Indeed. With a US presidential election in November, any vaccine delivered in October and touted by the current administration will be met with extreme skepticism, even by those who routinely take vaccines.

Remember hydrochloroquine?

In the case of hydrochloroquine, Trump was saying "this is bigly magical" and every expert around was urging caution. With a (proper, tested) vaccine expert opinion would be a lot more friendly. People do consider the source; most people would not take medical advice from a hotel magnate (even people generally friendly to Trump were mostly cautious of the chloroquine and disinfectant imbibing stuff), against advice of actual doctors.

That said, mass availability of anything by November is probably optimistic.

yeah that's really sad. Having a pandemic during an election year was a bad idea :)

There's a big difference between the hydroxychloroquine fiasco and a developed vaccine. Hydroxychloroquine was something that showed early promise and seized upon by one political side but when it didn't live up to the hype it was seized upon by the other political side.

A vaccine is developed over time and the results released for all to see at each stage in the development. It's much harder to over-hype a vaccine and I think politicians learned their lesson.

IMO, in the US at least, if you refuse the vaccine then insurance should require cost of Covid19 treatment to be 100% patient paid.

That’s like asking MSM patients who don’t wear condoms to bear the entire cost of HIV medication.

There's election year vaccine precedent: Gerald Ford in 1976 with an "upcoming" swine flu. It's one of the reasons that Jimmy Carter defeated Ford.

Sadly, the vaccine was rushed and botched. Some people ended up with Guillain-Barre.

>any vaccine delivered and touted by the current administration will be met with extreme skepticism

That would be the most unfortunate irrational, anti-science behaviour that people could have, especially given the criticism of the same administration as anti-scientific.

This administration literally touted drinking bleach to fix the Coronavirus. I'm not going to self-righteously criticize people that are a now more than a bit sceptical of medical claims coming from the Trump Administration.

I dislike your use of the word "literally" immediately preceding something that did not, in fact, literally happen.

It's 100% reasonable to doubt and verify anything coming out of the Trump administration, at this point. "extreme skepticism" is the correct response to have. No idea why you call that "anti-science" and "irrational".

(Honestly: Crossing fingers the vaccine won't come out of the US so this situation is avoided)