Trump might not get his COVID vaccine October surprise -- but he'll probably declare victory anyway: op-ed

Writing in POLITICO this Wednesday, Adam Cancryn says that while President Trump's odds of getting a coronavirus vaccine to tout before election day are slim, he'll likely turn the vaccine's development into a divisive political issue anyway.

"There is virtually no chance that the U.S. will have a proven vaccine by Election Day," Cancryn writes, adding that it "could also take well into 2021 to produce and distribute the hundreds of millions of shots needed to inoculate the entire country."

"Yet at the same time, drugmakers’ sprint through early clinical trials means leading vaccine candidates could begin to show indications of their effectiveness by late October, offering Trump the opportunity to seize on them as a potential game-changer," he continues.

According to Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia's Paul Offit, if Trump declares victory solely based on the vaccine's earliest results, that would be a "mistake."

“That’s the concern, not that Trump might boost his poll ratings by a couple percent but that we could make a catastrophic mistake,” said John Moore, a professor of microbiology and immunology at Weill Cornell Medical College. “Anything in October is going to be politicized. And the last thing this pandemic needs is more politicization.”

Read the full piece over at POLITICO.