The person we should trust about vaccines isn’t Trump

WASHINBTON >> President Trump insists on sugarcoating the public’s concern over the rise in coronavirus cases, despite the grim fact that its numbers continue going up, not down, in many states.

As this is written, the number of coronavirus cases in the U.S. has climbed by 100,000 this past week alone, with more than 200,000 deaths now attributed to COVID-19 in the U.S.

Medical counts in 27 states and Puerto Rico have shown significant increases in the sevenday average of coronavirus cases as of the last full week in September.

Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, is being widely quoted as saying, “No country is safe. No country at this point can ever relax and assume the worst is behind them.

“It’s a very vulnerable moment because, first of all, we’re headed in the wrong direction. The case numbers are going up. The positives are going up,” Nuzzo says.

Michael T. Osterholm, an epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota, says, “I think we’re just in the beginning of what’s going to be a marked increase in cases in the fall. And it won’t be just a testing artifact, either. This is real.”

Not only has Trump been trying to convince Americans that the U.S. has turned the corner and taken control of the pandemic, so have his White House advisers who have no background or experience in medicine.

Larry Kudlow, the president’s economic policy adviser, said Monday that the U.S. has “regained control” of the deadly virus — something that no specialist in the nation’s medical community is ready to say.

Regained control? Really? Kudlow is one of the nation’s most respected economists, but he has no background in the field of medicine.

But what about a vaccine that Trump has been promoting and that isn’t even near the point of full development, let alone distribution? Officials are reporting that the Food and Drug Administration is working on a tough new standard for an “emergency authorization” of the coronavirus vaccine, possibly sometime this week.

But other officials say that it will be difficult to clear any vaccine before Election Day.

Meantime, polls show that Americans are becoming increasingly nervous about taking a vaccine whose development is being rushed into testing and, eventually, production.

The Pew Research Center released a poll showing that the percentage of Americans who will take the vaccine has dramatically fallen to a little over 50 percent, down from 72 percent in May.

One possible solution to deal with public concern about a potential vaccine’s safety would be for the FDA to follow the health of participants in late-stage clinical trials for up to two months to ensure its safety and effectiveness.

The drug company Pfizer released a statement Tuesday that said it expects to have safety data on its vaccine’s effectiveness by the end of October.

But no one person has more credentials in the field of immunology than Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

Daniel Carpenter, a Harvard University professor of government, among others, said Fauci could strongly influence public opinion with his endorsement of a vaccine.

Before any vaccine is made available to the public, let us hope that it has Dr. Fauci’s full, wholehearted approval.