin making preparations to distribute vaccines, the New York Times first reported. The agency described guidelines for shipping, mixing, storing and administering two unnamed candidate vaccines, the report said.Days earlier, the CDC director, Robert Redfield, wrote a letter to state governors asking that they “consider waiving requirements” to allow a company with a federal contract to distribute vaccines to set up local facilities.Vaccine advocates worry that by potentially rushing an ineffective, or worse, dangerous, vaccine to market, the government could fuel vaccine skepticism and leave the population vulnerable to diseases once believed to have been eradicated if it prompts them to avoid other inoculations.“The president keeps telling us the virus is going to disappear,” Joe Biden said at the Democratic national convention last month.“He keeps waiting for a miracle. Well, I have news for him: no miracle is coming.”Officials have also voiced concerned that underfunded state health departments are not ready to be able to distribute and administer a vaccine to the waiting millions.The White House press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, on Thursday afternoon dismissed concerns that Trump is pressuring the FDA.“No one is pressuring the FDA to do anything,” McEnany said. More

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      What the Salongate outrage is really about | Moira Donegan

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      The newest scandal in rightwing media is that Nancy Pelosi got her hair done. A security video time-stamped from Monday afternoon Pacific time, emerged on Tuesday showing the House speaker walking through an empty eSalon, a business in her San Francisco district. In the grainy, overhead shot, Pelosi can be seen wearing a papery black spa robe and blue pumps. Her hair is wet, and she is not wearing a mask. A stylist follows behind her, who is masked. The visit evidently violated San Francisco’s coronavirus procedures, which mandate that salon treatments should be conducted outdoors.The video has been replayed giddily by Fox News and covered with fervor by outlets like the New York Post, which have lambasted the congresswoman for her hypocrisy in failing to comply with the now politically charged mask mandates she has encouraged others to follow. “Crazy Nancy Pelosi is being decimated for having a beauty parlor opened,” tweeted Donald Trump, “and for not wearing a Mask – despite constantly lecturing everyone else.” The right has also implied that to visit the salon was decadent and selfish of Pelosi, with the president’s son, Donald Trump Jr, calling her “Mary Antoinette” (yes, he misspelled it), in reference to the queen of France whose life of excess became a parable of the moral repugnance of elite obliviousness generally and female vanity in particular.For her part, Pelosi dismissed the scandal as manufactured, saying that her assistant was told that the salon was routinely scheduling individual appointments. “I take responsibility for trusting the word of a neighborhood salon that I’ve been to many times,” she said at a press briefing in San Francisco. “It was a set-up. I take responsibility for falling for a set-up.”It would perhaps be tedious to catalog the numerous hypocrisies that characterized the Republican response to the scandal. There is the way that Fox News rushed to book Erica Kious, the salon’s owner, who appeared on Tucker Carlson’s TV show to express her supposed outrage at the violation of the coronavirus restrictions. And the fact that Kious reminded one of Shelley Luther, the owner of Dallas’s Salon a la Mode, who opened her shop to serve clients in defiance of her own city’s coronavirus restrictions, and who also became a darling of rightwing media, with Carlson defending her at length on his show in May.And it would be unnecessary, too, to point out that the Trump family’s attempts to depict Pelosi as vain, decadent, elite and out of touch for getting her hair done draws attention to their own conspicuous lifestyles and effortful personal appearances. Donald Jr, for instance, is the son of a rich man who is the son of a rich man, and his comparison of Pelosi’s salon visit to the indulgences of hereditary royalty has the quality of a pot calling a kettle black. Meanwhile Donald Trump’s signature skin tone appears to require the intervention of one or more professionals to achieve, and women and men alike in the Trump orbit never appear publicly without their own elaborate coiffures. But the attack on Pelosi for the salon visit is not necessarily meant to belie any of these realities: after all, one of the Trump family’s primary means of asserting their power is to emphasize the brazenness of their own hypocrisy.If Donald Trump wasn’t such a bad president, no one would have to weigh the public health risks of getting their hair cut in the first placeInstead, Salongate seems less like a genuine outrage and more like a fabricated one, intended to distract from a presidential race that remains heavily favored for Joe Biden even in the aftermath of the Republican national convention. New polls released this week show Biden with a sizable lead in many swing states, including Arizona, once a Republican stronghold. Even those voters most amenable to the Trump camp’s messaging might have difficulty forgetting how much their lives have been altered and narrowed by the coronavirus pandemic, and experts have blamed America’s uniquely poor handling of the disease on incompetent executive leadership and the framing of commonsense public health measures, like mask-wearing, as statements of political allegiance. If Donald Trump wasn’t such a bad president, no one would have to weigh the public health risks of getting their hair cut in the first place.If anything, Salongate is evidence of the Trump campaign’s failure to respond to a central shift in the political dynamic between 2016 and now: Trump, for the first time, is running against a white man. Entering the political scene with the racist birther conspiracy theory he leveled against Barack Obama, and framing his 2016 presidential run as an reassertion of masculine prerogatives against the uppity ambitions of the first major female presidential nominee, Trump has previously made his political case as a defense of white male power against the forces of equality.But when he is running against Joe Biden, another white male, this argument has less potency. Instead of finding another way to attack Biden, the Trump campaign has attempted to frame him, and the Democratic party more broadly, as too comfortable and too proximate to female power. An awkward attempt was made to revive the racist birther conspiracy by suggesting that Biden’s running mate, Kamala Harris, was not eligible to be vice-president (Harris was born in California). Mailers sent out by pro-Trump groups have tried to cast Biden as a radical leftist, and provided pictures of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar to illustrate the point. The reality of Joe Biden – a paragon of white American masculinity in all its privileges and absurdities – makes attempts like Salongate to make the 2020 election into a referendum on female power seem somewhat desperate and sad. Of course, that doesn’t mean they won’t work. More

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      'A political awakening': how south Asians could tilt key US elections

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      This article was published in collaboration with the JuggernautAround 2016, Aamina Ahmed found herself wondering why, for all the talk about getting out to vote, no one had been canvassing in her neighborhood in Canton, Michigan.Canton is a township between Detroit and Ann Arbor with a growing south Asian population. Ahmed, who is Pakistani American and works and volunteers for several civic engagement organizations, started to speak up about the absence of activity at local candidate forums. Intrigued, a worker at a voter outreach organization went back to their colleagues to inquire if they had visited these neighborhoods. It turned out that the field workers had skipped visiting voters with names they felt they couldn’t pronounce.“They were viewing it as, ‘Well, we don’t want to offend the person by mispronouncing their name versus you are actually excluding them from the opportunity to participate in democracy,” Ahmed said.Such is the kind of story that turns up when probing why south Asian Americans, who historically have high voter turnout rates and lean toward the Democratic party, might not cast their vote. Coupled with voter suppression tactics and difficulty understanding the complex US political process, targeted outreach has lagged, and some south Asians face issues related to language access and gender inclusion. These factors are hindering a burgeoning American political awakening, according to more than a dozen community organizers, researchers and political campaigners.But it would be a mistake to overlook the south Asian community’s political significance. Growing numbers among multiple south Asian communities underscore their strength within the Asian American demographic, the fastest-growing racial or ethnic group in the US electorate.The south Asian American population – those who trace their ancestry to the southern region of Asia – grew by 43% from 2011 to 5.7 million people in 2018, according to the American Community Survey, while the total US population grew by only 4.7% during that same time period. And about 2 million Indian Americans, the second largest immigrant group in the country, are eligible to vote in the US, according to Devesh Kapur, professor of south Asian studies at Johns Hopkins University and co-author of The Other One Percent: Indians in America. More