In my first post I talked briefly about vaccine schedules; to wit, "A vaccine will be released before the election. It will be brought to us by the same people who were wrong about travel bans and not masks preventing the spread of the virus, who were wrong about not needing FDA approval for testing kits for the virus, and who were wrong about hydroxychloroquine being a treatment for the virus."

After lots of "soons" dating back to June, the President recently put a specific date on when "we'll have" a vaccine: Election Day! To this point he's still couching it in terms of hopes and optimism, but I thought that more specific timeline warranted a look at specific timelines from various places.

THE University of Oxford (with AstraZeneca) began phase III testing in late June and expects to know whether it's good or not by late November, or in 2Q 2021 at the latest.

Moderna was the first U.S.A. of America effort to reach phase III in late July. Now, you might think American efforts could have an advantage because transmission is so much higher here than pretty much everywhere, so if the vaccine does work it can get to statistical significance over placebo quicker than if e.g. Germans were being tested, but the Brits are no dummies and are testing in places like Brazil so we probably don't have an actual advantage there.

Pfizer announced phase III within hours, but even before starting them had confidently declared they'd have proof by September(!!!) and approval by October. An important caveat here is their German partner firm BioNTech puts the proof point in December, and it is well known that no one who speaks German could be an evil man. It's also I think pretty compelling that their phase III to proof to timeline matches the Ox's exactly if it is in fact December.

.

As demonstrated with Pfizer, in every case proof isn't the end, everyone's cured and everything's great. After proof comes regulatory approval, manufacturing, and distribution. Everyone has already started mass manufacturing (100m+ or in the metric system a cor blimey tiddlywinks a-boffin) of doses so we'll have a big head start there, probably big enough to keep us at full distribution speed throughout. It looks very unlikely reality will match anything the President could have meant by "we'll have", but widespread distribution is certainly a 2021 timeline, and not January 1 2021 either.

Which brings us back to hydroxychloroquine, which the President is somehow still advocating as a cure, and whose initial justification for it all the way back in April included "We don’t have time to go and say, 'Gee, let’s take a couple of years and test it out. And let’s go and test with the test tubes and the laboratories.' ... What do you have to lose?"

His timeline is Election Day. This was always obvious but now he's said it out loud.
His grasp of cost benefit analysis has been repeatedly demonstrated - anything that costs you and benefits him is fine regardless of the cost.
His advisors have been marginalized to the point that the only ones listening to Dr. Fauci et al aren't going to believe him in the first place.
It's possible we'll get a mass resignation of even loyalists when he releases an untested or even fraudulent vaccine early.
Fingers crossed, I guess ;D