The Morning Dispatch: Vaccine in Sight, but Trouble Ahead

Plus: A staggering number of Americans have already voted.

The Dispatch Staff 1 hr

Happy Monday! Three weeks from today, with the election behind us (we hope!), The Dispatch will host a two-day conference to examine the elections and their meaning. Some of the country’s top thinkers will be on hand to discuss what’s happened and what’s to come—in the nation’s capital, on the center-right, and for the country. Head over to WhatsNextEvent.com for details and stay tuned—we’ll be announcing additional speakers over the next three weeks.

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

  • The United States confirmed 49,951 new cases of COVID-19 yesterday per the Johns Hopkins University COVID-19 Dashboard, with 5.2 percent of the 962,806 tests reported coming back positive. An additional 512 deaths were attributed to the virus on Sunday, bringing the pandemic’s American death toll to 219,669.

  • Thousands attended demonstrations in France over the weekend in solidarity with Samuel Party, a schoolteacher who was beheaded in the street by an apparent Islamic extremist on Friday. During a lesson for his students on freedom of expression, Party had displayed caricatures of the prophet Muhammed from Charlie Hebdo, the satirical magazine whose Paris headquarters was attacked in 2015.
  • Pfizer CEO Dr. Albert Bourla announced on Friday the pharmaceutical giant will not apply for emergency authorization of its COVID-19 vaccine until the third week of November at the earliest. “Safety is, and will remain, our number one priority,” he wrote.
  • Joe Biden was asked about last week’s New York Post story for the first time over the weekend. He said “I have no response,” dismissed it as “another smear campaign,” and attacked the CBS News reporter who asked him.
  • The Treasury Department announced Friday that the U.S. budget deficit reached a record $3.1 trillion during fiscal year 2020, due in large part to federal coronavirus relief measures.
  • Fighting between Armenia and Azerbaijan reignited minutes after a Russian-brokered truce took effect Saturday night. Both sides have accused the other of violating the ceasefire.
  • The Trump administration approved wildfire disaster relief for California Friday hours after initially announcing it would reject Gov. Gavin Newsom’s request.
  • New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern won a second term over the weekend, with her Labour Party having its best election in decades.

Emergency Authorization for Pfizer’s Vaccine Pushed Back

Pfizer announced last week that the pharmaceutical company will not seek FDA emergency authorization for its COVID-19 vaccine until at least the third week in November. The news coincided with a nationwide surge in the virus, with newly reported cases surpassing 70,000 on Friday for the first time since July.

Although Pfizer may know whether the vaccine is effective by the end of October, government safety protocols stand in the way of immediate emergency authorization from the FDA. “A key point that I’d like to make clear is that effectiveness would satisfy only one of the three requirements and, alone, would not be enough for us to apply for approval for public use,” Pfizer CEO Dr. Albert Bourla said in the company’s statement. “In the instance of Emergency Use Authorization in the U.S. for a potential COVID-19 vaccine, FDA is requiring that companies provide two months of safety data on half of the trial participants following the final dose of the vaccine.”

Pfizer’s timeline accords with CDC Director Robert Redfield’s mid-September projection that a vaccine would likely not be approved until the first or second quarter of 2021. Moderna, AstraZeneca, and Johnson & Johnson are also currently enrolled in late-stage clinical trials for a COVID-19 vaccine, although the trials for AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson have been suspended in the United States over safety concerns.

In the meantime, experts are warning that the pandemic will only grow more painful as cases and hospitalizations shoot back up. “The next six to 12 weeks are going to be the darkest of the entire pandemic,” University of Minnesota epidemiologist Michael Osterholm said on Meet the Press Sunday. “This virus is going to keep looking for wood to burn for as long as it can.”

A Surge in Early Voting

You’ll probably hear someone mention today that we’re only two weeks out from the election. And while it is true that November 3 is exactly 15 days from today, the election itself is well underway. According to University of Florida political scientist Michael McDonald, 28,117,692 Americans have already voted in the 2020 election. That’s 20.6 percent of the total 2016 vote—and we’re still two weeks away!

“In 2016 at this point after the first week of early voting, there had been only 64,000 ballots cast,” Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose told The Dispatch last week. “This year, [it’s] close to 200,000.”

And Ohio is not alone. Kansas Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Katie Koupal told us at the end of September that the state had processed 384,387 advance by-mail ballot applications for the general election (51,455 were sent out in the 2016 primary). Maine Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap said the Pine Tree State saw about a six-fold increase in absentee ballots sent out from the 2018 primary to the 2020 primary. “The turnout was much higher than we predicted,” he said. “I think that part of that could be attributed to the fact that here we are, having this public discussion about how do you run an election, right? And it kind of got people’s attention: They realize, ‘Hey, there’s an election!’”

