Vaccine announcement was delayed to scupper Trump’s second term

[Dongdingdong]

This is what Donald Trump is claiming. And I have to say, I’m no fan of Trump but the timing does seem very convenient. AIBU to think his suspicions may have some grounds?

It’s like that game, tell 20,000 lies and one truth 20,001 lies

www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/07/13/president-trump-has-made-more-than-20000-false-or-misleading-claims/%3foutputType=amp

Terrible idea for a pharmaceutical company to delay their announcement. It's basic game theory. Even if a company decided to delay their announcement to influence the election (they wouldn't) they would have to trust all their rivals to also do the same.

I don’t think anyone’s suggesting they delayed kicking off the approval process. Just the PR.

Presumably they were confident no one else was in a position to steal their thunder. Or they didn’t care.

That is what I have heard and I think that was the correct decision. The development of vaccine was/is not a political project and should therefore not be used in such a matter. And we all saw how Trump tried to make the announcement about the first vaccine as something he had been involved in to the point that the pharmaceutical company felt it necessary to explain that Trump had not contributed in any shape or form.

@thepeopleversuswork has a very valid point.

The longer a company sits on this sort of information the more it leaves itself open to allegations of insider trading with any share transactions.

I’m not saying insider trading doesn’t happen...but would a pharmaceutical company, announcing the first viable vaccine to resolve a viral pandemic that’s brought the world to a halt, risk doing anything other than completely by the book? The level of scrutiny they will be under is intense, I just can’t see it happening.

And to do it purely to harm the re-election chances of Donald Trump? The mans a narcissist with an over inflated sense of his own importance, it really won’t have mattered much to them which president was in power when they announced, the pharmaceutical company will be around much longer than either Biden or Trump.

The longer a company sits on this sort of information the more it leaves itself open to allegations of insider trading with any share transactions.

But what info are they ‘sitting’ on? The vaccine has not yet been approved. Why would they have an obligation to share information with the public while preparing their application?

Due to early and postal voting the announcement would have had to be 2-3 weeks BEFORE election day to help Trump.

And to do it purely to harm the re-election chances of Donald Trump?

Well, possibly. I mean the man is absolutely detested and seen by many as a threat to world ‘peace’. Inverted commas around peace because while we may be technically at peace, everything feels pretty fucking fragile.

Bearing in mind he and his cult followers don't even believe covid is real or kills, I dont actually care.
But I doubt it. Some members of the GOP are suggesting it should be called ' the trump vaccine'. Ha bloody ha.
As if.
I've seen footage of medical staff who say that even itn their death beds from covid, his followers...rather than be at some sort of peace...are railing against hospital staff and arguing that they aren't dying from covid but they must have cancer or pneumonia or something else, covid doesn't exist. How sad is that.

Whoever quoted 220,000 deaths, no, it's 260,000. Trump inaction, science denial, and obstruction
He's a criminal.

ahhhh Op, i hear of Golden Showers in Moscow when the bird is in the nest, yes?

Biden gained a lot of votes from early voting and mail in ballots most of these would have been cast before the vaccine discovery

@Dongdingdong

Thread reported for spreading conspiracy theories.

@AgeLikeWine is clearly not an advocate of freedom of speech then. Sorry, I didn’t realise we were living a dictatorship. Good lord.

Ironically freedom of speech is the freedom to speak in your defence against the government. It’s not the freedom to say whatever harmful rubbish pops into your head. That’s why encouraging someone to commit murder is considered as much of a crime as murdering someone by your own hand. It’s never just free speech when it has harmful consequences.

And we’ve all seen how divisive and manipulative conspiracy theories have been to democracy.

And yes under trump, America looks the most like a dictatorship it ever has so...

Trump was also scoffed at last month for claiming that a vaccine would be ready “within weeks”. ...

Turns out he was right!

Well no, because none of them are "ready", assuming a reasonable definition of ready as being "available to be shipped out for patients immediately". We've still got quite a way to go before we reach that stage.

