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Trump’s Dangerous Push for a Vaccine by October

Gregg Gonsalves on Trump, plus David Cole on the police.

Start Making Sense and Jon Wiener

August 6, 2020

Trump is rushing to develop a vaccine and declare victory over Covid-19 before the November election—whether or not the current research, “Operation Warp Speed,” has succeeded. Gregg Gonsalves explains the challenges to the researchers and the dangers posed by Trump—an ineffective vaccine that will create more resistance to and skepticism about future vaccines. Gregg is codirector of the Global Health Justice Partnership and an assistant professor of epidemiology at Yale School of Public Health. He’s also the winner of a MacArthur “genius” fellowship.

Also: David Cole, national legal director of the ACLU, says we need less punishment and more justice from the police and the courts. One key way to achieve that is to reduce enforcement of misdemeanors, which currently leads to millions of avoidable arrests, especially of people of color—and many cases of police violence against them.

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Start Making SenseTwitterStart Making Sense is The Nation’s podcast, hosted by Jon Wiener and coproduced by the Los Angeles Review of Books. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts for new episodes each Thursday.  


Jon WienerTwitterJon Wiener is a contributing editor of The Nation and co-author (with Mike Davis) of Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties.


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