No vaccine for baloney

Since January, President Trump has alternately minimized the risks of the coronavirus, oversold his administration’s response and exaggerated possible treatments and vaccines, all while lashing out against experts who dare buck the line of the moment.

Friday was par for the course, with a Rose Garden announcement of “Operation Warp Speed” — uniting the Departments of Health and Human Services and Defense to produce a vaccine as early as year’s end. Good luck, good scientists, but beware the hypeman’s promises.

This press conference came, surely coincidentally, the day after Dr. Rick Bright, HHS’s whistleblowing former lead vaccine researcher, testified before Congress. Bright, who says he was reassigned because of his refusal to get on board Trump’s hydroxychloroquine bandwagon, also disclosed that the administration dismissed warnings in January and February about a N95 respiratormask shortage. And said that officials lost critical time because the U.S. didn’t pressure China enough to get virus samples that could’ve aided the American response. He warned of a “dark winter” given a lack of a national strategy to counter a coronavirus resurgence.

After Bright’s testimony, the White House suddenly produced a 2018 pandemic “preparedness report” and boasted of a 2019 pandemic “exercise.” Supposedly, these “superseded” the Obama White House’s comprehensive 69-page pandemic playbook, which Mitch McConnell claimed didn’t exist, before he admitted he got that wrong.

If 90,000 deaths and counting are the result of a “successful” implementation of a solid pandemic preparedness strategy the administration had all along, we’d hate to see what failure looks like.