Corona Corona (where you been so long?)

Since the election will largely be conducted as a blame game, chronology will be important. Here are two accounts from NYT and the  Washington Post

The Times of London reports today that a vaccine may be ready by September.  And Bill Gates says his foundation is going to spend billions to manufacture many different vaccines, knowing that most of them won't work, in order to speed the process of finding one that does. 

Trump believes that the scientific community is vulnerable to a kind of herd immunity. Scientists immunize themselves against the career-limiting consequences of being wrong by following the herd.  From this it follows that the concensus of the scientific community is always suspect, and never more reliable than the view of an informed (or uniformed) outsider who has had no enagement with the facts and reasoning of the scientific community.

In the UK, as elsewhere, we are grappling with balancing death by coronavirus versus death (economic and physical) by deprivation, we are hearing a renewed call for relaxing the restrictions and allowing the virus to do what it will. Here's the logic.  So long as we ward off the spread of the virus by locking down, we only delay the inevitable, which is that everyone will eventually be exposed. Wherever restrictions have been relaxed after new cases have dropped off, new cases have rebounded. This includes Wuhan and Hubei province. So we can prevent the second wave indefinitely by remaining locked down indefinitely, and collapsing the economy indefinitely. Or we can relax the restrictions, and revive the economy to the degree that we do, and release the virus to infect more people to the degree that we do.  Indefinite cratering of the economy, and everything that comes with that, cannot be an option. So let us out to die, if that is our fate. Hydroxychloroquine...