It's 'pigs flying' time for CNN viewers and New York Times readers

[mystery-ak]

October 14, 2020
It's 'pigs flying' time for CNN viewers and New York Times readers
By Andrea Widburg

If you thought 2020 could not get any weirder, you were wrong.  This week, two of the most radical, Trump-hating media outlets in America acted out of character, so much so that I glanced outside my window, expecting to see pigs flying by.  On Monday, the New York Times published an optimistic article saying the Wuhan virus is coming to an end.  It even praised one of the Trump administration's initiatives.  And then, if that wasn't crazy enough, on Tuesday, the CNN talking heads went out of their way to praise Amy Coney Barrett.  Sometimes, weird is good.

Let's start with the New York Times piece, "A Dose of Optimism, as the Pandemic Rages On."  The first thing to know about it is that the body of the piece is more optimistic than the title would suggest.  The second thing to know about it is that the author, Donald G. McNeil, Jr., a staff writer who covers science and health, takes all of the obligatory potshots at Trump.  But hidden behind the carping and sniping are weird moments of genuine optimism and praise, if not for Trump, then for his policies.

To appreciate how peculiar this article is, you have to remember that the left, especially its media mouthpieces, has been working overtime to instill extreme fear into Americans.  It's succeeded, too, especially with Democrats:

more
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/10/its_pigs_flying_time_for_cnn_viewers_and_new_york_times_readers.html

[skeeter]

Because they think they've got the election in the bag.

[PeteS in CA]

Rather than proliferate threads:

https://hotair.com/archives/ed-morrissey/2020/10/13/covid-19-pandemic-will-end-far-sooner-expected-says-nyt/

The COVID-19 Pandemic Will End “Far Sooner Than Expected,” Says … The NYT

I wonder why that might be? New York Times epidemiology reporter Donald McNeil offers readers a “dose of optimism” after months of gloom reporting on the spread and impact of COVID-19. In a lengthy analysis, McNeil lays out how he predicted the course the disease would chart, both in the US and around the world, and how little could be done to deflect it.
...

Since January, when I began covering the pandemic, I have been a consistently gloomy Cassandra, reporting on the catastrophe that experts saw coming: that the virus would go pandemic, that Americans were likely to die in large numbers, the national lockdown would last well beyond Easter and even past summer. No miracle cure was on the horizon; the record for developing a vaccine was four years.

Events have moved faster than I thought possible. I have become cautiously optimistic. Experts are saying, with genuine confidence, that the pandemic in the United States will be over far sooner than they expected, possibly by the middle of next year.

...

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.

Moncef Slaoui, Operation Warp Speed’s chief scientific adviser and a former pharmaceutical executive who has overseen the development of 14 vaccines, has said repeatedly that he expects some of the candidates that he picked to have 75 to 90 percent efficacy and at least two to win approval by early January.

By then, Dr. Slaoui has estimated, the factories under contract will have produced enough vaccine for 30 to 40 million people, and then another 80 to 90 million people every month after that. Assuming nothing goes wrong, he said, there will be enough doses for all 330 million Americans to be vaccinated by next June.

How momentous is this? McNeil notes in his analysis that the previous record for successfully producing an effective and safe vaccine was four years. Without the financial commitments made in Operation Warp Speed, pharmaceuticals would have had to weigh all sorts of fiscal implications before going full steam on development and testing. By purchasing hundreds of millions of doses up front whether they worked or not, the Trump administration took a position akin to wartime procurement of weapons systems. That strategy is about to pay off, McNeil notes, in what may well be several vaccine options and an already-maximized production rate on all of those lines.

McNeil claims he's been covering nCov-19--Covid-19 since January. Assuming that to be true, how in Hades did he not foresee what now admits some time back in the May-July time frame? Initiatives under DARPA, OWS, and BARDA/HHS started in January and had multiple vaccines and Covid-specific antibody treatments in late stage testing from May onward. OWS, DoD, and BARDA/HHS have also been assisting in setting up manufacturing for the vaccine companies, production of necessaries like vials, syringes, and fill-and-finish, and distribution logistics. The Trump Administration's Covid effort may only be short of multi-year projects like Mercury-Gemini-Apollo or the Manhattan Project.

How in Hades did McNeil not see the actions leading up to all these vaccines and treatments approaching Emergency Use Authorization (and the convalescent plasma antibody treatment given EUA almost two months ago)?! How in Hades did McNeil not understand the import of all those actions and progress milestones?! IMO, it was willful blindness. Because Orange Man BAD!!!