++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++America Survive the Democrats’ Arrows in Their Quiver? By Deborah Franklin
A Trump Reelection Would Mean America First on Trade Is Here to Stay
By Christian Whiton
A conventional analysis of the U.S. presidential race would predict challenger Joe Biden will defeat incumbent Donald Trump. Most polls have Joe Biden far ahead, and a much-cited recent survey showed him fourteen points ahead of Trump. However, the same poll in 2016 showed Hillary Clinton with the same lead.
Furthermore, Trump is once again connecting energetically with the disaffected voters who gave him an electoral college victory four years ago. In contrast, Biden has run a mostly virtual campaign, relying primarily on the media to challenge Trump.
The possibility of an upset second victory for Trump raises the question of what his administration would do with trade policy following his first-term replacement of NAFTA with the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), imposition of tariffs on steel and aluminum, negotiation of a trade deal with Beijing that left in place higher tariffs on more than half of Chinese imports, and completion of modest deals with Japan and South Korea.
It is usually a safe bet that second presidential terms are lackluster when it comes to bold new initiatives. Often, administrations focus on consolidating and touting the accomplishments of the first term.
With Trump, it may be different. A Trump reelection would demonstrate further to Congress that the public supports his tougher approach to trade.
The most immediate second-term development would likely be the continued expansion of export controls targeting China. What started as a U.S. effort to ban the use of Huawei equipment in U.S. telecom networks has grown to a global effort to prevent the sale of topline semiconductors and other components to Huawei, its subsidiaries, and Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation. This White House-led effort would continue with worldwide measures to deny China advanced inputs for telecom, semiconductor, and artificial intelligence applications. The Phase One trade deal with China will likely last only as long as Beijing needs to buy significant quantities of U.S. agriculture.
A trade agreement with the United Kingdom could land early in a second Trump term. American and British negotiators have already completed some thirty chapters of an agreement.
Pacts with India and Vietnam would also be likely in a second Trump term, despite the recent opening of a “Section 301” investigation of Vietnam for currency manipulation and illegal timber harvesting. The same tough approach preceded Trump’s deal with China.
A Taiwan deal is also a possibility. Signing these pacts would be seen as encircling China economically. Washington would seek to limit agreements to easier-to-accomplish topics like the intellectual property and digital trade elements of USMCA.
Despite pro forma talking points to the contrary, Washington likely would not press Japan seriously for a second, more comprehensive trade deal than the one the administration secured in 2019. That is actually good news for overall relations between Tokyo and Washington and an alliance that remains the world’s most important in deterring China.
East Asia may also benefit from the likelihood that Trump will focus his ire on Europe. Trump remains irritated at the European Union’s 10 percent tariff on U.S. cars since the reciprocal American tariff is 2.5 percent. Like other presidents before him, he is also disappointed by French agricultural protectionism, which hurts American farmers.
Trump was close to imposing 25 percent tariffs on German cars in 2019 but decided to wait until after the election. He may either impose these early in a second term or try again to use the threat of them to get Germany to apply pressure on Paris and Brussels to reform. While some voices in the administration would counsel caution, few expect Robert Lighthizer, the seventy-three-year-old U.S. trade representative, to stay more than a year into a second term. Higher tariffs on Europe are more likely than not.
Trump’s approach contrasts with that proposed by his opponent. Biden supported NAFTA, China’s entry into the World Trade Organization, and the Trans-Pacific Partnership. His advisors have suggested he would rejoin the latter with some modest adjustments. Biden also opposed the tariffs on China that brought Beijing to the negotiating table. The safe bet is that he would likely ease those levies in exchange for a climate change deal from Chinese leader Xi Jinping—which Xi would sign and then ignore. Biden’s likely trade representative, Jennifer Hillman, favors ending U.S. steps that have disabled the World Trade Organization’s dispute-resolution mechanism, which many analysts believe ruled against the United States too often. She is a standard Clinton-Obama era globalist. Biden’s vow “to work more closely with allies” is a euphemism for acceding to European wishes in Geneva.
While some might welcome Biden’s efforts to turn back the clock to before the disputes and trade wars of recent years, implementing his plans could further convince average Americans that the international trading system works against them, leading to even greater disruption in the future. It may well turn out that Trump will be on hand to continue a trade-reform process that looks chaotic on the surface, but which amounts to significant, measured evolution in practice.
Christian Whiton was a State Department senior advisor in the Trump and George W. Bush administrations. He is a senior fellow at the Center for the National Interest.
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Last time I cast it was for a fish and I hooked a catfish. Look what New York caught:
https://youtu.be/1h5iv6sECGU
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I have noted in earlier memos I am a small contributor to Tom Fitton's Judicial watch which I believe is one of the best hopes we have in protecting America. Fitton's Organization serves all Americans in seeking facts and uncovering corruption through our court system and, in my opinion, does what reliable, honest fact reporting newspapers used to do as ombudsmen.
