Dear Commons Community,

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit yesterday ruled that Harvard University does not discriminate against Asian American applicants. The university’s consideration of race and ethnicity, the court said in a lengthy opinion, is consistent with precedents affirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court.

The ruling was a defeat for Students for Fair Admissions, or SFFA, which sued Harvard in 2014. The group alleged that the university had intentionally discriminated against Asian American applicants; illegally sought to “balance” its incoming classes by race through the use of quotas; considered race as more than a “plus” factor in admissions decisions; and ignored the existence of race-neutral alternatives for achieving diversity.  As reported by The Chronicle of Higher Education:

“Lawyers for Harvard and SFFA squared off during an exhausting three-week trial at a federal courthouse in Boston two years ago. Then last fall, Allison D. Burroughs, the federal district judge who heard the case, ruled that Harvard’s race-conscious admissions practices were constitutional, finding no evidence of racial animus.

“Ensuring diversity at Harvard relies, in part, on race-conscious admissions,” she wrote in her opinion. “The use of race benefits certain racial and ethnic groups that would otherwise be underrepresented at Harvard and is therefore neither an illegitimate use of race or reflective of racial prejudice.”

SFFA appealed that decision. A three-judge panel of the federal appeals court heard the group’s arguments in September. It also heard from the Justice Department, which has thrown its weight behind SFFA. During the proceedings, an assistant attorney general told the court that Harvard’s use of race was “expansive” and “pervasive,” in contrast with the University of Texas at Austin’s race-conscious admissions program, which was upheld by the Supreme Court in 2016.

The appeals court was not convinced by those arguments. Its detailed opinion affirms the federal district judge’s finding that Harvard did not violate federal civil-rights laws barring racial discrimination. The university’s narrowly tailored use of race, the court wrote, furthers its compelling interest in student diversity and passes the “strict scrutiny” standard.

Moreover, the court rejected SFFA’s assertion that Harvard uses race in a “mechanical” way, giving a predefined boost to some applicants but not others. “Harvard’s use of race in admissions is contextual, and it does not consider race exclusively,” the court’s opinion says. “Harvard’s process does not weigh race so heavily that it becomes mechanical and decisive in practice.” In other words, the university’s holistic review of applicants is sufficiently holistic.

The appeals court also agreed with the lower court’s conclusion that there was no evidence of racial bias in Harvard’s use of personal ratings of applicants — and that the university had shown that race-neutral alternatives would not be workable.

Harvard officials applauded the court’s ruling. “Today’s decision once again finds that Harvard’s admissions policies are consistent with Supreme Court precedent, and lawfully and appropriately pursue Harvard’s efforts to create a diverse campus that promotes learning and encourages mutual respect and understanding in our community,” Rachael Dane, a spokeswoman for Harvard, said in a written statement. “As we have said time and time again, now is not the time to turn back the clock on diversity and opportunity.”

But the legal saga will almost certainly continue. SFFA, which is also challenging the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s admissions program in a trial that opened in federal court this week, intends to once again push the debate over race-conscious admissions through the doors of the nation’s highest court.

“While we are disappointed with the opinion of the First Circuit Court of Appeals, our hope is not lost,” Edward J. Blum, SFFA’s president, said in a written statement. “This lawsuit is now on track to go up to the U.S. Supreme Court, where we will ask the justices to end these unfair and unconstitutional race-based admissions policies at Harvard and all colleges and universities.

Though the Supreme Court has repeatedly upheld the limited use of race in admissions, its ideological balance has shifted over the last few years. If it heard this case on appeal, the court’s conservative majority could undo race-conscious programs at selective colleges — or it could once again defy the pundits who have long predicted affirmative action’s demise.”

This case will be watched closely by colleges all over the country to determine whether they will have to modify their admissions affirmative action programs.  As The Chronicle article concludes that with the recent appointment of Justice Amy Coney Barrett, the U.S. Supreme Court’s balance has moved markedly to the conservative right.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The world was elated on Monday when Pfizer announced that it was close to developing a vaccine for stemming the spread of Covid-19.  An article by NBC News this morning cautions that the Pfizer vaccine might have flu-like side effects including sore arms, muscle aches and fever — that could last days and temporarily sideline some people from work or school.  Furthermore, even if the vaccine proves 90 percent effective, the rate Pfizer established for its product, 1 in 10 recipients would still be vulnerable. That means, at least in the short term, as population-level immunity grows, people can’t stop social distancing and throw away their masks.  In sum, if the vaccine is approved for distribution in the next month or so, we will be well into 2021 before we can begin thinking that our lives will be back to normal..

The entire article is below.

Tony

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NBC Universal

Covid-19 vaccine may have unpleasant side effects. That will mean it’s working.

Liz Szabo and JoNel Aleccia | Kaiser Health News

November 12, 2020, 5:04 AM

Pfizer is expected to seek federal permission to release its Covid-19 vaccine by the end of November, a move that holds promise for quelling the pandemic but also sets up a tight time frame to make sure consumers understand what it will mean to get the shots.

The vaccine, and likely most others, will require two doses to work, injections that must be given weeks apart, company protocols show. Scientists anticipate that the shots will cause enervating flu-like side effects — including sore arms, muscle aches and fever — that could last days and temporarily sideline some people from work or school. And even if a vaccine proves 90 percent effective, the rate Pfizer touted for its product, 1 in 10 recipients would still be vulnerable. That means, at least in the short term, as population-level immunity grows, people can’t stop social distancing and throw away their masks.

Left out so far in the push to develop vaccines with unprecedented speed has been a large-scale plan to communicate effectively about those issues in advance, said Saad Omer, director of the Yale Institute for Global Health.

“You need to be ready,” he said. “You can’t look for your communication materials the day after the vaccine is authorized.”

Omer, who declined to comment on reports that he’s being considered for a post in the new administration of President-elect Joe Biden, called for the rollout of a robust messaging campaign based on the best scientific evidence about vaccine hesitancy and acceptance. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has created a strategy called “Vaccinate with Confidence,” but it lacks the necessary resources, Omer said.

“We need to communicate, and we need to communicate effectively, and we need to start planning for this now,” he said.

Such broad-based outreach will be necessary in a country where, as of mid-October, only half of Americans said they’d be willing to get a Covid-19 vaccine. Initial doses of any vaccine would be limited at first, but experts predict they may be widely available by the middle of next year. Discussing potential side effects early could counter misinformation that overstates or distorts the risk.

