A Dose of Vaccine Reality

The Food and Drug Administration released guidelines yesterday that make it nearly inconceivable for a coronavirus vaccine to hit the market before Election Day. The move came one day after The Times reported that White House officials had been trying to soften the F.D.A.’s language to clear the path for an 11th-hour vaccine.

The White House’s Office of Management and Budget approved the new guidelines after two weeks in which administration officials, including Mark Meadows, President Trump’s chief of staff, had sought to hold them up.

Four vaccines in the United States are in the final stage of testing, but the agency’s new regulations advise vaccine makers to follow test patients for a median of two months after the final dose. They also ask vaccine makers to document five cases of severe infection in people who received the placebo instead of the vaccine.

Can you conceive of a version of the internet where it’s easy to go about your business without using a product that shares your information with Google, Facebook, Amazon or Apple? The House Judiciary Committee’s Democratic leadership wants to start moving toward that reality.

The committee released a landmark 449-page report yesterday that proposes to start the process of breaking up those companies and proposes the most ambitious changes to antitrust laws in half a century. The lawmakers wrote the companies — which serve an essential role in public communication but are not generally regulated as utilities — had grown into “the kinds of monopolies we last saw in the era of oil barons and railroad tycoons.”

The report accused the giants of abusing their dominance by controlling prices, manipulating the rules of the road for everything from advertising to publishing. It recommended effectively downsizing the companies, strengthening the policing power of regulatory agencies, and doing more to prevent the giants from acquiring start-ups.

The Department of Homeland Security released a report yesterday calling violent white supremacy the “most persistent and lethal threat in the homeland,” and singling out Russia as the biggest international purveyor of disinformation in the United States.

This, too, represents a case of information coming to light after reports of interference by administration officials. A homeland security whistle-blower had accused the agency of holding up the document’s publication because of political concerns.

But in the end, the dispatch — a routine annual assessment of foreign and domestic threats — was direct and explicit. “I am particularly concerned about white supremacist violent extremists who have been exceptionally lethal in their abhorrent, targeted attacks in recent years,” Chad Wolf, the acting secretary of homeland security, wrote in the foreword to the assessment.

Trump called off negotiations yesterday over a long-awaited next round of stimulus legislation, accusing Speaker Nancy Pelosi of “not negotiating in good faith.”

The news sent the stock market sliding, and appeared to put an end to hopes that the government would extend significant relief before next year for workers affected by the pandemic.

Later last night, tweets from Trump seemed to backtrack on his statement that an agreement would wait until after Election Day. It was unclear if his posts signaled that he was willing to start negotiating again.

Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle had been pushing for a deal, recognizing the overwhelming public support for further stimulus. Pelosi threatened to pass an ambitious Democratic bill in the House last week if she wasn’t able to reach an agreement with Republicans, but she had walked that back after talks with the White House showed progress.

The president continued to insist that he was recovering quickly from the virus — just a day after his social media post downplaying the virus’s threat was found to be in violation of both Twitter’s and Facebook’s policies on harmful information. “FEELING GREAT,” Trump tweeted yesterday morning, later declaring that he was “looking forward” to his second debate with Joe Biden.

But Biden has stated that if Trump is ill, the debate should be called off — and medical experts have said that patients who show early symptoms often improve for a period of days before their condition worsens again.