CNN released a preview clip Saturday of chief correspondent Dana Bash asking Democratic vice presidential nominee Sen. Kamala Harris about the possibility of a Wuhan Coronavirus vaccine being approved for distribution prior to the November elections. Her answer left a lot of people shocked and angry.
Bash first asked Harris if she believed the scientists and medical professionals who were working on a vaccine would be the ones who had the final say on the efficacy of a vaccine. Harris said she did not:
“If past is prologue … they’ll be muzzled. They’ll be suppressed,” Harris said of health experts and scientists. “They will be sidelined because he’s looking at an election coming up in less than 60 days, and he’s grasping for whatever he can get to pretend he has been a leader on this issue when he has not.”
When Bash then inquired if Harris would get the vaccine if it was approved prior to the election, she said she wouldn’t trust Trump and would not “take his word for it” on the “reliability” of the approved vaccine:
Asked by CNN’s Dana Bash in a clip released Saturday whether she would get a vaccine that was approved and distributed before the election, Harris replied, “Well, I think that’s going to be an issue for all of us.””I will say that I would not trust Donald Trump and it would have to be a credible source of information that talks about the efficacy and the reliability of whatever he’s talking about,” she continued in the clip from an exclusive interview airing Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union” at 9 a.m. ET. “I will not take his word for it.”
Watch:
Harris’s answers raised all kinds of red flags, and sparked accusations that her response was dangerously irresponsible – especially to hard-hit minority communities – and tantamount to denying science:
And speaking of Dr. Fauci, he recently told Kaiser Health News that he was “not concerned about political pressure” and that a vaccine could be made available sooner than expected if clinical trials show overwhelmingly positive results:
A COVID-19 vaccine could be available earlier than expected if ongoing clinical trials produce overwhelmingly positive results, said Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease official, in an interview Tuesday with KHN.Although two ongoing clinical trials of 30,000 volunteers are expected to conclude by the end of the year, Fauci said an independent board has the authority to end the trials weeks early if interim results are overwhelmingly positive or negative.The Data and Safety Monitoring Board could say, “‘The data is so good right now that you can say it’s safe and effective,’” Fauci said. In that case, researchers would have “a moral obligation” to end the trial early and make the active vaccine available to everyone in the study, including those who had been given placebos — and accelerate the process to give the vaccine to millions.[…]Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said he trusts the independent members of the DSMB — who are not government employees — to hold vaccines to high standards without being politically influenced. Members of the board are typically experts in vaccine science and biostatistics who teach at major medical schools.“If you are making a decision about the vaccine, you’d better be sure you have very good evidence that it is both safe and effective,” Fauci said. “I’m not concerned about political pressure.”
Contra to the case Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, Harris, and other Democrats are trying to make on Trump allegedly trying to put political pressure on scientists and medical experts, I think a convincing case could be made that Democrats and their media allies have for months deliberately downplayed the possibility of the availability of a Wuhan Coronavirus vaccine specifically because they’re worried about the potential of it increasing Trump’s reelection chances.
Let’s remember that back in late March when Trump first began touting the possibility that hydroxychloroquine could be used to help treat the virus, Democrats and the MSM went nuts trying to discredit his claims, even though some studies have shown its effectiveness and even some Democratic state legislators including one in Michigan and one in New York have claimed it saved their lives.
Your thoughts?
— Stacey Matthews has also written under the pseudonym “Sister Toldjah” and can be reached via Twitter. —
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