Give some credit to former president

President Joe Biden needs to be a little more magnanimous. Granted, that could be politically challenging given that the person he is short-shrifting is former President Donald Trump, who was charitable to no one. But the nation is on the cusp of something truly historic. Daily Covid-19 vaccinations are about 2.5 million and rising. New cases, hospitalisations and deaths have fallen. The end of a national nightmare that has claimed nearly 543,000 American lives might be in sight.

It will be a definingmoment for Biden when and if the crisis ends. And the truth will be that he didn’t do it alone. Biden and his team moved with remarkable speed in days to secure hundreds of millions of doses and get them disseminated to ever larger numbers of people. None of that would have been possible if the vaccines didn’t already exist. The lightning speed at which they were created was on Trump’s watch. From start to finish, the first Covid-19 vaccine was produced in eight months.

For all his anti-science divisiveness, Trump proved keen on throwing large sums ofmoney at a possible solution. And it worked. None of this excuses his considerable failures in responding to the pandemic. But the truth is that when this virus finally abates because of vaccinations, it will be to the credit of two presidents. Trump’s selfaggrandising character would never allow him to share credit with anyone. But Biden would be the bigger man for doing so.