In the final weeks of his reelection campaign, U.S. President Donald Trump vacillated between promising that a coronavirus vaccine would soon be widely available and claiming that the pandemic was already over. On October 27, his Office of Science Technology and Policy put out a statement that listed “ending the COVID-19 pandemic” as a crowning achievement of his first term. In fact, the virus continues to spread unchecked throughout the United States. And now that Election Day has come and gone without a vaccine, it is clear that Trump’s real strategy for confronting the disease is to simply surrender.
The president’s effort to accelerate the development of a vaccine, Operation Warp Speed, will likely continue, but the goal of universal immunization appears to have fallen by the wayside. Key Trump advisers, including Dr. Scott Atlas, a member of the president’s coronavirus task force, have reportedly embraced a
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