The New York Times may have just given President Donald Trump one of the greatest nods they’ve ever given him, even if they didn’t mean to.
The Democrats have been attempting to sell the idea that Trump failed the coronavirus response and that there are so many dead here in America because he failed to act in a timely manner. This is, of course, a whopping falsehood. When Trump was closing off countries from the United States in order to limit the spread, Democrats were calling him xenophobic for doing so. In fact, it was Democrats who were out in the streets telling everyone to come out and not be afraid of the virus at all.
Now, the New York Times released a report citing experts who have “genuine confidence” that the pandemic will be over far faster than many anticipated and that Trump’s plan to combat the virus called “Operation Warp Speed” is “working with remarkable efficiency.”
New York Times Author Donald G. McNeil Jr. wrote of the optimism and good signs being seen in America. For instance, he notes that the U.S. is doing far better under the coronavirus than it did under the Spanish flu:
Already the United States is faring much better than it did during the Spanish influenza — the worst pandemic to hit the country to date, and the one to which this one is often compared. It began in early 1918 and did not completely fade away until 1920, when herd immunity arrived, at the cost of 675,000 lives. The country’s population at the time was 103 million, so that toll is equivalent to 2 million dead today.
He even admits that Trump talking up various treatments has sped things up:
Another intervention that might make a big difference is monoclonal antibodies.
Two weeks ago, most Americans had no idea what they were. Now, President Trump is touting them as his “miracle cure” and, whether or not he is ultimately cured, monoclonals are famous.
That attention could speed up their clinical trials, which had been delayed. (Many patients declined to volunteer, preferring to not risk being given a placebo when instead they could receive convalescent plasma, which Mr. Trump was promoting in August.)
But experts believe that the antibodies could prove far more effective than plasma. Last year, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, monoclonal antibody cocktails proved 90 percent effective at saving Ebola victims from death.
But best — and likely most surprising — of all is the fact that the New York Times is citing experts who have been touting Operation Warp Speed as a success:
Despite the chaos in day-to-day politics and the fighting over issues like masks and lockdowns, Operation Warp Speed — the government’s agreement to subsidize vaccine companies’ clinical trials and manufacturing costs — appears to have been working with remarkable efficiency. It has put more than $11 billion into seven vaccine candidates, and the F.D.A. has said it will approve any one that is at least 50 percent effective at preventing infection or reducing its severity.
McNeil notes that while half the country believes that the upcoming vaccine to the virus is dangerous, he believes that skepticism will fade just like the skepticism for the polio vaccine did back in the 1950s. When a virus is making its way through the population and proposing a huge danger, people turn to the vaccine, feeling their backs are against the wall.
It’s refreshing to hear this come from the New York Times, but while it’s good to finally get some kind of fair reporting from an outlet that has spent a good deal of its time playing for a singular team, it’s not the most important part of this article. The truth is that a lot of what’s being reported in this article is already known by many people.
We know Warp Speed was working and that the vaccine was going to be taken. We know that Coronavirus deaths are declining. We didn’t need the New York Times to tell us that.
The most important part of this article is that it came from a news source that is trusted by people who, up until now, had heard nothing but horrible things about how it’s going with the virus here in America. This is a take that has been widely circulated by the left and relied on by the Democratic party in order to push the narrative that Trump is a failure when it comes to protecting the people.
This narrative has just been scrapped by the New York Times itself.
How this will affect the campaigns is yet to be seen, but I can’t expect it to have a good effect on the Democrats who have been selling fear and pushing for lockdowns. Trump, who has been pushing for fearlessness and not being ruled by this virus, can only benefit.
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