Good afternoon, this is Word Powered with the Daily Beast. It's Tuesday, October 20th, and these are the top stories the Chi Chi team is watching right now. And so the experiments begin. A British pharma company is set to intentionally infect healthy young volunteers with COVID-19 in order to quicken the process of developing a vaccine.
The experiment will be one of the first so-called human challenge trials for coronavirus inoculation, and the British government contracted the company for the job. These sort of tests typically produce results quicker than conventional vaccine field trials. A program manager for vaccines at the Medical Research Council, a branch of UK Research and Innovation, said that, quote, human challenge studies have been ongoing for many years now. They are a useful way in which we can gain an awful lot of information in a relatively short space of time.
Volunteers will be paid the U.S. equivalent of $5,000 and will be required to remain under observation at the clinical facility until they are no longer infectious and test negative for the presence of live coronavirus. One top-level Biden donor said the campaign has pre-funded legal costs, or set aside cash for the possibility that a fleet of lawyers might be needed after the election. The rationale is due, in part, to lingering anxieties that President Trump will make good on his public implications, that he may refuse to accept election results if he loses.
As chaotic as that would be for American voters, it would also lead into a legal battle that could trigger court fights in multiple states and appellate courts. But the Biden campaign is prepared. According to his campaign manager, Joe Biden has been able to raise a record $432 million in cash on hand in the final full month before the election. And apparently there is no end in sight for fundraising.
According to fundraisers who spoke to the Daily Beast, the campaign is still leaning hard on his donor network, explicitly pointing ahead to his potential need to fund legal battles in multiple states following the election. Legal fights over ballot access have already begun in states around the country. Michael Gwynn, a spokesperson for the Biden campaign, says that it, quote, has assembled the biggest voter protection program in history to ensure the election runs smoothly and to combat any attempts by Donald Trump to create fear and confusion with the voting system or interfere with the Democratic process. The Democratic nominee's campaign says it has worked behind closed doors for much of the general election to help bulletproof what they can control of the voting and post-voting process of November 3rd.
More than 50 former high-ranking U.S. intelligence officers have signed a letter saying the recent release of emails allegedly belonging to Joe Biden's son, Hunter, quote, has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation. The emails were published by the New York Post last week after the paper was given an alleged copy of Hunter Biden's laptop hard drive by President Trump's personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani. Several Post reporters refused to put their name on the reports because they were concerned about the authenticity of the material.
While the letter's signatories presented no new evidence, they said their national security experience had made them, quote, deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in the case. The letter also cited several elements of the story that suggested the Kremlin had a hand in it. Signatories emphasized that they did not know if the emails were genuine, but noted in the letter that there were, quote, a number of factors that made them suspicious of Russian involvement. They added that the move would not be too left field for Russian objectives, considering their motives to create American political chaos.
In a massive antitrust lawsuit, Google has been accused of using its market power to diminish internet rivals. The suit comes from the Department of Justice and signals the formal start of what appears to be a lengthy legal war between Washington and Silicon Valley. The lawsuit alleges that Google broke the law into how it treated competition in its search and advertising businesses, trying to find ways to disadvantage them in order to keep its own search engine dominant and use that market power to sell more ads. The DOJ and Federal Trade Commission also have antitrust investigations into Amazon, Apple, and Facebook.
In Europe, competition regulators have slapped Google with $9 billion in fines and forced major operational changes on the business. Out of the hundreds of people who were arrested during the protests following the death of George Floyd, very few of them were associated with Antifa. The ideology of left-wing Antifa, or anti-fascism, has become the Trump administration's scariest boogeyman. After searching through thousands of pages of court documents related to over 300 protests that involved federal criminal charges for offenses like property destruction or disorderly conduct, the Associated Press found that most were not highly organized, urban-dwelling leftist President Trump has made them out to be.
In reality, over 40% of arrestees were white, over two-thirds were under 30, and many were from the suburbs, the places the president has vowed to protect from Antifa. The Associated Press found only one passing mention of Antifa in a Boston shooting case when an FBI director told a congressional panel in September that Antifa is more of, quote, an ideology or a movement, not a formal organization. That's all for today. Check back every week, good morning and afternoon for more news you need to know.
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