Christopher Swain is planning to go where no man has dared to go in a long time.

No, not the moon: The sludgy, toxic, once gonorrhea-infested waters of Brooklyn's Gowanus Canal.

Swain is prepared to put his body on the line today as part of the stunt, which he's performing on Earth Day to raise awareness about pollution. Though he is aware that the infamously disgusting canal is "spiked with a whole witches' brew of contaminants," including heavy metals, mercury, coal tar, and a heady mix of "dead bodies, bodily fluids, guns, and disease-causing microbes," CBS reports, Swain says the risks are worth it.

"It may be crazy to swim in the canal," Swain told CityLab. "But what's crazier is that the Gowanus Canal is so messed up."

When it comes to swimming bodies of water, Swain is no novice — he swam the entire length of both the Columbia River (1,243 miles) and the Hudson River (315 miles) for various awareness projects — but for the Gowanus' comparatively short 1.8-mile journey he'll wear tons of protective gear, including a sealed drysuit, gloves, goggles, and a cap. He also will take pains to make sure his head doesn't go underwater, and will employ a modified breaststroke to prevent any of the toxic water from entering his lungs (shudder).

Godspeed, Christopher. May you return without growing gills. Samantha Rollins

President Trump made the case Thursday that when it comes to COVID-19, "if we didn't do any testing, we would have very few cases." Trump wasn't actually saying America's 1.4 million COVID-19 cases wouldn't exist, but he appeared to be arguing that knowing about the cases makes his administration look bad. Jokes were made.

But while many comedians repeat Trump's more questionable statements in Trump voices they have perfected, Sarah Cooper just lets Trump do the talking himself while she pantomimes with props — in this case, a whiteboard and a marker (that she casually sniffs at one point).

Cooper started filming herself lip-synching Trump's comments for TikTok after he suggested some unorthodox COVID-19 treatments in April. "The thing of trying to put light into your body and inject household cleaner into your veins — it was so visual to me, and I thought, 'I have to make this,'" she told The Guardian on Thursday. The video went viral.

Cooper told The Guardian she's "not the normal demographic for TikTok, which is full of 11-year-olds — many of whom are sad that I am on it," but her newfound hobby has been therapeutic. "I feel like we've been gaslighted for years, being told it is totally normal for a president to say things like this," she said. "It is a very validating thing to see something remind you that, no, this is actually ridiculous and we can all agree on that." Peter Weber

Those who believe Tara Reade's allegations against former Vice President Joe Biden should maybe not vote for him, according to Biden.

Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, in an interview on MSNBC again addressed Reade's allegation that he sexually assaulted her in 1993 while she worked for him in the Senate. Asked what he would say to women who intended to vote for him in the 2020 presidential election yet are given "serious pause" because they believe Reade's claims, Biden recommended they "vote their heart" and potentially not back him.

"If they believe Tara Reade, they probably shouldn't vote for me," he said. "I wouldn't vote for me if I believed Tara Reade."

Biden in the interview also once again denied Reade's allegation and told MSNBC that "to be honest with you, I don't" remember her.

"The truth of the case is nothing like this ever, ever happened," Biden said. "...I give you my word. It never, ever happened."

Reade recently spoke out in an interview with Megyn Kelly in which she called for Biden to drop out of the presidential race, telling him, "You and I were there, Joe Biden. Please step forward and be held accountable." Brendan Morrow

"There are currently no known vaccines for COVID-19 but fighting over those that might be produced has begun," VOA News reports. French drugmaker Sanofi was widely criticized Thursday after its CEO suggested to Bloomberg News that the U.S. would get first crack at its COVID-19 vaccine — one of about 100 under development worldwide — "because it's invested in taking the risk." French President Emmanuel Macron said a vaccine shouldn't be subject to market forces.

The World Health Organization's governing body, the World Health Assembly, is scheduled to vote next week on a resolution calling for "the universal, timely, and equitable access to and fair distribution of all quality, safe, efficacious, and affordable essential health technologies and products," Politico reports. That means, essentially, that any vaccine developed in the coming months would have no effective patent, allowing national governments to produce and distribute it without a license.

A group of 140 current and former leaders — including South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan, and former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown — signed an open letter Wednesday pushing the World Health Assembly to "rally behind a people's vaccine against this disease." The world can't "leave this massive and moral task to market forces," the signatories write, and wealthy countries need to understand that "our world will only be safer once everyone can benefit from the science and access a vaccine" in "all countries, free of charge."

Hedge funds and private equity firms, which bet on winners in the market, are already leery of putting their money into COVID-19 vaccines, despite a "huge" potential market, The Wall Street Journal reports. "By some measures, Chinese companies and a group at Oxford University are in the lead. Some companies say they will distribute a vaccine they develop at cost, potentially reducing profits for others."

"Pandemics can't be handled domestically because they are global in nature," Ryan Heath writes at Politico. "Delivering $8 trillion for domestic stimulus but only $8 billion for vaccine distribution is a defining failure for global solidarity." Peter Weber

"Right now our country is in the middle of a fierce debate about listening to medical experts or diving like a drunken frat boy into the gullet of a crocodile," Stephen Colbert said on Thursday's Late Show. While President Trump "keeps trying to lure us out of safety, health experts are warning of dire consequences if we do." The latest is federal vaccine expert Dr. Rick Bright, whose testimony before Congress "was not reassuring," he said. "He was really driving home the 'darkest winter' point, as was his lawyer, Jon Snow."