What has JW been doing lately:
1) Sued for Hunter Biden Travel Records.
2) In August, Judicial Watch filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the Justice Department, the FBI and Office of The Director of Intelligence for all records related to the January 5, 2017 meeting in the Oval Office during which the Steele Dossier and investigation of Gen. Flynn were discussed, Fitton is of the view sedition might well have been engaged in at that meeting.
3) JW sues Dept.of Education for records about foreign money in U.S Colleges.
4) JW obtains Pentagon anti-bias training materials.
There is more but I highlighted what I thought were the more important actions JW has taken
Were it not for Fitton's group, none of these efforts would be taken and thus, no opportunity to uncover what might be skullduggery engaged in against "We The People."
I repeat, the nation's newspapers and mass media have abdicated their moral obligation to serve our nation's interests and protect our republic from those we elect to serve.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++Except during a wartime experience, Trump is probably the only president who has gotten the private and public sector to work together in a positive manner.
The Captain of Operation Warp Speed
Moncef Slaoui explains how a public-private partnership is overcoming technical and bureaucratic obstacles to find a way of inoculating against Covid.
If Covid-19 is a once-in-a-century pandemic, the timing could be a lot worse. A lockdown would have been far more burdensome before the internet made it easier to work, meet and shop at home. And thanks to other technological breakthroughs, vaccines may be universally available as early as next fall.
Past vaccines have taken a decade or longer to develop, and more than half over the past 20 years have failed during clinical trials. But four vaccine candidates have entered the last phase of clinical trials before approval by the Food and Drug Administration. Technological breakthroughs that were already in progress got a boost from a bureaucratic one in May, when the Trump administration launched “Operation Warp Speed.” The initiative organized government agencies and private companies around the goal of developing, manufacturing and distributing hundreds of millions of vaccine doses with initial doses available by early 2021.
Leading the operation is Moncef Slaoui, a Moroccan-born Belgian-American scientist who shepherded vaccine development at the U.K. drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline from 1988 to 2017. His interest in immunology and vaccine development is personal: When he was growing up in Casablanca, his younger sister died of whooping cough. He earned a doctorate in molecular biology and immunology at the Free University of Brussels, then immigrated to the U.S. for postdoctoral work at Harvard and Tufts medical schools.
In 1988 he landed a job in GSK’s vaccine division. There he helped develop one of the world’s thickest vaccine portfolios, including inoculations for meningitis, human papillomavirus and rotavirus. The company developed 14 successful vaccines during Mr. Slaoui’s tenure. When the Trump administration tapped him to run Operation Warp Speed, liberals predictably criticized him because he came out of private industry.
Mr. Slaoui, 61, notes that vaccine development entails many dead ends but also plenty of important discoveries and lessons along the way. He worked on a vaccine for genital herpes and a universal flu shot for every strain of the virus, both of which failed. But sometimes the results are worth the wait. GSK’s malaria vaccine was approved in 2015 by the European Medicines Agency after more than a quarter-century of research and development.
“In the process of discovering these vaccines that either didn’t work or took forever,” he says, “what we did was learn.” Scientists now have a far better understanding of how to design vaccines based on the “kind of immunity defense we need, which is different from one pathogen to another.”
All vaccines aim to stimulate a durable immune response that prevents future infection and illness. Many familiar vaccines, such as those for polio, smallpox and MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) use an attenuated or inactivated virus that stimulates the production of antibodies without causing a dangerous infection.
But in recent years vaccine makers have developed “platform” technologies that can be tweaked to different pathogens. “The technology is like a cassette player, and you put a different cassette in it and you listen to different music,” Mr. Slaoui says. “There are like five or six different platform technologies, and you can test them all in parallel against a particular pathogen by simply putting a piece of the genes from the pathogen within that platform technology. And that allows you to select quite quickly a candidate that you can take into development.”
Example: Moderna’s and Pfizer’s Covid vaccines use mRNA platforms, which program human cells to produce a protein that resembles the “spikes” found on the surface of coronaviruses, through which they bind to cells. This doppelgänger prompts the body to produce antibodies that will attack the real virus. Moderna is also using its platform to develop vaccines against cytomegalovirus, Zika and some cancers.
Adenovirus-vector vaccines by AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson work somewhat differently. They use a genetically engineered virus that carries the genetic code to create coronavirus spike proteins in human cells, which tricks the body into producing antibodies against Covid. Johnson & Johnson this summer received approval from the European Commission for an adenovirus-based Ebola vaccine.
