Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

The European Commission has signed a deal for more than 40mn doses of a vaccine against bird flu for 15 countries across the continent, as member states grapple with a rise in cases of the respiratory virus.

The EU’s executive arm announced the contract on Tuesday, procuring up to 665,000 vaccine doses — which can be adapted to any bird flu strain — from Australia-based manufacturer CSL Seqirus. The deal includes a provision for a further 40mn vaccines over the next four years.

The deal comes as governments monitor an increase in bird flu cases in animals after 10 US states reported outbreaks in cattle in recent months, with three cases in humans following exposure to dairy cows.

Last week, the World Health Organization reported that a farmworker in Mexico had died after contracting the H5N2 variant, a strain that had previously not been detected in humans but has been reported in Mexican poultry. There have been no recorded cases of human-to-human transmission of the virus.

The outbreaks have increased concerns over the safety of dairy and meat products. Strains of the virus have been detected in US milk, although pasteurisation kills the pathogen. The tissue of one dairy cow was also reported to be infected but meat from the animal did not enter food supply chains, the US agriculture department said last month.

Stella Kyriakides, European commissioner for health and food safety, said: “While the threat of avian influenza to the general population remains low, we need to protect people at higher risk, such as poultry and farm workers or certain veterinarians.”

Monitoring by the EU reference laboratory for avian influenza shows there have been 522 outbreaks of bird flu detected in wild and captive birds in 27 countries since the start of the year.

According to the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, the risk of transmission from animals to humans is considered low in Europe. A commission spokesperson said on Tuesday there were “no reported active cases” in EU citizens.

The doses will go to people most exposed to the virus, including farm workers and veterinarians, with the first shipment heading to Finland. Outbreaks of bird flu in the Nordic country’s mink farms last year raised concerns of transmission to humans.

“This agreement will help in Europe’s resolve to maintain robust preparedness and rapid response capabilities for this potential threat,” said Raja Rajaram, head of global medical strategy at CSL Seqirus.

The jabs are being made in CSL Seqirus factories in the Netherlands and England using egg-based manufacturing, a traditional method for developing vaccines.

The US has a stockpile of flu vaccines from GSK, Sanofi and CSL Seqirus that can provide immunity against bird flu. It is considering funding a late-stage trial of Moderna’s mRNA-based avian flu vaccine, which could be scaled up more quickly.

UK drugmaker GSK and German biotech CureVac are also jointly developing an mRNA-based avian flu vaccine in early trials.

The European Commission did not immediately respond when asked if it was pursuing a similar deal.

Today 538 published our official forecast for the 2024 presidential election. The model builds on our general election polling averages by asking not just what our best guess is about who is leading the presidential race today, but what range of outcomes are possible for the actual election in November. At least once per day, we’ll rerun our simulations of the election with the latest data, so bookmark our interactive and check back often.

At launch, our forecast shows President Joe Biden locked in a practically tied race with former President Donald Trump, both in the Electoral College and national popular vote. Specifically, our model reckons Biden has a 53-in-100 chance of winning the election, meaning he wins in slightly more than half of our model’s simulations of how the election could unfold. However, Trump still has a 47-in-100 chance, so this election could still very much go either way. The range of realistic* Electoral College outcomes generated by our forecasting model stretches from 132 to 445 electoral votes for Biden — a testament to how much things could change by November (and how off the polls could be).

Our model is brand new this year, with tons of bells and whistles and modern statistical tools that you can read all about in our methodology post. Here, I’ll give you the non-wonky version of how the forecast works, offer a few tips on how to read it and explain why we think forecasts are valuable in the first place.

How we forecast

To forecast the election, we rely primarily on polls asking voters whom they support. However, our forecast also incorporates various economic and political indicators that aren’t related to polling but can be used to make rough predictions for the election. For example, we have calculated an index of economic growth and optimism on every day since 1944, gathered historical approval ratings for every president since Franklin D. Roosevelt and derived a formula for predicting state election outcomes using these and other local factors. We also tested whether incumbent presidents do better when they run for reelection (they do) and whether all of these factors are less predictive of voters’ choices when political polarization is high (they are).

Right now, Trump leads Biden in most polls of the swing states that will decide the election, but the “fundamentals” favor Biden. The combined polls-plus-fundamentals forecast splits the difference between these two viewpoints and arrives at an essentially deadlocked race. Here’s what it looks like on the state level:

At this point in the race, our margin of error for these state forecasts is huge. There are two reasons for this: First, it is early. As pollsters are bound to remind you many times between now and November, polls are snapshots of public opinion as it stands today, not predictions of vote share in the eventual election. To the extent they are predictions at all, they predict how people would vote if an election were held today — which, of course, it will not be.

In part, this oft-repeated caveat is a convenient way for pollsters to avoid catching flak for inaccurate numbers closer to the election. But there is an important truth to it: If a voter has not yet cast their ballot, there is the possibility they may change their mind. We also don’t know exactly who is going to turn out in this election yet. All this means polls earlier in the election cycle are worse at approximating the final margin.