“The biggest tragedy would be if we have a safe and effective vaccine that people are hesitant to get,” said Dr. Preeti Malani, chief health officer and a professor of medicine at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

Pfizer and its partner, the German company BioNTech, said Monday that their vaccine appears to protect 9 in 10 people from getting Covid-19, although they didn’t release underlying data. It’s the first of four Covid-19 vaccines in large-scale efficacy tests in the U.S. to have posted results.

Data from early trials of several Covid-19 vaccines suggest that consumers will need to be prepared for side effects that, while technically mild, could disrupt daily life. A senior Pfizer executive told the news outlet Stat that side effects from the company’s vaccine appear to be comparable to those of standard adult vaccines but worse than those of the company’s pneumonia vaccine, Prevnar, or typical flu shots.

The two-dose Shingrix vaccine, for instance, which protects older adults against the virus that causes painful shingles, results in sore arms in 78 percent of recipients and muscle pain and fatigue in more than 40 percent of those who take it. Prevnar and common flu shots can cause injection-site pain, aches and fever.

“We are asking people to take a vaccine that is going to hurt,” said Dr. William Schaffner, a professor of preventive medicine and health policy at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. “There are lots of sore arms and substantial numbers of people who feel crummy, with headaches and muscle pain, for a day or two.”

Persuading people who experience those symptoms to return in three to four weeks for a second dose — and a second round of flu-like symptoms — could be a tough sell, Schaffner said.

How public health experts explain such effects is important, Omer said. “There’s evidence that suggests that if you frame pain as a proxy of effectiveness, it’s helpful,” he said. “If it’s hurting a little, it’s working.”

At the same time, good communication will help consumers plan for such effects. A Covid-19 vaccine is expected to be distributed first to health care staffers and other essential workers, who may not be able to work if they feel sick, said Dr. Eli Perencevich, a professor of internal medicine and epidemiology at University of Iowa Health Care.

“A lot of folks don’t have sick leave. A lot of our essential workers don’t have health insurance,” he said, suggesting that essential workers should be granted three days of paid leave after they’re vaccinated. “These are the things a well-functioning government should provide for to get our economy going again.”

Making sure consumers know that a vaccine is likely to require two doses — and that it could take a month for full effectiveness to kick in — is also crucial. The Pfizer phase 3 trial, which has enrolled nearly 44,000 people, started in late July. Participants received a second dose 21 days after the first. The reported 90 percent efficacy was measured seven days after the second dose.

Communicating effectively will be vital to ensuring that consumers follow through with the shots and — assuming several vaccines are approved — that their first and second doses are from the same maker. Until full protection kicks in, Omer said, people should continue to take measures to protect themselves: wearing masks, washing hands, socially distancing. It’s important to let people know that taking appropriate action now will pay off later.

“If we just show them the tunnel, not the light, then that results in this mass denial,” he said. “We need to say, ‘You’ll have to continue to do this in the medium term, but the long term looks good.'”

The best communication can occur once full data from the Pfizer trial and others are presented, said Dr. Paul Offit, a vaccinologist at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia who sits on the Food and Drug Administration’s advisory board considering Covid-19 vaccines.

“When you look at those data, you can more accurately define what groups of people are most likely to have side effects, what the efficacy is, what we know about how long the efficacy lasts, what we know about how long the safety data have been tested,” he said. “I think you have to get ready to communicate that. You can start getting ready now.”

President Trump in the Oval Office Earlier This Week.  Erin Schaff/The New York Times

Dear Commons Community,

Maggie Haberman, New York Times columnist, has a piece today commenting on President Trump’s survival strategies as those around him increasingly advise him to concede the election to Joe Biden.  While speculating on various options such as running for election again in 2024 or  starting a media business to compete with Fox News, Haberman comments that Trump spends his days toggling between his White House residence and the Oval Office, watching television coverage about the final weeks of his presidency. His mood is often bleak, though he is not raising his voice in anger, despite the impression left by his tweets, which are often in capital letters.  Haberman concludes that Trump is not sure what he is going to do next and that “There is no grand strategy. He is simply trying to survive from one news cycle to the next.”

Below is her entire column!

Tony

—————————————————————————————————–

New York Times

Trump Floats Improbable Survival Scenarios as He Ponders His Future

By Maggie Haberman

Nov. 12, 2020

At a meeting on Wednesday at the White House, President Trump had something he wanted to discuss with his advisers, many of whom have told him his chances of succeeding at changing the results of the 2020 election are thin as a reed.

He then proceeded to press them on whether Republican legislatures could pick pro-Trump electors in a handful of key states and deliver him the electoral votes he needs to change the math and give him a second term, according to people briefed on the discussion.

It was not a detailed conversation, or really a serious one, the people briefed on it said. Nor was it reflective of any obsessive desire of Mr. Trump’s to remain in the White House.

“He knows it’s over,” one adviser said. But instead of conceding, they said, he is floating one improbable scenario after another for staying in office while he contemplates his uncertain post-presidency future.

There is no grand strategy at play, according to interviews with a half-dozen advisers and people close to the president. Mr. Trump is simply trying to survive from one news cycle to the next, seeing how far he can push his case against his defeat and ensure the continued support of his Republican base.

By dominating the story of his exit from the White House, he hopes to keep his millions of supporters energized and engaged for whatever comes next.

The president has insisted to aides that he really defeated Joseph R. Biden Jr. on Nov. 3, but it is unclear whether he actually believes it. And instead of conducting discreet requests for recounts, Mr. Trump has made a series of spurious claims, seizing on conspiracies fanned on the internet.

The latest was on Thursday, when he falsely claimed on Twitter that Dominion voting machines switched hundreds of thousands of his votes to Mr. Biden, citing a report he had seen on the fringe network OANN, something even his supporters called ridiculous and a federal agency overseeing cybersecurity disavowed in a statement.

Advisers said his efforts were in keeping with one of his favorite pastimes: creating a controversy and watching to see how it plays out.

As a next step, Mr. Trump is talking seriously about announcing that he is planning to run again in 2024, aware that whether he actually does it or not, it will freeze an already-crowded field of possible Republican candidates. And, Republicans say, it will keep the wide support he showed even in defeat and could guarantee a lucrative book deal or speaking fees.

In the meantime, Mr. Trump has spent his days toggling between his White House residence and the Oval Office, watching television coverage about the final weeks of his presidency. His mood is often bleak, advisers say, though he is not raising his voice in anger, despite the impression left by his tweets, which are often in capital letters.

But the work of government has been reduced to something of a sideshow for the president. He has not made any public appearances except for a visit to Arlington National Cemetery on Veterans Day since an angry statement a week ago.

