Peril

by Bob Woodward

The FDA is a regulator and follows strict guidelines to determine whether and when a vaccine is safe and efficacious for use by the general public in the U.S. It does not produce the vaccine. A typical vaccine usually takes around 10 to 15 years to crea...

“These clinical trials are set up by companies, by the NIH,” the National Institutes of Health. The vaccine was being developed by companies like Pfizer-BioNTech, Johnson & Johnson, and Moderna. They conducted the scientific study, including laboratory research and nonclinical trials in animals before th...

“While FDA has oversight over clinical research, it does not conduct the trials,” Hahn said again. Its role is to evaluate the data submitted by the c...

Public faith in safety procedures was critical to convincing people to get vaccinated.

Hahn did not ask the president whether he ever considered what thousands of FDA workers might think when they read the statements attacking their work from the president of the United States.

In March, Biden had publicly pledged to pick a woman as his running mate. Clyburn was careful to never demand Biden put a Black woman on the ticket. Picking a Black woman would be a “plus not a must,” a phrase he repeated often in private with Biden and others.

“That means something to HBCU people,” he said. While high-achieving Black Americans now went to Ivy League schools, Clyburn said, “People tend to forget that these people, their parents went to HBCUs, their grandparents went to HBCUs. When it comes to their grandparents, very few of them could have gone anywhere else.” Harris’s diploma was more than a degree. It carried political weight with the exact people Biden needed to show up to vote, Clyburn said.

“That’s one of the things I think people miss, they don’t think about the history of all of this,” he said. “It’s all, you know, ‘I went to Yale, I went to Harvard.’ Well, a lot of us came along at a time when those opportunities were not there. It was South Carolina State, North Carolina A&T, whatever it is.”

For him, the HBCUs were the nucleus of identity and power in the Black commu...

He felt most Americans tended not to recognize how, when most of his generation was coming along, Black men and women were not privy to civic participation in Rotary Clubs, Lions Clubs and other groups. Black people looked at fraternities and ...

Kamala and Beau had served together as state attorneys general, Harris for California and Biden for Delaware. During the housing crisis and economic recession a decade earlier, the pair collaborated on an investigation into the biggest banks. “We had each other’s backs,” Harris wrote in her 2019 memoir, The Truths We Hold.

When Beau died in 2015, Harris attended the memorial service. She posted a picture on Instagram on June 8, 2015, and called the service a “moving tribute” for “my dear friend.”

Harris was the daughter of an Indian mother, Shyamala, and a Jamaican father, Donald, who had immigrated to the United States before Harris was born. They met as fellow civil rights activists in Berkeley—Donald an economist, Shyamala a scientist.

She had been the first woman to serve as San Francisco’s district attorney and first Black person and first woman to serve as state attorney general.

That passion was shared by many others in the party who wanted to recognize the power and vitality of Black women not only in the party, but in American politics.

There were about 10 million more women than men registered to vote.

The campaign raised $48 million in the 48 hours following the announcement and a record-breaking $365.4 million in August, more than any single month’s fundraising total in previous presidential elections.

“Joe likes to say that character is on the ballot and it’s true,” she said. “When he saw what happened in Charlottesville three years ago today, he knew we were in a battle for the soul of our nation.”

“There were shots fired outside,” the agent told the president. Trump scowled. “I’m not going in the fucking bunker,” he said.

In late September, the FDA submitted guidelines on its process for emergency approval of the coronavirus vaccines to the White House. For over two weeks, they waited for a sign-off. The holdup was Mark Meadows. He was concerned there were too many unnecessary steps in the FDA authorization process. It would take too long.

For Hahn, it was another intervention by Meadows, the brash former North Carolina businessman, weighing in as a supposed expert on FDA process, even though he was not a doctor.

The guidelines called for Phase 3 studies to include a two-month follow-up period to see whether participants reported any serious side effects. Peter Marks, the director of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research at the FDA, had a PhD in cell and molecula...

“It was stunning to me that Mark Meadows thought he knew more than Peter Marks, with respect to how to evaluate the safety and efficacy of a vaccine,” Hahn told others. “He thinks he knows things that h...

“The White House has said it might try to influence the scientific standards for vaccine approval put forward by the FDA. “This pronouncement came just after key leaders at the FDA, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health all publicly supported the guidance,” they wrote. “Drug makers have also pledged to use the FDA’s scientific standards.”

“I’ve spoken to Pfizer, I’ve spoken to all of the people that you have to speak to, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson, and others.” “We’re weeks away from a vaccine,” Trump claimed, insisting the companies “can go faster.” Despite all his rhetoric playing down the virus, Trump knew a vaccine before the election could help him politically.

“Once more, I was disappointed that the prevention for a deadly disease was discussed in political terms rather than scientific facts,” Bourla said in an open letter to colleagues.

“Will you shut up, man?” Biden asked with exasperation. It was the line of the night.

