September 15, 2020

Trump tells an ABC News town hall that a coronavirus vaccine could be weeks away, contradicting his own CDC director’s timeline and accelerating the political gamble on a pre-election breakthrough. The FDA weighs whether to resume the AstraZeneca trial after a participant suffered spinal cord damage, an adverse event whose severity tests the safety-first pledges signed by nine drugmakers the week before. A Pew survey finds the U.S. public is now evenly divided on whether to get a COVID-19 vaccine, with widely held concerns about safety and the pace of the approval process. New York Magazine asks bluntly: “What If They Make a Vaccine and Nobody Takes It?”

The mask wars continue on multiple fronts. Connecticut begins issuing $100 fines for noncompliance, a man in the UK is photographed wearing a snake as a face mask on a bus, Noel Gallagher refuses to mask up citing “too many fucking liberties being taken away,” and Paul Rudd stars in a youth-targeted mask PSA. An Australian mother and her two-year-old are kicked off a plane for not masking while snacking, illustrating the zero-tolerance enforcement now standard in air travel. Nature publishes an editorial urging researchers to study the role of hubris in nations’ COVID-19 response, noting pointedly that many countries “that see themselves as distinctive have handled the pandemic badly.”