And he has not spoken about the coronavirus pandemic or mentioned it on Twitter despite the staggering growth in positive cases and the number of West Wing aides and outside advisers who have been diagnosed with the virus in the past week.

Several advisers have bluntly told Mr. Trump that the chances of changing the election’s outcome are almost nonexistent, including in a meeting with him on Saturday at the White House to which the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, dispatched aides, even as he has generally backed Mr. Trump’s desire to keep fighting.

While most Republicans have declined to publicly oppose the president, more have become vocal that the time has come, amid the growing pandemic, to allow a transition to take place.

“Look, I’m worried about this virus. I’m not looking at what the merits of the case are,” said Gov. Mike DeWine, Republican of Ohio, about Mr. Trump’s lawsuits in an appearance on Thursday on CNN. “It would appear that Joe Biden is going to be the next president of the United States.”

Karl Rove, the architect of President George W. Bush’s presidency and an informal adviser to Mr. Trump, wrote in The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday that “closing out this election will be a hard but necessary step toward restoring some unity and political equilibrium.”

He added that after Mr. Trump’s “days in court are over, the president should do his part to unite the country by leading a peaceful transition and letting grievances go.”

A peaceful transition is not as much on Mr. Trump’s mind right now as settling scores both inside and outside the administration.

White House advisers have sent warnings to any government employees who might be looking for other jobs, have placed loyalists in the upper ranks of the Pentagon, and have been open to calls for intelligence officials to declassify documents related to the investigation into a possible conspiracy between the Trump campaign in 2016 and Russian officials.

And the president is considering firing the C.I.A. director, Gina Haspel, although some administration officials said he may not go through with it.

The president has nursed a burning anger at Fox News for calling Arizona for Mr. Biden on election night, and has entertained suggestions from allies to start some kind of competing conservative-leaning news network, whether by trying to join forces with an existing property like OANN or Newsmax, or forming a digital network of his own, as Axios reported. (The New York Times called Arizona for Mr. Biden late Thursday.)

In a tweet on Thursday, Mr. Trump continued his attacks on his once loyal supporters, declaring that Fox News’s “daytime ratings have completely collapsed.”

“Weekend daytime even WORSE,” he added. “Very sad to watch this happen, but they forgot what made them successful, what got them there. They forgot the Golden Goose. The biggest difference between the 2016 Election, and 2020, was @FoxNews!”

Several Republicans expressed doubt on Thursday that Mr. Trump would ever be able to put together anything that could overtake Fox.

And allies acknowledge that he could not do both a presidential campaign and create a news network at the same time, and they questioned whether he would keep up his animus toward Fox if it were to offer him a lucrative contributor deal once he is out of office.

Some advisers had hoped that Mr. Trump would accept the state of the race by the end of this week, but a looming recount in Georgia may delay that. The president has told some advisers that if the race is certified for Mr. Biden, he will announce a 2024 campaign shortly afterward.

The president’s goal for now is to delay certification of the election results, a process that has begun in some states. But his approach to lawsuits aimed at delaying that certification has been as scattered as his own thinking about the future.

Advisers say there may be additional lawsuits filed, but it is not entirely clear when. It also is not clear who is leading the legal efforts.

Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, has been a source of enormous frustration for Trump advisers. Advisers have tried to tell Mr. Trump that the fraud Mr. Giuliani is offering hope of proving simply does not exist.

Mr. Trump is getting suggestions from an array of other lawyers, as well. They include Sidney Powell, the lawyer for his former national security adviser Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, who was at the Trump campaign headquarters over the weekend.

Advisers have nudged the president to stop talking about “fraud” because that has legal implications that his team has not been able to back up. So Mr. Trump has taken to pronouncing the election “rigged,” one of his favorite words but one with dangerous implications in terms of how his own supporters view the election’s ultimate outcome.

Anthony Fauci

Dear Commons Community,

Dr. Anthony Fauci yesterday acknowledged former White House strategist Steve Bannon’s horrifying remarks about beheading him, calling the situation “really kind of unusual.”

Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert and a member of President Donald Trump’s coronavirus task force, was discussing the stresses of his job during an interview on Australian television.  As reported by the Huffington Post.

“It’s obviously been very stressful. I mean, to deny that would be to deny reality,” Fauci said. “When you have public figures like Bannon calling for your beheading, that’s really kind of unusual, I think.

“That’s not the kind of thing you think about when you’re going through medical school to become a physician.”

Bannon said on his podcast “War Room: Pandemic” last week that he would like to put the heads of Fauci and FBI Director Christopher Wray “on pikes” outside the White House as a warning to federal bureaucrats.

“You either get with the program or you’re gone ― time to stop playing games,” said Bannon, a former top aide to Trump who is out on bail after he allegedly misused hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations on personal expenses.

His podcast’s content was removed from multiple social media platforms for violating policies about inciting violence, and prompted his account’s permanent suspension on Twitter.

Fauci said he pushes through the noise and “nut junk” by staying laser-focused on his goal, as a scientist and physician, which is to help develop vaccines for COVID-19.

“I think we’ve been quite successful in that. Now, the next challenge is to develop good therapeutics and the other challenge is to get public health measures to be listened to be the American public,” he said.

“You know, people calling for you to be beheaded, fired, thrown into the fire pit, or whatever, that’s just noise” he added. “You don’t pay attention to that.”

Fauci has followed an evidence-based approach to mitigating the spread of the virus and urged the public to follow strict measures to quell the outbreak. However, amid the politicization of the virus and following public attacks from Trump, he has become the target of violent threats. He has been provided extra government security as a result.”

Anthony Fauci is pure class while Steve Bannon is  a degenerate buffoon!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Once again the polling during our recent presidential election left a lot to be desired.  We were given to believe that our pollsters had learned from the errors of 2016.  Some observers are theorizing that they did, and that that the 2020  election posed a new set of problems. Nate Cohn has an article in today’s New York Times that reviews what went wrong with the polling in this year’s election.  He leans to the idea that this election was different than 2016 for a number of reasons including the overwhelming turnout and the coronavirus pandemic.  Cohn’s entire article is below.  It is a good analysis.

Tony

———————————————————————————————

New York Times

What Went Wrong With Polling? Some Early Theories

By Nate Cohn

November 11, 2020

Asking for a polling post-mortem at this stage is a little bit like asking a coroner for the cause of death while the body is still at the crime scene. You’re going to have to wait to conduct a full autopsy.

But make no mistake: It’s not too early to say that the polls’ systematic understatement of President Trump’s support was very similar to the polling misfire of four years ago, and might have exceeded it.

