'Technically impressive yet TOTALLY wrong': Thread takes 2020 NYT article about how long it would take for a COVID vaccine APART

Sam J. | 2:48 PM on April 26, 2021

It’s articles like this that had people convinced COVID would be the end of this country. Or at least the end of the Trump presidency.

Ahem.

Seriously, this New York Times article doesn’t show a vaccine for the virus until 2033!!! This editor would have been … well, old.

But Trump didn’t allow for that and he pushed forward – and now Biden takes all the credit.

Of course.

Check out this thread on the article:

It's now been almost a year since the New York Times put together this technically impressive yet totally wrong interactive article about how long it would take to get a Covid vaccine. pic.twitter.com/gXzZS5ME2G

— Chris Anderson (@chr1sa) April 26, 2021

So per the NYT, they should only be in the ‘academic research’ phase right now.

Alrighty then.

To their credit, the NYT allowed you to try, by clicking, all sorts of (implausible, they suggested) accelerants like fastrack regulatory approval and building factories ahead of approval. But no combination of options got you to how fast we actually got the vaccine.

— Chris Anderson (@chr1sa) April 26, 2021

Implausible.

Anything to make Americans feel hopeless.

This really is gross.

I'm trying to understand why so many people underestimated our ability to get a vaccine (to say nothing of such an effective one) in less than 12 months. Part of it is that mRNA vaccines were still new; they didn't have confidence that they would work.

— Chris Anderson (@chr1sa) April 26, 2021

They didn’t want us to have any hope. If people thought Trump might come through with the vaccine then he’d look like he was solving or solved the pandemic. The powers that be in the media and on the Left needed it to feel like an uphill battle that couldn’t be won.

Except if they were magically elected.

But even traditional attenuated/killed vaccines (like China's) got out faster than this timeline.

This reminds me of the Erlich/Simon debate. People so often discount the effect of innovation under pressure cc @stewartbrand

Here's the original NYT piece.https://t.co/SVlAK4Wlmv

— Chris Anderson (@chr1sa) April 26, 2021

Or they have a narrative that’s more important than the science.

*adjusts tinfoil*

What's particularly baffling is that more than a dozen vaccines were already in trials *when that article was written*. Thus defaulting most of the purported delays, like "academic research" and "preclinical", to zero

— Chris Anderson (@chr1sa) April 26, 2021

It’s not baffling when you understand what their goal was.

And it wasn’t informing people about the realistic timeline for a vaccine.

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