There’s no doubt that some voters are simply shifting their voting timelines up a few weeks due to the pandemic; several states have expanded early voting opportunities this year as a way to reduce crowding in the age of coronavirus.

But elections experts see something else going on. “Every indicator—including early voting—points to record-shattering turnout in this election,” Cook Political Report elections analyst Dave Wasserman told The Dispatch. “We’re likely to see between 150 million and 160 million votes cast, which is way up from the 137 million in 2016. We are essentially looking at a record turnout among eligible voters since women earned the right to vote.”

Worth Your Time

  • In the Sunday New York Times, Ross Douthat tells progressives concerned about right-wing populism that they could be the real authoritarian threat. “Pressure from the heights of big media, big tech and the education system” could, Douthat says, enable progressives to impose their will on American culture and society, even if conservatives stay electorally competitive. As control of newspapers, the internet, and academia becomes consolidated under powerful institutions like the Times, Facebook, and Harvard—a younger generation of elites is becoming radicalized, “embracing a new progressive orthodoxy that’s hard to distill but easy to recognize and that really is deployed to threaten careers when the unconvinced step out of line.” Though some conservatives may exaggerate it, the threat this change poses is very real. Power “lies in many places in America, but it lies deeply, maybe ineradicably for the time being, in culture-shaping and opinion-forming institutions that conservatives have little hope of bringing under their control.”
  • “There’s no more school. There’s no more church. No more friends. We gave it all up for squash,” complains one mother in sports-mad Darien, Connecticut. Ruth S. Barrett, writing in The Atlantic, has a fascinating profile on the American upper classes’ obsession with niche sports. Buoyed by a striver’s mentality, an obsession with elite universities, and the desire to overcome “the penalty that comes from being from an advantaged zip code” in college admissions (as one parent put it), wealthy parents are pushing their children into less-popular sports like fencing and squash. The reason? It’s much easier to get recruited to the Yale fencing team than its basketball squad, or as (gasp!) a non-athlete. The result is a never ending cycle of private coaches, travel teams, and personal trainers for children as young as ten or twelve, and a situation that seems straight out of a Christopher Guest movie.
  • National Review’s Jon Loftus sat down with heterodox liberal demographer Joel Kotkin to discuss if the GOP can hope to ever win over millennial voters. Kotkin says that with Trump at the helm the Republican Party “can’t talk to millennials, can’t talk to a lot of women, can’t talk to minorities, and can’t talk to immigrants.” But there’s hope, Kotkin says, if the GOP manages to shed the Trump brand. A focus on upward mobility and property ownership will be crucial in order to appeal to a generation that struggles to settle into the single-family home lifestyle that continues to appeal to most Americans.

Presented Without Comment

Katie Robertson @katie_robertson

Rudy Giuliani, a source for the Post’s story (as noted by the Post itself), told The New York Times he chose The Post because “either nobody else would take it, or if they took it, they would spend all the time they could to try to contradict it before they put it out.”

October 18th 2020

940 Retweets

Toeing the Company Line

  • In the latest Dispatch Podcast, Sarah and David were joined by Renée DiResta of the Stanford Internet Observatory to discuss online disinformation and journalistic ethics. “Anybody with a laptop can make themselves look like a media organization,” she warns. They “can use a variety of social media marketing techniques to grow an audience, and then can push out whatever they want to say to that audience.”
  • David often hears from young Christians, “I’m pro-life, I believe in religious freedom and free speech, I think we should welcome immigrants and refugees, and I desperately want racial reconciliation. Where do I fit in?” His answer: Nowhere. In his Sunday French Press this week, David argues that this political homelessness can be a blessing—if you embrace it. “Your commitment to Christ is permanent, eternal,” he writes. “Your commitment to a party or a politician is transient, ephemeral.”
  • Empathy is a virtue, but in his Friday G-File Jonah warns that it’s one politicians can often use for evil: “The antonym of empathy is antipathy, but in the political context they are not simply opposites. One goes hand in hand with the other. Politicians and culture warriors use empathy to arouse antipathy.” You can find more thoughts on originalism, and other important points of clarification, in Friday’s Ruminant.

Reporting by Declan Garvey (@declanpgarvey), Andrew Egger (@EggerDC), Charlotte Lawson (@charlotteUVA), Audrey Fahlberg (@FahlOutBerg), James P. Sutton (@jamespsuttonsf), and Steve Hayes (@stephenfhayes).

Photograph by Chandan Khanna/AFP via Getty Images.
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