#The vaccine race at the finish line and other commentary

Reason’s Ronald Bailey reports some good news: “The biotechnology company Moderna just launched the first Phase Three clinical trial of a coronavirus vaccine” that will “test for efficacy and safety” after a Phase One trial that “induced an immune response” in every volunteer. Moderna’s success rests on “novel technology that uses messenger RNA” to mobilize a recipient’s immune system against the virus. “If all goes well, the company could deliver 100 million doses by early fall,” and Pfizer, AstraZeneca and Novavax also plan to begin Phase Three trials soon. Such promising signs are only possible because the Food and Drug Administration temporarily set aside burdensome regulations, perhaps saving “hundreds of thousands of lives.”

From the right: The Media’s ‘Peaceful’ Violence

“Many media outlets have steadfastly described the violent riots” across the country as “mostly peaceful protests” — ignoring, The Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway eyerolls, the “arson, assault, vandalism and wanton destruction” actually occurring. Last weekend, for example, the Associated Press and ABC News depicted Oakland, Calif., protesters “setting a federal courthouse on fire, vandalizing a police station” and ­assaulting police officers as a “peaceful demonstration” that “intensified.” Such media attempts to “downplay or obscure the left-wing violence laying siege to cities across the country” for fear that the truth will “benefit Republican candidates in November” will only hurt “the republic, the citizens of those cities” and journalists’ credibility.

Culture critic: Olivia’s Finest Moment

The late, great Olivia de Havilland “was a lively anti-Communist,” notes Stephen Daisley at Spectator USA, who “worked to expose and counter the influence of Soviet sympathizers” in postwar Hollywood. “Perhaps her finest moment was in teaming up with Ronald Reagan to reveal” that the Hollywood Independent Citizens Committee of the Arts, Sciences and Professions was “a Communist front organization.” The two wrote a resolution declaring “a ‘belief in free enterprise and the democratic system’ while repudiating Communism.” When no one else on the executive board voted in favor, they resigned, and the group disbanded a week later. She was only 30, “which makes her courage in standing up to Communist intimidation all the more extraordinary.” De Havilland was “an eager foe of doctrines that subsume the individual into the state, the group, the race or the nation,” ­unlike “today’s liberals, many of whom lack the basic confidence in their own ideas and institutions required to resist the radical authoritarian left.”

Foreign desk: Media Malpractice on Soleimani

US political and media elites united to “breathlessly warn” that the killing of Iranian Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani had put the United States and Iran on the “brink of war,” recalls Isaac Schorr at National Review. Sen. Elizabeth Warren said it would “increase the likelihood of war,” while an analysis in The Washington Post claimed war was “imminent.” Yet no such war materialized, as “should have been obvious.” Having bought the Obama administration’s narrative that war was the only alternative to its Iran nuclear agreement, these elites assumed the killing would “light the powder keg” after the Trump administration scrapped the deal. Such bias is pure “malpractice.”

Education beat: Online-‘Learning’ Perils

Among the many troubles with remote learning, warns Mark Bauerlein at First Things, is that teachers can’t hope to police what else a student might be doing at the computer — so a child may well instead play a game “created with his impulses in mind. People in Silicon Valley designed games and social-media apps according to the causes of addictive behavior,” as brilliant developers work “to create a very ‘sticky’ screen activity. The teacher has nothing like that to back him up.” To end-run this “behavioral conditioning,” he suggests parents enforce such rules as sticking to print books for assigned reading, making notes by hand for online lectures and “no breaks for video, no browsing until class is over, no social contact while the teacher is talking.” Unfortunately, this will privilege the children of involved parents over those of the uninvolved.

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board