President Trump’s hospitalization with the coronavirus, late Friday, October 2, briefly ruptured his campaign’s final stretch, with Trump helicoptered to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland.

Trump had resisted going. But when his blood oxygen levels plummeted into the 80s range, a potentially fatal zone, and the president had trouble breathing, his physician had to give him oxygen. Several aides warned he would have to be taken out in a wheelchair or worse if...

“You have zero percent body fat, honey,” Trump said. “Honey, if you have zero percent body fat, you’re fine.”

The White House remained a hot zone for infection. Meadows and other senior staffers eschewed masks and low-level staffers felt the office culture seemed to encourage ignoring public health guidelines. They sat through meeting after meeting where missives from Fauci and others were derided by Trump and his aides as preachy and liberal. At least “34 White House staffers and other contacts” had contracted the virus, noted an internal memo from FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, in October.

“Being Donald Trump,” McConnell told others, was enough for Trump to lose in November. “Trump’s personality was his biggest problem and from a personality point of view, Joe was the opposite of Trump.”

For nearly four years, McConnell had had what he called a “brotherhood” with cabinet officials like former secretary of defense James Mattis and former White House chief of staff John Kelly, and now with Attorney General William Barr. They tried to push Trump toward normal.

“Do you know why Tillerson was able to say he didn’t call the president a ‘moron’?” McConnell would dryly ask colleagues in his Kentucky drawl. “Because he called him a ‘fucking moron.’ ”

On Friday, October 30, four days before the election, Chairman Milley examined the latest sensitive intelligence. What he read was alarming: The Chinese believed the United States was going to attack them.

Milley knew it was untrue. But the Chinese were on high alert, and whenever a superpower is on high alert, the risk of war escalates.

Miscommunications were often the seeds of war. In 1987, Admiral William J. Crowe, chairman of the Joints Chiefs under President Ronald Reagan, had established a back-channel relationship with the head of the Soviet Union’s military, to avoid an accidental war. Crowe had not informed President Reagan about his decision to take national security into his own hands and work directly with Marshal Sergei Akhromeyev, the chief of the Soviet General Staff.

Trump was attacking China on the campaign trail at every turn, blaming them for the coronavirus. “I beat this crazy, horrible China virus,” he told Fox News on October 11. Milley knew the Chinese might not know where the politics ended and possible action began.

“General Li, I want to assure you that the American government is stable and everything is going to be okay. We are not going to attack or conduct any kinetic operations against you. “General Li, you and I have known each other for now five years. If we’re going to attack, I’m going to call you ahead of time. It’s not going to be a surprise. It’s not going to be a bolt out of the blue. “If there was a war or some kind of kinetic action between the United States and China, there’s going to be a buildup, just like there has been always in history. “And there’s going to be tension. And I’m going to be communicating with you pretty regularly,” Milley said. “So this is not one of those times. It’s going to be okay. We’re not going to have a fight.” “Okay,” General Li said, “I take you at your word.”

Milley could see the Lincoln Memorial from Quarters 6, his home. Arlington National Cemetery was nearby. “I’ve buried 242 kids up here,” he later told others one Saturday morning. “I’m not really interested in having a war with anybody. “I’ll defend the country if it’s necessary. But war, the military instrument, must be a last resort, not a first resort.” He did not tell Trump about his call with General Li.

“If President Trump wins, then the street’s going to explode with riots and civil unrest. If President Trump loses, there’s going to be significant issues there about a contested election,” Milley said at a meeting.

“We need you to join ARMY FOR TRUMP’s election security operation!” read one official Trump campaign post at the end of September, with Donald Trump Jr. imploring “every able-bodied man, woman” to enlist in the president’s “security” effort. “Don’t let them steal it,” Trump Jr. said. “Enlist today.”

The Map Room, where Franklin Roosevelt tracked battles during World War II, was set up as the nerve center.

In the months before the election, Trump systematically claimed the outcome would be rigged. If he didn’t win, the election would be stolen. It was his unless there was massive fraud.

“MILLIONS OF MAIL-IN BALLOTS WILL BE PRINTED BY FOREIGN COUNTRIES, AND OTHERS. IT WILL BE THE SCANDAL OF OUR TIMES!”

“the only way they can take this election away from us is if this is a rigged election.”

The mood in the Map Room was beginning to darken.

Eric asked for data his father could cite in a speech. He grew frustrated when told the numbers would continue to change. States were still counting.

Fox News’s decision desk called Arizona for Biden shortly before 11:30 p.m., stunning Trump’s crowd. Trump pressed his family members and advisers to tell the network to pull the call back. Fox refused, enraging the president, who said Fox News was now in on the steal.

Shortly before 12:45 a.m., Biden took the stage in Wilmington. He predicted victory but did not declare it outright. The crowd was mostly parked in cars outside the Chase Center due to the social distancing rules. Drivers honked their horns.