Joe Biden’s best chance to shake up the race

To rewatch the two debates of the presidential campaign in 2020—an undertaking no kind person would recommend—is to encounter, amid the insults, two rather poignant moments. In each debate Donald Trump, then president, predicted that vaccines against covid-19 would be available by the end of 2020. Each time, moderators confronted him with his own advisers’ doubts, while his rival, Joe Biden, called him a fantasist if not a liar. “There’s no prospect that there’s going to be a vaccine available for the majority of the American people before the middle of next year,” Mr Biden scoffed in the second debate, on October 22nd.