For now, there is no easy excuse. After 2016, pollsters arrived at plausible explanations for why surveys had systematically underestimated Mr. Trump in the battleground states. One was that state polls didn’t properly weight respondents without a college degree. Another was that there were factors beyond the scope of polling, like the large number of undecided voters who appeared to break sharply to Mr. Trump in the final stretch.

This year, there seemed to be less cause for concern: In 2020, most state polls weighted by education, and there were far fewer undecided voters.

But in the end, the polling error in states was virtually identical to the miss from 2016, despite the steps taken to fix things. The Upshot’s handy “If the polls were as wrong as they were in 2016” chart turned out to be more useful than expected, and it nailed Joe Biden’s one-point-or-less leads in Pennsylvania, Georgia and Arizona.

The polls were off in 2020 in almost the same ways they were off in 2016.

In Maine and Nebraska, two electoral votes are apportioned to the winner of the state popular vote, and the rest of the votes are given to the winner of the popular vote in each congressional district. (Maine has two congressional districts, and Nebraska has three.) Poll error in 2016 is calculated using averages of state polls conducted within one week of Election Day.

The national polls were even worse than they were four years ago, when the industry’s most highly respected and rigorous survey houses generally found Hillary Clinton leading by four points or less — close to her 2.1-point popular-vote victory. This year, Mr. Biden is on track to win the national vote by around five percentage points; no major national live-interview telephone survey showed him leading by less than eight percentage points over the final month of the race.

The New York Times/Siena College polls were also less accurate than they were in 2018 or four years ago. In 2016, the last two Times/Siena polls were among a very small group of polls to show Mr. Trump tied or ahead in Florida and North Carolina. This time, nearly all of the Times/Siena surveys overestimated Mr. Biden to about the same extent as other surveys.

In the months ahead, troves of data will help add context to exactly what happened in this election, like final turnout data, the results by precinct, and updated records of which voters turned out or stayed home. All of this data can be appended to our polling, to nail down where the polls were off most and help point toward why. But for now, it’s still too soon for a confident answer.

In the broadest sense, there are two ways to interpret the repeat of 2016’s polling error. One is that pollsters were entirely wrong about what happened in 2016. As a result, the steps they took to address it left them no better off. Another is that survey research has gotten even more challenging since 2016, and whatever steps pollsters took to improve after 2016 were canceled out by a new set of problems.

Of these two, the latter interpretation — real improvements canceled out by new challenges — may make the most sense.

“I think our polls would have been even worse this year had we employed a pre-2016 methodology,” said Nick Gourevitch of Global Strategy Group, a Democratic polling firm that took steps to better represent Mr. Trump’s supporters. “These things helped make our data more conservative, though clearly they were not enough on their own to solve the problem.”

Joe Biden may have won the election, but the margin of victory was much closer than the experts predicted. Why?

The explanation for 2016’s polling error, while not necessarily complete or definitive, was not contrived. Many state pollsters badly underrepresented the number of voters without a college degree, who backed Mr. Trump in huge numbers. The pollsters went back to their data after 2016, and found that they would have been much closer to the election result if they had employed the standard education adjustments that national surveys have long used. An Upshot analysis of national surveys found that failing to weight by education cost Mr. Trump about four points in polling support — enough to cover much of the 2016 polling error. Other pollsters had similar findings.

But this time, education weighting didn’t seem to help. State and national polls consistently showed Mr. Biden faring far better than Mrs. Clinton did among white voters without a degree. Last week’s results made it clear that he didn’t.

Over all, the final national surveys in 2020 showed Mr. Trump leading by a margin of 58 percent to 37 percent among white voters without a degree. In 2016, they showed Mr. Trump ahead by far more, 59-30. The results by county suggest that Mr. Biden made few gains at all among white voters without a degree nationwide, and even did worse than Mrs. Clinton’s 2016 showing in many critical states.

In contrast, the 2016 polls did show the decisive and sharp shift among white voters without a degree, but underestimated its effect in many states because they underestimated the size of the group. Many state polls showed college graduates representing half of the likely electorate in 2016, compared with about 35 percent in census estimates.

The poll results among seniors are another symptom of a deeper failure in this year’s polling. Unlike in 2016, surveys consistently showed Mr. Biden winning by comfortable margins among voters 65 and over. The final NBC/WSJ poll showed Mr. Biden up 23 points among the group; the final Times/Siena poll showed him up by 10. In the final account, there will be no reason to believe any of it was real.

This is a deeper kind of error than ones from 2016. It suggests a fundamental mismeasurement of the attitudes of a large demographic group, not just an underestimate of its share of the electorate. Put differently, the underlying raw survey data got worse over the last four years, canceling out the changes that pollsters made to address what went wrong in 2016.

It helps explain why the national surveys were worse than in 2016; they did weight by education four years ago and have made few to no changes since. It also helps explain why the error is so tightly correlated with what happened in 2016: It focuses on the same demographic group, even if the underlying source of the error among the group is quite different.

Polling clearly has some serious challenges. The industry has always relied on statistical adjustments to ensure that each group, like white voters without a degree, represents its proper share of the sample. But this helps only if the respondents you reach are representative of those you don’t. In 2016, they seemed to be representative enough for many purposes. In 2020, they were not.

So how did the polls get worse over the last four years? This is mainly speculation, but consider just a few possibilities:

The president (and the polls) hurt the polls. There was no real indication of a “hidden Trump” vote in 2016. But maybe there was one in 2020. For years, the president attacked the news media and polling, among other institutions. The polls themselves lost quite a bit of credibility in 2016.

It’s hard not to wonder whether the president’s supporters became less likely to respond to surveys as their skepticism of institutions mounted, leaving the polls in a worse spot than they were four years ago.

“We now have to take seriously some version of the Shy Trump hypothesis,” said Patrick Ruffini, a Republican pollster for Echelon Insights. It would be a “problem of the polls simply not reaching large elements of the Trump coalition, which is causing them to underestimate Republicans across the board when he’s on the ballot.”

(This is different from the typical Shy Trump theory that Trump supporters don’t tell pollsters the truth.)

A related possibility: During his term, Mr. Trump might have made gains among the kinds of voters who would be less likely to respond to surveys, and might have lost additional ground among voters who would be more likely to respond to surveys. College education, of course, is only a proxy for the traits that predict whether someone might back Mr. Trump or respond to a poll. There are other proxies as well, like whether you trust your neighbor; volunteer your time; are politically engaged.

