Not to get all “back in the day” on you, but remember when John McCain and Barack Obama spent the months before the 2008 election competing to see who could appear most concerned and proactive about the financial crisis? It’s all I could think of when watching President Trump’s interview with “Axios on HBO” last week as he insisted there is no crisis. “United States is lowest in numerous categories. We’re lower than the world,” Trump said, pointing to coronavirus deaths as a proportion of cases and ignoring the U.S.’s soaring per capita death rate. Even as a kick-off to Washington’s traditional August “silly season,” it was a demoralizing sight.
 
Since the beginning of this pandemic, The New Republic’s Apocalypse Soon has been publishing pieces on the evolving scientific understanding of the coronavirus, observing the many parallels between America’s struggle to process and respond to epidemiological science and America’s struggle to process and respond to climate science. “My climate grief and my grief about the coronavirus pandemic feel devastatingly similar,” Mary Annaïse Heglar wrote back in March.

The past month has offered yet another example of that with the school reopening debate. Three weeks ago, TNR published a comprehensive piece on why it’s so hard to make schools safe and what the latest research suggests would be needed for them to reopen safely. Yesterday, The New York Times reported that some schools that have doggedly pursued reopening are already seeing clusters of coronavirus cases. And today, the Times followed that up with a close look at a suburban Atlanta school district’s growing case count.
 
Much has been made of the vaccines under development. Almost half of them, as TNR contributor Melody Schreiber wrote earlier this week, are so-called platform vaccines, which offer great promise not just for fighting SARS-CoV-2, the virus causing Covid-19, but for quick vaccine development in the future. The idea is that the base of a vaccine could be created well ahead of time and then quickly adapted for a specific virus. It’s the kind of technology that could prevent future pandemics, in theory. We’re not there yet for the coronavirus, though, and several experts Melody talked to worried the vaccines would be politicized and possibly rushed to market too soon with either reduced efficacy or side effects that might reduce public trust in the entire process.
 
A day after we published her piece, that possibility became significantly more likely. Russian President Vladimir Putin announced the approval for a coronavirus vaccine before it had undergone any of the typical large-scale clinical trials. As several outlets have already observed, this is almost certain to stoke Trump’s competitive side, perhaps causing the U.S. to prematurely approve a vaccine, too. As Melody reported earlier this week:

A compressed timeline could obscure a vaccine’s side effects, or it could obscure the fact that a given vaccine simply doesn’t work—leading those who were immunized to believe they’re protected when they’re not. If that happens, Rasmussen said, “That’s going to really erode people’s trust in the entire process. And then we’re going to be in really bad shape…. If people don’t trust the process, if you don’t trust the vaccines, more and more people are not going to get the vaccines, and then we will really have no hope of ever being without the coronavirus circulating among us.”