A Vaccine is not the October Surprise the Trump Administration is looking for

Even if the Trump Administration cuts corners and somehow rushes a COVID vaccine to market by October, I doubt it will help him in the election. When a brand new vaccine comes out, we won't magically have ability to immediately vaccine 330 million people in the U.S. We don't have any facilities to mass produce the vaccine because the vaccine hasn't been invented yet and we don't know what that entails. So first, we would have to build the facilities to mass produce a vaccine. Even with the facilities we already have for the flu vaccine, each dose takes a few weeks to produce because they have to be grown in a live chicken egg.

So first we would have to do a crash program to immediately build a ton of vaccine production facilities, and then as each of those facilities goes online, we would need to wait for however long it takes to produce the vaccine before those vaccines doses even reach the public. The first people might get inoculated in only a few weeks after the factories are built (however long that takes). But the vast majority of the country will know a cure is out there but will be waiting for months for enough supply to be produced for them to innoculated. Either way, almost all voters will have an extremely frustrating period when they know that normal life is possible but it still isn't for them.

If the Trump Administration unveils a miracle cure on the first of October, there still wouldn't be enough time to get through that frustrating period before November 3. Hell, if they announced a cure today and immediately started that crash building program for COVID vaccine factories, I don't think most voters would get the vaccine before election day.