Another proxy is turnout: People who vote are likelier to take political surveys. The Times/Siena surveys go to great lengths to reach nonvoters, which was a major reason our surveys were more favorable for the president than others in 2016. In 2020, the nonvoters reached by The Times were generally more favorable for Mr. Biden than those with a track record of turning out in recent elections. It’s possible that, in the end, the final data will suggest that Mr. Trump did a better job of turning out nonvoters who backed him. But it’s also possible that we reached the wrong low-turnout voters.

The resistance hurt the polls. It’s well established that politically engaged voters are likelier to respond to political surveys, and it’s clear that the election of President Trump led to a surge of political engagement on the left. Millions attended the Women’s March or took part in Black Lives Matter protests. Progressive activists donated enormous sums and turned out in record numbers for special elections that would have never earned serious national attention in a different era.

This surge of political participation might have also meant that the resistance became likelier to respond to political surveys, controlling for their demographic characteristics. Are the “MSNBC moms” now excited to take a poll while they put Rachel Maddow on mute in the background? Like most of the other theories presented here, there’s no hard evidence for it — but it does fit with some well-established facts about propensity to respond to surveys.

The turnout hurt the polls. Political pollsters have often assumed that higher turnout makes polling easier, since it means that there’s less uncertainty about the composition of the electorate. Maybe that’s not how it worked out.

Heading into the election, many surveys showed something unusual: Democrats faring better among likely voters than among registered voters. Usually, Republicans hold the turnout edge.

Take Pennsylvania. The final CNN/SSRS poll of the state showed Mr. Biden up by 10 points among likely voters, but by just five among registered voters. Monmouth showed Mr. Biden up by seven among likely voters in a “high-turnout” scenario (which it ended up being), but by five points among registered voters. Marist? It had a lead of six points among likely voters and five points among registered voters. The ABC/Washington Post showed a seven-point lead for Mr. Biden among likely voters and a four-point lead among registered voters.

It’s still too soon to say whether Republican turnout beat Democratic turnout, but it sure seems possible. In Florida, the one state where we do have hard turnout data, registered Republicans outnumbered registered Democrats by about two percentage points among those who actually voted, even though Democrats outnumber Republicans among registered voters by about 1.5 points in the state. Here, there is no doubt that the turnout was better for the president than the polls suggested, whether they’re private polls or the final Times/Siena poll — which showed registered Republicans with an edge of 0.7 points.

If Mr. Trump fared better among likely voters than among registered voters in Pennsylvania, a fundamental misfire on the estimate of turnout could very quickly explain some of the miss.

Unlike the other theories presented here, this one can be proved false or true. States will eventually update their voter registration files with a record of whether voters turned out in the election. We’ll be able to see the exact composition of the electorate by party registration, and we’ll also be able to see which of our respondents voted. Perhaps Mr. Trump’s supporters were likelier to follow through. We might start to get data from North Carolina and Georgia in the next few weeks. Other states might take longer.

The pandemic hurt the polls. Remember those Times/Siena polls from October 2019 that showed Mr. Biden narrowly leading Mr. Trump? They turned out to be very close to the actual result, at least outside of Florida. They were certainly closer than the Times/Siena polls conducted since.

It wasn’t just the Times/Siena polls that were closer to the mark further ahead of the election. Results from pollsters in February and March look just about dead-on in retrospect, with Mr. Biden leading by about six points among registered voters nationwide, with a very narrow lead in the “blue wall” states, including a tied race in Wisconsin.

One possibility is that the polls were just as poor in October 2019 as in October 2020. If so, Mr. Trump actually held a clear lead during the winter. Maybe. Another possibility is that the polls got worse over the last year. And something really big did happen in American life over that time: the coronavirus pandemic.

“The basic story is that after lockdown, Democrats just started taking surveys, because they were locked at home and didn’t have anything else to do,” said David Shor, a Democratic pollster who worked for the Obama campaign in 2012. “Nearly all of the national polling error can be explained by the post-Covid jump in response rates among Dems,” he said.

Circumstantial evidence is consistent with that theory. We know that the virus had an effect on the polls: Pollsters giddily reported an increase in response rates. High-powered studies showed Mr. Biden gaining in coronavirus hot spots, seeming to confirm the assumption that the pandemic was hurting the president.

But if Mr. Shor is right, the studies weren’t showing a shift in the attitudes of voters in hot spots; rather, it was a shift in the tendency for supporters of Mr. Biden to respond to surveys.

Adding to the intrigue: There is no evidence that the president fared worse in coronavirus hot spots, contrary to the expectations of pundits or studies. Instead, Mr. Trump fared slightly better in places with high coronavirus cases than in places with lower coronavirus cases, controlling for demographics, based on the preliminary results by county so far. This is most obviously true in Wisconsin, one of the nation’s current hot spots and the battleground state where the polls underestimated Mr. Trump the most. The final polls in Wisconsin — including the final Times/Siena poll — showed Mr. Biden gaining in the state, even as polls elsewhere showed Mr. Trump making gains.

Don’t forget the Hispanic vote. There’s one state in particular where the polls were much worse in 2020 than in 2016: Florida, where Mr. Trump made huge gains among Hispanic voters.

What happened in Miami-Dade County was stunning. Mr. Biden won by just seven points in a county where Mrs. Clinton won by 29 points. No pollster saw the extent of it coming, not even those conducting polls of Miami-Dade County or its competitive congressional districts.

Most polls probably weren’t even in the ballpark. The final Times/Siena poll of Florida showed Mr. Biden with a 55-33 lead among Hispanic voters. In the final account, Mr. Biden may barely win the Hispanic vote in the state.

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What happened in Miami-Dade was not just about Cuban-Americans. Although Democrats flipped a Senate seat and are leading the presidential race in Arizona, Mr. Trump made huge gains in many Hispanic communities across the country, from the agricultural Imperial Valley and the border towns along the Rio Grande to more urban Houston or Philadelphia.

Many national surveys don’t release results for Hispanic voters because any given survey usually has only a small sample of the group. It will be some time until the major pollsters post their results to the Roper Center, a repository of detailed polling data. Then we’ll be able to dig in and see exactly what the national polls showed among this group.

But if the Florida polls are any indication, it’s at least possible that national surveys missed Mr. Trump’s strength among Hispanic voters. It seems entirely possible that the polls could have missed by 10 points among the group. If true, it would account for a modest but significant part — maybe one-fourth — of the national polling error.

Dawn Marie Picciano Divano

Dear Commons Community,

Today we honor and thank all the men and women who served in our armed forces. 