To be honest, when you wheel out conspiraloon vocabulary like "Big Pharma" you sort of lose the argument.

OP you obviously like Trump, why pretend otherwise? All the same conspiracy theories spouted by his supporters 🙄 I am surprised you didn’t throw in “freedom of speech”, “communist”, “marxist”, “fascist”, “deep state” randomly in your post 😂

European companies would have wanted to be the first to announce it asap, to get the orders in, especially since several companies were close. They honestly wouldn't have cared enough about an election overseas, when there is the entire European market to saturate. So, no, they didn't time their announcement in Europe to the American election.

www.cnbc.com/2020/10/26/covid-vaccine-fauci-says-findings-will-be-known-by-early-december.html

Obviously we got the new early but it seems that November was inevitable.

I suspect that announcements were made as soon as possible for prestige (bragging rights that you're first) and so that share prices would rise.

Assuming that there are Biden supporters who might have switched to Trump if there was a vaccine announcement, the announcement would have had to be made before Mail in votes could be submitted for it to help Trump. (Biden supporters were encouraged to Mail in votes while Trump supporters were encouraged to vote in person)

I think it was a coincidence tbh and considering that Trump supporters tend to be more anti-vaccine and more like to be Covid-deniers, I'm not sure the announcement helps apart from on a tv debate level. The Pfizer vaccine wasn't funded by the US government anyway.

You're barking up the wrong tree!

NO WAY would P/B have held back & possibly missed out on being the first to announce! 🙄🙄🙄

@Dongdingdong

Trump, unsurprisingly, produced no evidence to substantiate his claim.

But he was right about it.

Scary how many posters are perfectly happy for pharmaceutical companies and big business to directly influence elections.

Are you under the impression that these companies don't normally do such things, OP?

So basically OP you are saying that Biden voters would have changed their vote to Trump had they known that a vaccine was “imminent”. If you could explain your reasoning that would be great.

(I’m also slapping my own wrists as I have sworn never to engage with anyone using the term “Big Pharma”).

This is what Donald Trump is claiming. And I have to say, I’m no fan of Trump but the timing does seem very convenient. AIBU to think his suspicions may have some grounds?

🤣🤣

Trump has about 8 weeks to come to terms with the fact he is moving house in January, it can't come a day too soon. All we need now is Boris out & the world will be a better place.

A small selection of Trump on Covid:

We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China. It’s going to be just fine.
We pretty much shut it down coming in from China.
Looks like by April, you know in theory when it gets a little warmer, it miraculously goes away.
The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA.
The 15 (cases in the US) within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero.
Well, we're testing everybody that we need to test. And we're finding very little problem. Very little problem.
This is a flu. This is like a flu.
I'm also hopeful to have Americans working again by that Easter - that beautiful Easter day.
And so on ad nauseam.

He finally got something right, in the same way a million monkeys on a million type-writers will eventually produce a piece of Shakespeare.

His time has passed, and he'll drift off into the pages of history. In a generation's time, a lot of kids will be saying "Mom, Dad, what were you doing back then?"

I think that of course big businesses try to influence the political process. Look at large media corporations, they almost always have bias in their reporting. Even Netflix seemed to have some very liberal programming come out just before the election. It's extremely naive to think that big companies don't try to influence politics especially in the US where becoming president costs a lot of money. Where do you think they get that money for their campaigns from?

However, I'm not sure it's relevant in this case because as others have pointed out, it's three separate companies. I think the timing is just a coincidence. Plus, I'm not sure that the announcement would have made such a huge difference. So many dead people in the US because of Trump's shitty policies. A vaccine won't change that.

Trump thinks Covid is fake news/hype
This tantrum about delaying vaccination news is just another straw to clutch on to.

Part of me wonders why there doesn't seem to be any mechanism for him to be removed early for reasons of insanity - but there again, that might give him a defence for all the potential criminal proceedings when he is no longer president.

The US lack of control of covid-19 helped.
But not in the way he thinks.

It’s helped sadly in the fact it made a better testing ground as more infections make for a better comparison between the vax and placebo.