Defeating the pandemic

As I've noted before, even if the US had competent leadership right now, we still would not be doing nearly as well as other developed countries in fighting covid-19 because of the "stupid one-third" of our population, which refuses to cooperate with public health measures.  The anti-maskers, the spring-breakers, the churches that put their medieval rituals and taboos above science and secular law -- they would, and will, keep the pandemic raging regardless of the occupant of the White House.  Those who grasp this point increasingly pin their hopes on a vaccine, which would cut through the problem by making people immune to the virus rather than needing to follow all these onerous precautions to avoid it.

Vaccines are humanity's most powerful weapon against infectious disease.  But in this case, there are a number of caveats to keep in mind.

First, it's not inevitable that a vaccine will be developed in a reasonable time.  HIV has been around for four decades and we still don't have a vaccine against it.  Viruses are extremely difficult to deal with (and no, viruses and bacteria are not just two vaguely similar categories of "germs", they're totally different things).  The effort and money being spent toward a covid-19 vaccine is vast, and it will be developed as soon as is humanly possible -- but "as soon as is humanly possible" might not be within a year or two as we all hope.

Second, a big part of the reason why vaccines take so long to develop is safety testing, which is critically important.  A drug to cure people of a deadly disease they already have can be useful even if it's dangerous -- if you have a 70% chance of dying of the disease, it's still worth trying the drug to cure it even if the drug itself has a 5% chance of killing you.  But vaccines only work if they're given to whole populations, because they work by building up resistance before people are exposed to the disease.  If we vaccinate 300 million people and then it turns out the vaccine kills 5% of the people who get it, we'll kill 15 million.  So safety testing is essential.

A corollary of this is that assurances from politicized government agencies cannot be trusted.  Trump is desperate for any news that would persuade people that the pandemic is being beaten, since he believes this would help him get re-elected.  I have no doubt that his toadies in charge of whatever agencies would have to approve a vaccine as safe are fully capable of fudging and rushing the process to get such a panacea out there as quickly as possible.  If a vaccine is announced before the election -- or, really, while Trump is still in office at all -- do not trust assurances of its safety until the identical vaccine is approved by the appropriate regulatory agencies in other advanced nations.  If France or the UK or South Korea declare it safe, you can rely on that.

Third, even if a vaccine is developed and shown to be safe, the usual anti-vaxers, the crackpots who think it's being used to inject Satanic microchips into people, and much of the rest of the "stupid one-third" will refuse it.  At least in this case the harm they do will be mostly limited to themselves, unlike with their rejection of masks and social distancing -- as long as you get the vaccine, you will be protected despite their virus-friendly behavior.  But they will prevent the "herd immunity" that normally protects the small minority of people who for whatever reason cannot be vaccinated.  And other countries, which now bar or strictly limit visitors from the plague-infested US, will be reluctant to start letting Americans in again, since there's no obvious way to distinguish the stupid ones from the non-stupid.

(Darwinfish 2 blog recently suggested issuing photo ID cards to people who get the covid-19 vaccine so they can prove they are safe, which might help with that last issue.  But there would be a lot of resistance to a system which would be portrayed as distinguishing the "unclean" religious nuts and Trumpanzees from the "clean" normal people -- even though that would be the actual reality.)

Finally, even without a vaccine, there's the possibility of developing drugs to cure covid-19 in infected people or at least mitigate the symptoms, similar to the drugs which now allow people with HIV to lead fairly normal lives.  But I'm guessing that this, too, will be very difficult.  Covid-19 has a lot of different effects -- we're still learning all the ways it harms the body.  Developing those drugs for HIV took a long time, though it would probably be somewhat faster today due to more advanced technology.  And the scale of the problem is far different.  HIV is one of the hardest-to-transmit infectious pathogens ever discovered, while the covid-19 virus is among the easiest.  After decades, the number of HIV-positive people in the US is holding steady at around one million, while in just a few months we've racked up almost five million known covid-19 infections.

Competent national leadership will help.  Once we actually get it.  (January 20 is still more than five months away.)  But don't assume the pandemic will be defeated easily or quickly, even then.  There will still be a lot of hard work to do.