We are a better nation because of them.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The Chronicle of Higher Education is reporting this morning that faculty at Stanford University are calling on the administration to sever its ties with the Hoover Institution, a conservative policy-research center dedicated “to freedom, private enterprise, and effective, limited government.”  As reported by The Chronicle:

“At a recent Faculty Senate meeting, Stanford’s provost, Persis Drell, told professors that they shouldn’t think of the Hoover Institution as a separate entity — one that just happens to occupy a 285-foot tower on campus — but should instead accept it as a bona fide part of the university. Many of its fellows, the provost pointed out, are also Stanford professors; what’s more, Hoover’s new director, Condoleezza Rice, has been a faculty member since 1981. “In a very real sense,” Drell said, “and I think this is important to keep in mind, they are, in fact, us.”

That message of unity didn’t go over well in some quarters. There is a long-simmering tension between Stanford and Hoover, which celebrated its centennial last year and considers itself “the world’s pre-eminent archive and policy-research center dedicated to freedom, private enterprise, and effective, limited government.” Hoover is semi-independent: It has its own Board of Overseers, and its fellows, who are given renewable appointments rather than tenure, don’t pass through the same selection process as faculty members (though its senior fellows are granted continuing-term appointments that don’t have to be renewed). At the same time, when a new director is selected, the candidate must be approved by Stanford’s Board of Trustees.

The somewhat less-than-collegial reaction to Drell’s remarks was captured in a Stanford Daily op-ed by Branislav Jakovljević, a professor of theater and performance studies. “When I signed up to teach at Stanford, I was not told that part of my job would be to serve as a living shield for the Hoover Institution,” he wrote. “I refuse to be used in that way. I am not them.”

Lately the source of tension has focused primarily on one person: Scott W. Atlas, the Robert Wesson senior fellow at Hoover and also an adviser to the White House Coronavirus Task Force. He has promoted what’s usually referred to as the “herd immunity” strategy to deal with the pandemic — though Atlas objects vehemently to the label. It’s accurate to say, though, that his views, which appear to align closely with President Trump’s, are outside the public-health mainstream. Anthony Fauci has called them “nonsense,” and Twitter deleted an Atlas tweet that said masks don’t work.

In September, dozens of researchers and doctors from Stanford School of Medicine signed an open letter calling attention to the “falsehoods and misrepresentations of science” they say Atlas has espoused. The former chief of neuroradiology at the school, Atlas threatened to sue his erstwhile colleagues for defamation. He didn’t respond to a request for comment from The Chronicle, but he told the Stanford News Service in a statement that he has used his “unique background, critical thinking, and logic to present the president with the broadest possible views on policy” and that to “claim otherwise is an embarrassment to those who do so.”

Another letter of protest, signed by more than 100 Stanford faculty members, notes that Atlas has “no expertise in epidemiology.” It also chides another Hoover fellow, Richard A. Epstein, a legal scholar and author of books like Free Markets Under Siege: Cartels, Politics, and Social Welfare, for writing in mid-March that he thought only 500 people in the United States would die from the coronavirus. In a confusing series of corrections, Epstein later revised that number to 5,000 in the United States and predicted that worldwide totals would reach 50,000. (More than a million deaths have been recorded so far globally, 237,000 of them in the United States.)

The letter goes on to say that the signatories are “profoundly troubled” that Stanford’s name is being used to “validate such problematic information.” It ends with a call for Stanford’s Faculty Senate to take action: “The relationship between the Hoover Institution’s way of promoting their policy preferences and the academic mission of Stanford University requires more careful renegotiation.”

What does that mean, exactly? An author of the letter, David Palumbo-Liu, a professor of comparative literature, said he wasn’t sure what a renegotiation would entail or where it would lead. In February, Palumbo-Liu will make a presentation to the Faculty Senate requesting that a committee be formed to look into the matter. “So my interest is basically in flexing the muscle of faculty governance in a way that it hasn’t been exercised in some time,” he says. “After that, it’s really up to the administration as to how they listen or don’t listen to the faculty.”

Palumbo-Liu contends that this isn’t an attempt to restrict research that Hoover fellows can pursue or censor their opinions. The problem, he argues, is that positions taken by Hoover reflect on the rest of Stanford, and when it comes to Atlas and Epstein, they reflect poorly. “They’re committed to a project that is in opposition to ours,” he says. “And they take advantage of the association with Stanford to draw from the legitimacy of Stanford research, and they benefit from that association in a way that’s illegitimate.”

That’s what bothers Stephen Monismith, too. Monismith, a professor of engineering who signed the letter, says he, too, would be happy to see Hoover pack its bags and move off campus. He also wouldn’t mind if the institution dissolved, rewrote its mission statement, and asked fellows to reapply. The new statement, as he envisions it, should be “one that doesn’t have an overt mission to say that the free market is the way to go.”

So far the administration doesn’t seem even slightly receptive to such calls. During the same faculty meeting at which Provost Drell called for Hoover-Stanford oneness, David Spiegel, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, posed the following challenge to President Marc Tessier-Lavigne of Stanford: “Will you, on behalf of the university, publicly disavow Scott Atlas’s irresponsible, unethical, and dangerous actions? Stanford’s reputation and our lives depend on it,” he asked, according to a transcript of the exchange in the official minutes of the October 22 meeting.

Tessier-Lavigne responded by reading the university’s statement on academic freedom, adding that “just because an individual expresses a view does not mean it reflects the views of colleagues or of the university.” At the same time he affirmed that Stanford believes in following “science-informed public-health guidance,” including requiring masks, social distancing, and testing.

That defense aside, Jay Bhattacharya doesn’t think Stanford’s administration has done enough to stand up for academic freedom during the pandemic. Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine at Stanford and one-time Hoover fellow, is a co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration, which contends that those who are not at elevated risk of complications from Covid should “immediately be allowed to resume life as normal” in order for the population to reach herd immunity more quickly. Atlas has cited Bhattacharya and his co-authors favorably, and Bhattacharya says he and Atlas largely agree on coronavirus strategy. “I think it is absolutely their right to object to what Scott actually said that they disagree with,” he says. “Instead they relied on distorted press accounts in the middle of this massive political battle.”

Just because an individual expresses a view does not mean it reflects the views of colleagues or of the university.

Bhattacharya says it has seemed at times that Stanford, as an institution, has supported the condemnation of Atlas and his views. For example, the letter from Stanford medical-school researchers and doctors was sent out via an official university email list. A follow-up email sent by the university’s Faculty Senate chair, Judith L. Goldstein, and Provost Drell, clarified that use of the official list for the letter “was not consistent with policy” and “will not happen again.

