We already know that Donald Trump lied to Americans about the dangerousness of the pandemic. Trump's lies are designed to be self-serving, but they have a real affect on our safety.
There is a lot of skepticism out there, for example, about the possibility of a vaccine arriving just in time for election day. There is good reason for that skepticism -- even crash vaccine efforts usually take years to come to fruition. Doing on a timeline of months is pretty much unheard of. But the other reason people are skeptical of the vaccine is because Donald Trump is promising us it is on the way and will make everything alright. And because we Americans know Donald Trump is such a huge liar, this makes us understandably skittish that such a vaccine, if and when it arrives, will provide us with as much protection as a broken condom. Which means, inevitably, that fewer people will line up to take the vaccine when it becomes available -- which, if it is effective, means that a number of people will forgo the protection, and that they in turn will deny us collective immunity.
Health and drug company officials understand the problem, which is why you've seen them out in public the last few days, telling us they would never, ever put out an ineffective or unsafe vaccine for political reasons. But Trump's lies, and his willingness to bend the bureaucracy to his will for political reasons, means we can't really trust those promises. It's possible that we're going to have a snake oil salesman whose snake oil really works, but whose reputation for cons and selling quack cures means many of us pass on the good stuff. That would be tragic. But we're talking about Trump here. It's just as likely the snake oil salesman's product won't actually work, and we'll be stuck with the consequences of his selfishness.
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