By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

It’s difficult for me to avoid getting too ramped up over news that a vaccine that could eradicate the COVID-19 virus is on its way to a pharmacy near me.

Pfizer has announced a potential vaccine with a 95 percent cure rate; Moderna has a similar vaccine in the works; Astrazenica does, too. Big pharma, which gets whipped and flogged all the time, is answering the call.

It’s all part of the Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed. It’s fashionable these days to bash the daylights out of Donald Trump … who deserves every bit of the thrashing he is getting for a whole host of reasons.

Operation Warp Speed, the code name for the administration’s effort to find a cure for the disease, has been a mixed bag to be sure. The pharmaceutical companies haven’t gotten the federal help that was promised, but they appear to be delivering trial versions of vaccines that well could be the proverbial “light at the end of the tunnel.”

I am not yet ready to whoop and holler, proclaiming it to be the news for which an entire nation has waited, but it does look promising.

Given all the bad news we’re getting — Trump’s refusal to concede his loss to President-elect Biden and the undermining of our democratic process, not to mention the death and misery caused by the pandemic — I will cling to the hope that we might awaken soon from this national nightmare.