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In recent weeks, several scientists and health experts have expressed concern that US President Donald Trump may rush the approval of a coronavirus vaccine for the November presidential election, in order to use his propagation for political purposes.
The day before the start of the Republican convention that will officially sanction his candidacy, Trump had held a press conference to announce the emergency approval of a plasma therapy against the coronavirus, exaggerating its effectiveness (so much so that the head of the federal agency that approves eligible drugs and therapies, the FDA, He admitted that the criticisms received were founded).
But experts warn that any hasty approval of the vaccine could cause much more extensive and long-term damage to the health of Americans. “The main thing we want to avoid is spreading a vaccine with emergency approval before we have confirmation of its efficacy,” she said. Reuters Anthony Fauci, an immunologist and director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID, America’s leading epidemic research institute).
By all polls, Trump began to slump in support in early summer, when it became clear that the United States would become the country hardest hit by the pandemic in the world. Since February, Trump had tried to minimize the impact of the coronavirus, delegating his management to the states and showing little interest, and as soon as the number of deaths and infected people began to decrease, he began to talk about the coronavirus in the past, more or less as Speakers at the Republican convention – and to promote supposed miracle cures but discredited by the scientific community, such as hydroxychloroquine.
It is clear that the approval of a vaccine would legitimize their narrative about the “defeat” of the coronavirus, and according to some it would trigger a virtuous cycle of optimism and euphoria that would have beneficial effects on financial markets, multinationals and long-awaited voters. good news on this front. Trump’s strategy “is based entirely on an understandable desire for something positive to happen,” explained Republican strategist Mike Murphy in Washington Post.
At the moment, the White House has not announced any plans to spread the vaccine in the weeks leading up to the presidential elections, but three sources have confirmed to the Financial times that the Trump administration is considering the possibility of an emergency approval for the diffusion of the vaccine developed by the Swedish pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford, which is currently in testing.
In the United States, emergency authorization, called emergency use authorization (EUA), allows the FDA to approve a treatment or drug before it completes the routine testing phase, in case an infectious disease does not yet have cure and in that the damage caused by further diffusion “outweighs the potential risks of the new product,” Fauci explained.
Reuters explains that the USA still anticipates a preliminary analysis by the FDA. In recent weeks, several US officials, including the director of the National Institutes of Health, the federal agency that coordinates research in the health sector, had explained that they would have considered a trial with more than 30,000 volunteers to be reliable. At the moment, AstraZeneca’s experimentation involves only 10,000 (a second phase with another 30,000 volunteers will conclude only after the first). Ultimately, there is no technical time to approve a vaccine according to the criteria established by federal experts.
Approving a vaccine before its efficacy has been preliminarily demonstrated would have at least two very negative consequences, he writes. Political: it would push many people not to get vaccinated because they are skeptical of its effectiveness – perhaps precisely because of the suspicion that Trump approved it for political reasons – or, in the worst case, it would make it even more vulnerable to contagion, in case of that the vaccine is not totally effective but people feel safe stopping the preventive measures taken so far.
Several observers focus on the first, as the second is highly dependent on unpredictable factors. The mere suspicion that Trump may spread the vaccine for electoral purposes would deter many people from taking it: The most critical would likely be voters belonging to ethnic minorities, who tend to be less likely to vote for Trump and more skeptical of the federal government than the white community. . For example, a recent Pew Institute survey indicates that only 54 percent of African Americans would be willing to get vaccinated against the coronavirus.
However, for the time being, FDA leaders deny considering the approval of an emergency vaccine just before the election, and the hypothesis has been described as “absolutely false” for Financial times by a spokesman for the Trump administration’s Health Department, according to which the Department expects to get a vaccine within the first three months of 2021. Financial times however, he speculates that if he changes his mind, the administration may order the FDA to approve an emergency clearance: in that case, multiple agency executives could resign, effectively creating a national case.
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