The National Message Has Undergone a Massive Transformation

"We could save tens of thousands of lives if everyone would just wear a mask for the next few months. Not Democratic or Republican lives. American lives." 

"I implore you. Wear a mask. Do it for yourself. Do it for your neighbour. A mask is not a political statement."

"The goal is to get back to normal as fast as possible. And masks are critical in doing that. It won't be forever."

"But that's how we'll get out nation back up to speed economically, so we can go back to celebrating birthdays and holidays together, so we can attend sporting events together, so that we can get back to the lives and connections we shared before the pandemic."

"I hope it [Catholic hymn -- "On Eagle's Wings"] can provide some comfort and solace to the 230,000 Americans who have lost a loved one to this terrible virus this year. My heart goes out to each and every one of you."

U.S.President-Elect Joe Biden

"Given the fact that the statisticians have come to a conclusion at this stage, I think we get behind the new President."

"You're not going to change the nature of President Trump in these last days."

"He has a relatively relaxed relationship with the truth. And so he's going to keep on fighting until the very end, But I'm convinced that, once all remedies have been exhausted, if those are exhausted in a way that's not favorable to him, he will accept the inevitable."

"But don't expect him to go quietly in the night. That's not how he operates."

Mitt Romney, Utah Senator, former presidential aspirant 

"[I ask Americans to set aside their political differences and] give him a chance and lend him your support."

"When he walks into the White House in January, he'll face a series of extraordinary challenges no incoming President ever has -- a raging pandemic, an unequal economy and justice system, a democracy at risk, and a climate in peril."

"I know he'll do the job with the best interests of every American at heart, whether or not he had their vote. [The election results] at every level show that the country remains deeply and bitterly divided."

"It will be up to not just Joe and Kamala, but each of us, to do our part -- to reach out beyond our comfort zone, to listen to others, to lower the temperature and find some common ground from which to move forward." 

Former President Barack Obama 

 

"[I] WON THE ELECTION." 

"Bad things happened [during the election his poll observers were not permitted to view]."

"71,000,000 Legal Votes. The most EVER for a sitting President!" [Biden had won 74.5 million votes and Trump had won 70.4 million votes]."

"I will not rest until the American People have the honest vote count they deserve and that Democracy demands."

U.S.President Donald Trump

President Donald Trump has cast doubt on whether he will commit to a peaceful transfer of power.

Mr. Biden has gone into action, first things first; attending to the disastrous pandemic that has stricken over ten million Americans and taken the lives of a quarter million U.S. citizens in its sweep through the continent, striking the United States ferociously. A fact that the sitting administration should but would not admit to having had some hand in producing primarily through the off-hand attitude of its president who constantly and deliberately downplayed the nature of the threat that SARS-CoV-2 represented.

 

Jeering at the namby-panby individuals who followed science and wore masks and diligently social distanced, he did otherwise, setting an example for his avid followers, an example that bit back when he contracted the disease himself and with the considerable assistance of therapies not available to ordinary citizens, surmounted the disease, while members of his administration began succumbing to COVID-19 like dominoes falling in order, struck down in their turn. 

Millions of Americans are now unemployed as a result of the turmoil in the economy in overturning normal business, production and economies as they have been worldwide. Mr. Trump made no secret of the fact that he focused primarily on returning the economy back to a firm footing to restore losses in trade, the stock market, the country's employment figures. It was only the elderly that were really under threat, he shrugged, characterizing them as expendable in the larger interests at stake for the U.S. economy to get back to production and work and profitability.

The latest close Trump associate testing positive for COVID was Housing Secretary Ben Carson, following hard on the revelation that White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows tested positive. Mr. Biden spoke of his team focus on rapid testing to be widely available and a corps of contact-tracers tracking and curbing the spread of the pathogen, prioritizing vulnerable populations such as the health-impaired and the elderly. Approved vaccines would be "distributed as quickly as possible to as many Americans as possible, free of charge".

Credit: Eva Marie Uzcategui/Bloomberg via Getty

Compelling scenarios allied with today's surprise revelation from Pfizer that they and their German collaborator BioNTech had succeeded in developing a promising vaccine -- that ongoing Third Stage human trials have proven 90 percent successful in a double-blind trial involving 44,000 volunteers. The vaccine producers are prepared to ask the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for immediate assent for use of the vaccine which they are prepared to produce 50 million doses of by the end of 2020, increasing to well over a billion doses next year.