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Nope, they weren't

To quote their own R&D lead: "Pfizer's head of vaccine and research and development, Kathrin Jansen, had said on November 8 that they "were never part of the Warp Speed". They did receive a large initial order, but they didn't partake of Warp Speed for R&D. They did, however, get funding from European governments.

Moderna was the only completely successful recipient of Warp Speed funding. AstraZeneca was the other one, but their offering had issues with blood clotting.

Demonizing and downplaying and sowing doubt on the credibility of public health did incredible damage. One of the reasons the US suffered as badly as it did is because the Trump admin treated it like a PR attack on Trump, instead of like a legitimate crisis, which it was.

Trump's failure is commonly assumed to have killed almost half-million people. And that's just Trump's response to COVID, turning vaccine hesitancy into a mainstream right-wing shibboleth is going to be a gift that keeps giving.

Warp speed also didn't really help that much. Of the recipients, only Moderna's was successful, and Pfizer wasn't part of the program. And that's before we get into insider trading allegations and how it didn't coordinate with anyone internationally.

A lot of people used pandemic relief funds to invest, notably in real estate. As the market returns to reality, those people are finding they're massively overextended.

I know, but the risk of injury is so high, and the history of medical snake-oil salesmen exploiting the desperate is long and bloody.

This is like letting people build shanty-towns to deal with the housing shortage: it helps in the short-term, but the chance or harm is huge and it takes energy away from dealing with the real issue.

Free speech absolutism. Sure.

The pandemic kind of wallpapered over it, but at the time we were looking down the tubes at a recession and a trade war, and Trump had by that point gotten rid of most of the competent cabinet that kept him in check.

If a 2008 crisis hit, it would have been bad.

People tend to forget how badly he fucked up the pandemic response. Imagine his cronies instead of Bush and Obama's people in '08. We'd be in a depression by now.

Ah, Usenet syndrome.

You'd said the problem was voters. That's an entirely wrong way to look at politics.

You can thank Mike Harris for that one.

Actually, if there's something that's broken in Ontario, you can almost always draw a line back to Harris about it. Drug epidemic? Harris' closing of mental health facilities. Housing? Harris downloading public housing onto cities. Environmental assessment wait times? Harris gutting the MOE. Transport? Harris' downloading again. Poor municipal road repair? You guessed it, Harris dumping provincial roads and services onto the cities then cutting their budgets.

It's tempting to blame Ford for stuff--and I'm sure the booze-in-C-stores will be a gift that keeps giving, both in terms of social costs and the FOUR BILLION DOLLARS it will cut from government revenues--but he's not done one-tenth the damage Harris did.

Pfft, of course not.

You're asking if the government that couldn't be asked to build housing while asking the feds for millions of immigrants to prop up the economy is planning when there's money involved? Please, this is the same guy who:

• Built an Ontario Science Centre subway line, then closed the Science Centre.
• Cancelled ServiceOntario franchises, then had to bribe Staples to take it because Staples didn't think it was profitable enough

This is palm-greasing to the small-business douchebags that vote PC, and a sop to large donors that wanted this to buttress weakening foodservice sales. It's about doin' bidness.

"Former Langley MP" really buries the lede.

Maybe "protofascist grifter" would be more accurate?

Trudeau's moment, really, was when he didn't seem to think it was his job to do anything about housing or inflation.

I don't think you can pin the LPC's fall on that, but just coincidentally that's when the bottom fell out of their numbers and they scrambled off to a retreat to try and figure out how to get people to like them. Unfortunately, all of the solutions would require them to abandon neoliberalism.

I think they're really hoping for the kind of moment that got Keir Starmer in, or that saved Macron's bacon. Centrist and centre-left parties really, really want it to be the late 90s again, when you could lower taxes, be entertained by billionaires, play the sax on stage, fingerbang an intern and still be thought of as cool and progressive because you inhaled pot smoke one time.