This is where forecasting models really become useful. Above everything else, 538 makes forecasts to quantify the uncertainty inherent in the election. Our study of historical presidential election polls finds that the margin between the two candidates shifts by an average of 9 percentage points between June and November. In practical terms, that means today’s polls have a true margin of error of close to 20 points. And while recent elections have not had as much volatility, we can’t assume 2024 will be the same way; it’s possible that this year will be closer to the historical norm.

The second major source of error is the chance that polls systematically underestimate one of the candidates, as happened in the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections. We estimate that, even on Election Day, state-level polling averages of presidential general elections have an expected error of 4 points on the margin — meaning if the candidates are tied in the polling average, then on average we’d expect one to win by 4, and in rare cases they could win by 8!

Why forecast, anyway?

Having such wide margins of error is not our way of absolving ourselves of responsibility if the election result is surprising. It’s our way of giving you, the reader, a more informed understanding of the range of potential election outcomes than you’d get from a single poll (or even a polling average).

Over the last decade, it has become common to view election forecasting — and even polling — as purely making predictions of “what will happen” in the election. But we think forecasting models serve a greater journalistic purpose than a focus on prediction gives them credit for. For us here at 538, forecasting is an exercise in quantifying the reliability of various indicators of public opinion. Yes, that involves making predictions, but the real value of our work is the statistical analysis of the reliability of the numbers you are bound to see plastered all over print news media, social media and television over the next five months.

We think this is a different goal from making predictions for prediction’s sake, or making a model that can “call” every state correctly. If you want someone to give you a prediction of who will win the election with absolute certainty, then look elsewhere. (And buyer beware.)

Instead, we think we offer a unique product that can help you be smarter about the way you think about the range of outcomes for the election. As the stakes of our politics increase, a carefully calibrated sense of what could realistically happen in November — in our case, from a forecast that properly distinguishes between normal and tail risk — becomes increasingly valuable.

How to read the forecast

On that note, I’ll end with a few tips on how to read our forecast responsibly:

Watch the distributions. Our model simulates thousands of possible Electoral College outcomes based on the historical predictive error of the indicators we rely on. The top of our forecast page has a histogram of a random subset of these simulations, showing you which outcomes are likelier than others. We hope you get the impression that there is a wide potential range of outcomes, given all the error we’re talking about.

Unlikely does not mean impossible. In 2020, polls performed worse than in any election since 1980. The average state-level poll conducted in the last three weeks of that election overestimated Biden’s vote margin by 4.6 points — about 1.5 times the average 3-point bias for presidential elections since 1972. In a backtest of our current model, we would have assigned about a 20 percent chance to Biden winning 306 electoral votes (the number he actually won) or fewer in 2020. We think a similar miss this year would be statistically surprising, but a possibility people should mentally prepare for.

Changes in public opinion take time. We have done our best to make a model that reacts the appropriate amount to new polling data. “Appropriate” here means that the model will be conservative early on or when polls are bouncing generally around the same level, but also that it will be aggressive when polls appear to be moving uniformly across states — especially late in the campaign. However, as a properly Bayesian statistical model, the program that runs our forecast generates some amount of uncertainty about the parameters, resulting in unavoidable random error across our simulations. This means polling averages can change by a few decimal places day to day — and probabilities may jitter by around a point, which cascades down into uncertainty in our model. Don’t sweat these small changes; instead, pay attention to bigger changes in the model over longer stretches of time.

Use all the information you (reasonably) can. Polls are reasonably good predictors of election outcomes. In fact, asking people how they are going to vote is about the best single source of information you can get if your goal is to figure out how people might vote. But polls are not the only source of information available to us. 538’s forecast incorporates demographics, polls and the “fundamentals” all the way up to Election Day; our research has found this decreases the chance for uniform bias in our forecast.

Our forecast assumes normal election rules still apply. This is an important disclaimer about what our model is intended to do and what it is not. Because our model is trained on historical polling and election results, it is not intended to account for violations of normal political and election rules. We assume, for example, that if a voter legally casts a ballot, it will be counted accurately and fairly; that the electors a state elects to vote for a certain candidate in the Electoral College get to do so; that their votes are ultimately recognized by Congress; and that, as an extreme example, the election is administered on time, where officials say it will be administered and generally that people who show up to vote will be able to.

That is not to say that we dismiss the possibility of rule-breaking. From an editorial perspective, we stand ready to cover any attempts to undermine a free and fair election. But as a quantitative matter, our forecast is intended to explain variance in election outcomes based on the polls and other indicators, to serve as a supplement to polling averages and to put other political journalism in its proper context.

Footnotes

*Within the 95 percent confidence interval.

The surveillance footage shows an unremarkable suburban scene: a dark SUV pulls into the parking lot of an upscale grocer. A woman wearing sunglasses steps out. She retrieves a purple gift bag from the back seat, glances over her shoulder, and then drops it into a rubbish bin on her way into the store.