"With the news focused on today's disturbing testimony, it was only a matter of time before Trump tried to outshine Dr. Bright," Colbert said, running through some of his various comments and tweets.

Trump's "cookies were in a real crisp today as a new, new whistleblower, Dr. Rick Bright, harshly criticized the White House response to COVID-19," Jimmy Kimmel recapped. "This was a scary hearing today. Dr. Bright warned us that the window was closing to address the pandemic," and "if we don't get our act together, the United States could be headed for 'the darkest winter in modern history.' The good news is it sounds like he's saying we might make it to winter."

Meanwhile, Trump has "been pressuring the CDC to fudge the virus casualty numbers to get them lower," even as "the disease gets scarier by the day," Kimmel said. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania just found that the virus can hang in the air for at least 8 minutes after you speak loudly, "but a lot of people either don't believe this or just don't care. In Wisconsin, the state Supreme Court overturned the governor's state-at-home order, and guess what happened immediately?" Trump called the crowded Wisconsin bars a big win, then headed off to a PPE factory in Pennsylvania, sans mask. "But there's a good reason why he won't wear a mask," Kimmel said: "Wearing a mask is a sign of respect and consideration for others."

"Bright had a damning and truly harrowing assessment of where we are as a nation on everything from vaccines to testing," Late Night's Seth Meyers said. "The frustrating thing about listening to Dr. Bright's testimony is that everything he's talking about is possible, as we've seen from other countries." Watch below. Peter Weber

President Trump is famously "obsessed with metrics and numerical indications of success," and in the COVID-19 pandemic, he "has few good numbers to point to," Ryan Lizza and Daniel Lippman write at Politico. The U.S. ranks 26th in per capita coronavirus testing but is easily No. 1 in confirmed cases, at 1.4 million. Unemployment is at Great Depression levels, especially in the industrial Midwest that provided Trump's 2016 margin of electoral victory. The stock market is gyrating wildly.

"Now, in a White House once obsessed with statistical boasts, those close to the president are loath to set any milestones defining a positive outcome," Lizza and Lippman report. "By far the most sensitive subject is the awful reality of the growing death count," currently at 86,000, according to Johns Hopkins University. "I'm not going to play that game," one White House official said. "I think all these body count things are somewhat gross...." Trump has compared this to a war, but wars have consequences, Politico notes:

When American war deaths in Vietnam spiked in 1967 and early 1968, Lyndon B. Johnson announced that he wouldn't seek a second term. When the Iraq War spun out of control in George W. Bush's second term, his presidency collapsed. Similarly, there is now a grim conversation quietly happening in Republican circles about the COVID-19 death count, with some saying that if there are 250,000 people dead by Election Day, it will be hard for Trump to win reelection. [Politico]

Some advisers are more optimistic, but "the fear that Trump can't survive a referendum on his handling of the crisis has allies pushing a series of change-the-subject strategies," Politico reports: Question the death count, inflame partisan divides, blame China. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) told Politico that China-bashing won't trump an effective strategy to quash the coronavirus, but extreme social distancing and other steps the U.S. has taken saved hundreds of thousands of lives. "The closer you can have it to 120 [thousand deaths], I think you can say you limited the casualties in this war," he added.

If "30,000 Benghazis," as some critics calculated, doesn't sound like winning, Dr. Zeke Emanuel, a University of Pennsylvania health policy expert and Joe Biden adviser, says it's also optimistic. "If you take out New York, the number of cases are still actually going up, and this reopening isn't helping things," he lamented. "We are going to be at 200,000 deaths. People are still dropping like flies." Peter Weber

"For months now, everyone has been asking: When will things just get back to normal?" Trevor Noah said on Thursday's Daily Show. "Well, President Trump hasn't been great at doing the things that could help make that happen — you know, like expanding testing," he said, "but there is one part of getting back to normal that Trump is definitely an expert in, and that's conspiracy theories." For anyone missing the wondrous days when news cycles were routinely hijacked by "some far-out conspiracy theory that Trump had dreamed up about his enemies," Noah said, "well, good news, those happy days are here again with a brand-new conspiracy Trump and Fox News are calling 'ObamaGate.'"

"Fox News hasn't been this excited since the last time Colin Kaepernick bent down to tie his shoes, but here's the basic idea of what this is about," Noah said: After the 2016 election, the intelligence community discovered that Michael Flynn, Trump's national security adviser, "was having secret conversations with foreign powers. And now, you might be wondering why those shady conversations were happening in the first place, but that's not important! Keep up! The important part is that they investigated it, and that's what has everyone in Trumpworld so excited right now, because there's new documents that shed light on what happened during that investigation."

What do they show? Well, "basically, what the Obama administration did was a standard government procedure that happens thousands of times a year," Noah said. "But that isn't stopping Donald Trump from proposing his favorite solution to any problem: Lock them up." Trump defenders also claim someone illegally leaked Flynn's name and argue Flynn did nothing materially wrong, but "you know what? The full conspiracy theory's actually pretty complicated. I mean, it's too much for my little brain. But luckily, our very own Desi Lydic volunteered to watch Fox News nonstop so that she could help break this ObamaGate scandal down." Watch her "FOXplain" the "scandal" below. Peter Weber