Huge Expectations -- Corona Virus Vaccine -- June 17, 2020

This is the first paragraph in Carl Elliott's essay, "An Ethical Path to a Covid Vaccine" in the most recent issue of The New York Review of Books:

When will we get a vaccine? That's the question Americans have been asking since the novel coronavirus shut down much of the country in March. Dr Anthony Fauci says it could happen this year. Others think it will take a lot longer. The HPV vaccine took fifteen years to develop. The chickenpox vaccine took twenty-eight years. No widely effective vaccine has ever been developed for many life-threatening viruses, including cytomegalovirus and HIV.

And once developed, there are already questions how effective "the Covid-19 vaccine" will be. It should be noted that the "annual seasonal flu" vaccine is said to be only 45% effective.

By the way, there's a report out today that African-Americans are very skittish about being part of any study to test the efficacy of any Wuhan flu vaccine. It turns out that the memory of the infamous syphilis study on Tuskegee airmen runs deep.

There is still no syphilis vaccine and researchers have been working on it since at least 1932 -- eighty-eight years.

Carl Elliott is a professor at the University of Minnesota and the recipient of a 2018 Guggenheim Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar Award. He is working on a book about whistleblowers and unethical medical research.

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Texas

Do you emember that "fake" story yesterday about how the number of cases in Anderson County, Texas, jumped from 103 to 989 literally overnight?

If the explanations were correct (and I knew they were), I predicted there would be few, if any new cases, reported in the next twenty-fours hours. How did that prediction work out? There was one new infection in the past twenty-fours in Anderson County. Ka-ching. Woo-hoo!