Operation Warp Speed has invested in six vaccine candidates (Moderna, Pfizer/BioNTech, Johnson & Johnson, AstraZeneca, Novavax, and Sanofi /GSK) with the hope that at least a couple will prove safe and effective in clinical trials. “What was extremely useful in the case of the Covid program,” Mr. Slaoui says, “was to frankly use judgments and experience to say, ‘OK, there are four platform technologies that are best suited to, A, be successful, B, make the timeline, C, be manufacturable at scale. And D, we can have access to them.’ ”
Pharmaceutical development is a costly business with an uncertain reward. Operation Warp Speed attenuates the risk by providing vaccine makers $10.7 billion up front to support clinical trials and development. “For the companies it became exclusively a matter of opportunity cost of the teams enrolled in the work, if they were working on some other program,” Mr. Slaoui says.
The trials, Mr. Slauoi emphasizes, are run “absolutely as usual.” The improvements in speed come from administrative streamlining. Vaccine makers have been able to do in six to seven months what would usually take six or seven years by eliminating what Mr. Slaoui calls “dead time” between phases—for instance, by preparing trial sites and recruiting volunteers in advance. “As soon as [vaccines] were in technical work, so still in the lab and in animals, we already were preparing the sites for the Phase 1 trial, but also, critically, for the Phase 2 and Phase 3 trials.”
Results are analyzed instantly. “The reports are prewritten without the data, so that when the data comes, the framework of the report is ready—of course interpreted based on the data and the science,” he says. Vaccine makers then “submit the reports to the FDA, the FDA looks into them—maximum one week—and gives the green light to go into [the next phase] depending on the technology and the level of comfort with performance of the vaccine in the studies.”
Democrats have stoked anxieties that the administration will push through an unsafe vaccine for political purposes before the election. “If Donald Trump tells us that we should take it, I’m not taking it,” Kamala Harris said during Wednesday’s debate. But a pre-election vaccine became impossible this week when the FDA published guidelines that require vaccine makers to follow trial participants on average two months after their final injection before seeking emergency use authorization.
Suspected side effects can delay approval even when they aren’t caused by the vaccine. Serious health conditions regularly happen during vaccine trials, Mr. Slaoui says. But they also happen in the general population. Vaccine trials are supervised by independent safety boards, which investigate such adverse events. AstraZeneca halted recruitment for its Phase 3 trial in the U.S. last month after a U.K. participant developed transverse myelitis, a rare spinal-cord inflammation. The company concluded there was insufficient evidence to tie the condition to the vaccine.
Vaccine approval also depends on the vagaries of the epidemic itself. “We try to localize the clinical trial sites in the cities and the townships where there’s a lot of transmission,” Mr. Slaoui says. But that’s a moving target. The FDA requires that a vaccine be shown to be at least 50% more effective than a placebo in preventing Covid-19. That threshold takes longer and becomes harder to meet if infections in the general population slow.
So he hesitates to predict when a vaccine will be approved or become available to the public: “It’s extremely unlikely that is achieved in October; it’s slightly more likely in November, it’s more likely in December, and it’s really, really likely in January. Where it’s going to be, I don’t know; nobody knows.”
But he adds a promising note: The two mRNA vaccines by Moderna and Pfizer, which are furthest along in clinical trials, seem to work well in older people. “That, to me, is very, very reassuring, because that’s the highest hurdle.”
Operation Warp Speed, meanwhile, also looks past approval to manufacturing and distribution. It has funded the manufacturing in advance of hundreds of millions of doses of the vaccine candidates and is working to ensure that vaccines are seamlessly distributed to doctors’ offices and pharmacies once they’ve been approved.
“In contrast to testing, where we didn’t know before the month of March or April how to distribute tests to every spot in the U.S., we know how to distribute vaccines to every spot in the U.S.,” Mr. Slaoui says. “It happens every year for flu and shingles.” But unlike flu shots, some Covid-19 vaccines will require “deep freezing.”
Tracking systems will have to be “incredibly precise” to ensure that patients each get two doses of the same vaccine and to monitor them for adverse health effects. Operation Warp Speed has selected the medical-distribution company McKesson and cloud operators Google and Oracle to collect and track vaccine data.
What lessons has Mr. Slaoui learned while leading Operation Warp Speed? For one, he jokes, not to have a pandemic during an election year. “Politicizing vaccine development is a bad idea. Across the line I think there has been too many question marks during the process,” he says. “I hope that anxiety disappears as the vaccines become available and the data is transparent.”
“On the manufacturing side,” he says, “we have learned a lot to scale up some technology.” He also suggests that the FDA could accelerate vaccines for other diseases by approving experimental platform technologies that have proved safe in Covid-19 trials. This would drastically reduce cost and increase speed.
“One of the remarkable features of Operation Warp Speed is the collaboration and partnership between government entities and industry,” he says. With politicians so often at loggerheads with the pharmaceutical industry, this may be as important a breakthrough as any vaccine.
Ms. Finley is a member of the Journal’s editorial board.
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I am sure there are technical reasons why the Durham report will not be released before the election but that is a travesty because the more voters have information about how those in government work is critical. Damn shame.
BREAKING: AG Barr Says No Durham Report Before the Election
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