The history of friction between Hoover and Stanford dates back a long way. In 2007, Hoover made Donald Rumsfeld a visiting fellow, which led to a petition, signed by nearly 4,000 members of the Stanford community, objecting to the appointment of the former defense secretary. In 2003, student antiwar activists called on Hoover to alter its mission statement or for Stanford to sever ties. In 1983, after a number of Hoover fellows were tapped to work in the Reagan administration, two professors started a petition to begin an “immediate inquiry on the relationship between the Hoover Institution and Stanford.” Two years later, a committee appointed by Stanford’s Faculty Senate published a lengthy report that found a “large sense of grievance” directed at each group by the other and called for more cooperation.

Though that sense of grievance clearly hasn’t gone away, it’s hard to imagine that this recent flare-up will lead to significant changes in the relationship. The two entities are, as the provost said, more entwined than ever, and there is zero indication that administrators are looking to evict the institution, which brought in $34-million in donations last year and boasts a half-billion-dollar endowment.

It also seems very unlikely that Scott Atlas will hold onto his influential advisory role in the White House once President-elect Biden is sworn into office. When asked about Atlas and the herd-immunity strategy during a 60 Minutes interview, Biden shook his head. “Nobody thinks it makes any sense,” he said.”

Tony

Kayleigh McEnany and Neil Cavuto

Dear Commons Community,

Fox News anchor Neil Cavuto cut away from footage of a press conference held by the Trump campaign yesterday saying, “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” as White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany spread misinformation about the integrity of the presidential election. 

“We want every legal vote to be counted, and we want every illegal vote—” McEnany stated at the press conference, falsely suggesting there was significant voter fraud in the election, before Cavuto cut away. 

“Whoa, whoa, whoa, I just think we have to be very clear, she’s charging the other side as ‘welcoming fraud’ and ‘welcoming illegal voting,’” Cavuto said. “Unless she has more details to back that up, I can’t in good countenance continue showing you this.”

“That’s an explosive charge to make, that the other side is effectively rigging and cheating,” the Fox News anchor added. “Not so fast.”

Since President-elect Joe Biden’s victory on Saturday, President Donald Trump has refused to concede the election and has repeatedly lied about nonexistent fraud in an attempt to delegitimize the results of the election he lost.

Early in the morning after Election Day, several news networks, including MSNBC, NBC and ABC, had to cut into Trump’s premature victory speech, as he had not won — in fact, neither candidate had reached the 270 electoral votes needed to prevail. 

In the months leading up to the election, Trump had been spreading lies about mail-in voting — which millions of Americans used to stay safe amid the coronavirus pandemic — being “corrupt” or “fraudulent.” (It is not — there is no evidence of significant voter fraud in mail-in voting processes.) His campaign has filed lawsuits challenging results and ballot counting in some battleground states, and several of these have already been dismissed. 

In Monday’s press conference, McEnany continued to perpetuate lies about there having been “fraud” and “illegal voting” in November’s election, for which there is no evidence. 

Fox News, a right-leaning network, is a favorite of Trump’s. The news network frequently peddles the president’s own misinformation, such as when Trump held a sham health assessment on the news channel after his coronavirus infection.

However, in recent days, Trump and his supporters have complained about the network, specifically after it was one of the first to project Arizona would go to Biden in the presidential election.

The Trump – Fox News relationship is fraying a bit.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The pharmaceutical company, Pfizer, announced this morning positive early results from its coronavirus vaccine trial with a 90 percent effective rate for subjects taking part in its testing.

Pfizer, which developed the vaccine with the German drug-maker, BioNTech, released only sparse details from its clinical trial, based on the first formal review of the data by an outside panel of experts.  As reported by the New York Times:

“The company said that the analysis found that the vaccine was more than 90 percent effective in preventing the disease among trial volunteers who had no evidence of prior coronavirus infection. If the results hold up, that level of protection would put it on par with highly effective childhood vaccines for diseases such as measles. No serious safety concerns have been observed, the company said.

Pfizer plans to ask the Food and Drug Administration for emergency authorization of the two-dose vaccine later this month, after it has collected the recommended two months of safety data. By the end of the year it will have manufactured enough doses to immunize 15 to 20 million people, company executives have said.

“This is a historical moment,” Kathrin Jansen, a senior vice president and the head of vaccine research and development at Pfizer, said in an interview. “This was a devastating situation, a pandemic, and we have embarked on a path and a goal that nobody ever has achieved — to come up with a vaccine within a year.”

The news comes just days after Joseph R. Biden Jr. clinched a victory over President Trump in the presidential election. Mr. Trump had repeatedly hinted a vaccine would be ready before Election Day, Nov. 3. This fall, Pfizer’s chief executive, Dr. Albert Bourla, frequently claimed that the company could have a “readout” by October, something that did not come to pass.

Independent scientists have cautioned against hyping early results before long-term safety and efficacy data has been collected. And no one knows how long the vaccine’s protection might last. Still, the development makes Pfizer the first company to announce positive results from a late-stage vaccine trial, vaulting it to the front of a frenzied global race that began in January and has unfolded at record-breaking speed.

Eleven vaccines are in late-stage trials, including four in the United States. Pfizer’s progress could bode well for Moderna’s vaccine, which uses similar technology. A Moderna spokesman said that it expected interim findings from its study this month.

Operation Warp Speed, the federal effort to rush a vaccine to market, has promised Pfizer $1.95 billion to deliver 100 million doses to the federal government, which will be given to Americans free of charge. But Dr. Jansen sought to distance the company from Operation Warp Speed and presidential politics, noting that the company — unlike the other vaccine front-runners — did not take any federal money to help pay for research and development.

“We were never part of the Warp Speed,” she said in an interview on Sunday. “We have never taken any money from the U.S. government, or from anyone.” On Monday, a spokeswoman for Pfizer clarified that the company is part of Operation Warp Speed as a supplier of a potential coronavirus vaccine.

Dr. Jansen said she learned of the results from the outside panel of experts shortly after 1 p.m. on Sunday, and that the timing was not influenced by the election. “We have always said that science is driving how we conduct ourselves — no politics,” she said.

The data released by Pfizer Monday was delivered in a news release, not a peer-reviewed medical journal. It is not conclusive evidence that the vaccine is safe and effective, and the initial finding of more than 90 percent efficacy could change as the trial goes on.

“We need to see the actual data, and we’re going to need longer-term results,” said Jesse Goodman, a professor of medicine and infectious diseases at Georgetown University. Still, he said, “it’s a testament to hard work and science that we’re getting results that are so good and so fast.”