A jury in Wilmington, Delaware was told last week that the woman was Hallie Biden, the former daughter-in-law of the current US president. Inside the bag was a pistol belonging to Biden’s troubled son, Hunter, who, it transpires, was having an affair with Hallie — his late brother’s widow. In the course of that relationship Hunter also turned the mother of two on to crack cocaine.

The week-long criminal trial, in which jurors began their deliberations on Monday, has focused on Hunter Biden, and whether he lied on a federal background check about his own drug addiction when he bought that pistol in October 2018 at a local store called StarQuest Shooters & Survival Supply.

But the trial has also provided something else: a raw — at times excruciating — glimpse into the turmoil of the Biden family after the president’s oldest son and presumed political heir, Beau, died in 2015 from brain cancer.

Whether it has any political implication for Biden as he fights for re-election is unclear. A survey by Emerson College Polling earlier this month found 64 per cent of voters said the trial would not affect how they will vote.

Republicans have for years tried, and mostly failed, to pin the sins of Hunter on his father — be it his drug abuse, failure to support a child fathered out of wedlock, or his business dealings. Their efforts have intensified as former president Donald Trump’s campaign has become burdened by his own legal woes.

Unsavoury as the trial’s revelations have been, though, some believe it might also remind voters of Biden’s virtues as a father, particularly at a time when so many American families are dealing with drug addiction.

That is the view of Chris Whipple, who chronicled the family in his book The Fight Of His Life: Inside Joe Biden’s White House. “For, me, the trial confirms what we’ve always known about Joe Biden,” Whipple said. “It’s just hard to overstate how strong the bond is between him and Hunter. How close they are.”

Even if his political career demanded it, Whipple is convinced the president would never cast Hunter aside. “Family is everything to Biden,” he observed.

As Hunter himself told the New Yorker in 2019, he was a kind of security blanket for his father on the campaign trail. “I can say things to him that nobody else can,” he explained.

Their bond was forged in Kennedy-esque tragedy that is both family lore and political biography. Biden’s young wife and daughter were killed in a car accident a week before Christmas in 1972. Just 29, the newly-minted senator was sworn into office days later at the hospital bedside of his boys, Beau and Hunter, who survived the accident.

As he has often recounted at campaign events, Biden would ride the train home from Washington, DC each evening to kiss his boys goodnight. Beau’s untimely death has added another chapter to the story. As he ran for the presidency in 2020, Biden cast his fallen son as his inspiration and guiding spirit.

Behind the scenes, though, the grief-stricken family was cratering, as Hallie recounted from the witness stand on Thursday. Within months of Beau’s death, she and her brother-in-law began a “complicated” romance. Hunter would disappear for weeks on end — often bingeing on drugs. The first time she found his stash of crack at her house she had to consult Google, Hallie said, because she did not know what it was. Soon she was smoking it, too. She became paranoid that he was seeing other women.

“It was a terrible experience I went through,” Hallie, now sober and recently remarried, told the court. “I’m embarrassed and ashamed and I regret that period of my life.”

Hunter did not testify but prosecutors played extended clips from the audiobook of his 2021 memoir, Beautiful Things, last week. He was forced to listen as his own voice filled the courtroom, narrating his descent into crack addiction.

“I’ve bought crack cocaine on the streets of Washington, DC, and cooked up my own inside a hotel bungalow in Los Angeles. I’ve been so desperate for a drink that I couldn’t make the one-block walk between a liquor store and my apartment without uncapping the bottle to take a swig,” he intoned in one passage.

Have your say

Joe Biden vs Donald Trump: tell us how the 2024 US election will affect you

While Hunter’s flaws have been extensively recounted — be it arranging to meet with dealers or standing up his daughter on a visit to New York —there have also been occasional flashes of his charm, as a former stripper he briefly dated testified. “He was just so charming and so nice,” she recalled. “I felt myself having feelings for him.”

As is their habit — and perhaps, to their detriment — the Bidens have not abandoned Hunter. If anything, they have pulled him closer. In the run-up to the trial, he has been a regular presence at the White House, even attending state dinners.

Meanwhile, his second wife, Melissa, has been supported in court by a rotating cast of family and friends, including first lady Jill Biden and the president’s sister, Valerie. Other members of the Biden orbit present in court include Kevin Morris, an entertainment lawyer and friend of Hunter, Fran Person, the president’s former personal aide, and philanthropist Bobby Sager.

President Biden, who last week said he would not pardon his son if he is convicted, has not attended. Still, he has been a spectral presence: His smiling portrait hangs in the lobby of Wilmington’s federal courthouse.

On the eve of the trial, he issued a statement that suggested even the commander-in-chief was not exempt from the parental anguish induced by a wayward child. “I am the president, but I am also a dad,” Biden said. “Jill and I love our son, and we are so proud of the man he is today.”