Vaccine row enters POTUS race
WASHINGTON: The prospect of a vaccine to shield Americans from coronavirus infection emerged as a point of contention in the White House race as US President Donald Trump accused Democrats of “disparaging” for political gain a vaccine he repeatedly had said could be available before the election.
“It’s so dangerous for our country what they say, but the vaccine will be very safe and very effective,” Trump pledged on Monday at a White House news conference.
Trump levelled the accusation a day after Kamala Harris, the Democrats’ vice-presidential candidate, said she “would not trust his word” on getting the vaccine. “I would trust the word of public health experts and scientists, but not Donald Trump,” Harris said.
Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden amplified Harris’ comments on Monday after he was asked if he would get a vaccine for Covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus. Biden said he would take a vaccine but wants to see what the scientists have to say, too.
Biden said Trump has said “so many things that aren’t true, I’m worried if we do have a really good vaccine, people are going to be reluctant to take it. So he’s undermining public confidence”.
The back-and-forth over a coronavirus vaccine played out as three of the candidates fanned out across the country on Labour Day, the traditional start of the two-month sprint to the election. Harris and vice-president Mike Pence campaigned in Wisconsin and Biden went to Pennsylvania. Trump added the news conference to a schedule that originally was blank.
Harris, a California Democrat, said in a CNN interview broadcast on Sunday that she would not trust a vaccine if one were ready at the end of the year because “there’s very little that we can trust that... comes out of Donald Trump’s mouth.”
Trump dismissed her comments as “reckless anti-vaccine rhetoric” designed to distract from the effort to build a vaccine for a disease that has killed nearly 190,000 Americans.
Trump: Time to decouple US economy from China
Trump on Monday again raised the idea of separating the US and Chinese economies, suggesting the US would not lose money if the world’s two biggest economies no longer did business.
“We lose billions of dollars and if we didn’t do business with them, we wouldn’t lose billions of dollars. It’s called decoupling, so you’ll start thinking about it,” Trump said, warning, “If Biden wins (the US election), China wins, because China will own this country.”