Other scientists were stunned by the data so far.

“This is really a spectacular number,” said Akiko Iwasaki, an immunologist at Yale University. “I wasn’t expecting it to be this high. I was preparing myself for something like 55 percent.”

If the final vaccine ends up with that level of efficacy, it “would be higher than your regular flu vaccine, and this vaccine could have a serious impact on bending the curve of this outbreak,” said Dr. Saad B. Omer, the director of the Yale Institute for Global Health.

Dr. Jansen said that because the trial is continuing, an independent board reviewing the data has not told her or other company executives other details, such as how many of the people developed mild versus more severe forms of Covid-19 — crucial information that the F.D.A. has said it will need to evaluate any coronavirus vaccine. The agency has also asked for other detailed data that could take weeks to review, including about how the company plans to manufacture millions of doses and ensure that the product is consistent and safe.

The trial is expected to continue until 164 people in the 44,000 person trial have developed Covid-19, and will also evaluate how well it protects against developing severe forms of the disease, and how well the vaccine protects people who have already been infected with the coronavirus.

Half of the participants received two doses of the vaccine, and half received a placebo. The first analysis was based on 94 volunteers who developed Covid-19. Dr. Jansen said the outside board did not say how many of those cases came from participants who had been vaccinated. But with a rate of more than 90 percent effectiveness, most had to have been in the placebo group.

Dr. Jansen said the global surge in coronavirus infections contributed to the speed with which participants in the trial got infected with the virus. “You can see for yourself, the rates are going up everywhere,” she said. “So we think based on our predictions, it shouldn’t take us very long” to get to 164 cases of Covid-19.

Dr. Paul Offit, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and a member of the F.D.A.’s vaccine advisory panel, said the news that Pfizer’s trial was progressing quickly was a good sign for other trials, too.

“If there’s any silver lining in the fact that our country is currently on fire with this virus, it’s that these trials can reach a conclusion much quicker than otherwise,” he said.

Work on the vaccine began in Mainz, Germany, in late January, when Ugur Sahin, the chief executive and co-founder of BioNTech, read about the virus in the Lancet that filled him with dread. “I almost instantly knew that this would affect us,” Mr. Sahin said in an interview. That same day, the first European cases were detected, in France.

Mr. Sahin assembled a 40-person team to work on the vaccine. Many employees canceled vacations and Mr. Sahin authorized overtime pay. They called it Project Lightspeed.

BioNTech used a technology that had never been approved for use in people. It takes genetic material called messenger RNA and injects it into muscle cells, which treat it like instructions for building a protein — a protein found on the surface of the coronavirus. The proteins then stimulate the immune system and are believed to result in long-lasting protection against the virus. Other companies, including Moderna, are also using messenger RNA technology.

BioNTech quickly identified 20 vaccine candidates, and began testing them on rodents. But the company lacked the experience and resources to rapidly conduct a major clinical trial. So Mr. Sahin called Pfizer. The two companies had been working to develop a flu vaccine since 2018, and within a day of Mr. Sahin calling Dr. Jansen at Pfizer, the companies agreed to partner on a coronavirus vaccine. In mid-March, the companies announced their partnership.

After early human trials, they determined that two vaccine candidates produced a robust immune response, including antibodies against the virus and powerful immune cells known as T cells. They chose the one with fewer side effects to start a trial with more than 30,000 volunteers in the U.S., Argentina, Brazil and Germany. In September the company expanded the trial to 44,000 participants.

Even before it began, the Trump Administration placed a bet that Pfizer and BioNTech would succeed, announcing its advance purchase deal on July 22. At the time, it was the largest such commitment from the U.S. government.

From time to time over the past seven months, while working from his home in the affluent suburb of Scarsdale, New York, Dr. Bourla spoke with Mr. Trump, who had tied progress on a vaccine to his election hopes. Dr. Bourla said the president pressed for details about when the vaccine might be ready.

“Every time I spoke with the president I told him that he should not worry about us compromising safety or efficacy, but that we would do it as quickly as science allows us,” he said.

Late this summer, as the president made public pronouncements about a vaccine coming soon, Dr. Bourla boarded a Pfizer jet to Frankfurt to pick up Mr. Sahin. The two men were meeting face-to-face for the first time, but there was little time for pleasantries, or even science.

As they descended toward a factory in Austria that would produce their vaccine, they discussed how to ensure a wary public would trust their vaccine. Days later, Pfizer organized an effort by major drug companies to pledge that any coronavirus vaccine would stand up to scientific scrutiny.

In another move to shore up public confidence and after criticism from outside researchers, Pfizer and other companies took the unusual step of releasing their trial blueprints, known as protocols, revealing typically secret details about how it was evaluating its vaccine.

Two days after Mr. Trump called out Pfizer by name in the first presidential debate, saying it and other vaccine makers were being hampered by politics, Dr. Bourla emailed Pfizer employees.

“We are approaching our goal,” he wrote. “And despite not having any political considerations with our pre-announced date, we find ourselves in the crucible of the U.S. Presidential election.”

The trial’s protocol allowed four interim analyses — early looks that would give the outside board of experts a chance to identify safety concerns, and assess whether the vaccine was working. Outside of this panel, no one — not doctors or company officials — were allowed to know which participants received the vaccine or a placebo.

The first interim analysis was supposed to have taken place after 32 people in the study developed Covid-19, although regulators at the F.D.A. had always been skeptical that would be enough data to merit an authorization. The company said that, after discussing the matter with the F.D.A., it decided that the virus was spreading fast enough to wait until the pre-scheduled second analysis — at 62 cases. By the time it had finished discussions with the agency and the independent board was ready to look at the data, 94 cases had accrued.

“When everything was done and dotted, and we could actually do the analysis, it turned out we had even far more than what we expected,” Dr. Jansen said. So the outside panel reviewed 94 cases — more than half the number needed to complete the trial.

Wide distribution of Pfizer’s vaccine will be a logistical challenge. Because it is made with mRNA, the doses will need to be kept at ultra cold temperatures. While Pfizer has developed a special cooler to transport the vaccine, equipped with GPS-enabled thermal sensors, it remains unclear where people will receive the shots, and what role the government will play in distribution. Adding to the challenge, people will need to return three weeks later for a second dose to complete the immunization.

Most experts say the world will need many treatments and vaccines to bring an end to the pandemic.

“There’s a lot at stake for humanity,” Dr. Bourla said. “If we get it right, the world can be saved.”

This can be a game-changer.  Congratulations to Pfizer and its collaborators!

Tony