An inoc for the good doc
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the country’s top infectious-diseases expert, rolled up his sleeve Tuesday to receive the Moderna coronavirus vaccine, saying he wanted to reassure Americans it’s safe and to encourage them to get it themselves.
Fauci was inoculated along with Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins and other NIH Clinical Center frontline workers at the NIH facility in Bethesda, Md.
Fauci said his reasons for getting the vaccine were twofold.
“One is that I’m an attending physician here on the staff at the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center, and so I do see patients,” he said.
“But as important, or more important, is as a symbol to the rest of the country that I feel extreme confidence in the safety and the efficacy of this vaccine and I want to encourage everyone who has the opportunity to get vaccinated so that we can have a veil of protection over this country that would end this pandemic.”
After getting the shot in his left
arm, Fauci, who turns 80 on Thursday, gave a thumbs-up sign.
Azar, who got his shot moments before Fauci did, gave a nod to the Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed “for bringing us to this point where now we can see the light at the end of the tunnel from this dark period.”
Both Azar and Fauci wore masks as they were inoculated.
Shortly before being vaccinated, Fauci said, “What we’re seeing now is the culmination of years of research which have led to a phenomenon that has truly been unprecedented. And that is to go from the realization that we’re dealing with a new pathogen, a virus that was described in January of this year, to, less than one year later [having] vaccines that are going into the arms of so many people, including myself.
“So I consider it an honor to be part of this process,” he added.
Azar said the quick development of a safe and effective vaccine was “nothing short of miraculous.”
IT is now an established fact that the numerous naysayers who predicted President Trump could never deliver a vaccine this year were wrong. Thankfully, he did what they insisted couldn’t be done. But the no-can-do crowd now has a second puerile act: a miserly and grudging recognition of the miracle Trump and his team performed. Those expressing pinched gratitude for a fact they can’t deny include the man who has reason to be the most thankful of all Americans.
“I think that the administration deserves some credit getting this off the ground with Operation Warp Speed,” Joe Biden said as he got his Trump vaccine shot.
“Some credit?” Then who deserves the rest of the credit?
Notice, too, that Biden can’t bring himself to say “President Trump.” It’s just the “administration” that deserves “some credit.”
This is stingy stuff. Imagine for a second that Trump had not pushed as hard as he did and instead allowed the vaccine research, development and human trials to follow the usual drawn-out process through the maze of approval checkpoints.
That would mean a delay of possibly four or five years, putting the vaccine’s debut near or after the end of Biden’s term. In the long interval, how many more Americans would have died from the coronavirus? Half a million more? A million, 2 million?
Whatever the additional horrific toll, the worst clearly has been avoided and many, many lives have been saved.
Think also of the economic impacts of going another four or five years without a vaccine. Repeated waves of infections would have been met with more lockdowns and restrictions, slashing or eliminating income to tens of millions of families and driving cities and states closer to bankruptcy. Even Washington’s money-printing presses would have had trouble keeping up.
There’s little doubt how Biden himself would have reacted absent a vaccine. He said during the campaign he would “follow the science” and if that meant national lockdowns and stay-at-home orders, so be it. One of his top advisers suggested a lockdown across the country lasting “four to six weeks” would control the pandemic and allow the economy to reopen.
Right, except remember that the initial lockdowns were going to be for just two weeks and that would be enough to flatten the curve. That was nine months ago.
In fact, the Trump vaccine is a great gift to the nation and the world, and that includes the Biden administration. Its agenda on issues like climate and tax hikes would have been dead on arrival without a way to reopen the country and give people hope that better and safer days are coming.
The vaccine also will allow Biden to pursue something like a normal presidency in that he will no longer be forced to shun most human contact because of his age and health problems. He campaigned primarily from his Delaware basement, but it is inconceivable he could have governed while being isolated in the Oval Office and locked down in the White House.
The vaccine will free him personally, so it shouldn’t be asking too much for Biden to acknowledge Trump’s contribution in a complete and honest way. But apparently it is asking too much.
Nonetheless, getting the vaccine successfully produced and with millions of doses now being distributed and administered, Operation Warp Speed must be counted as Trump’s greatest achievement as president. It is hard to believe any other modern commander in chief would have done it nearly as well, let alone better.
This was a triumph of the first order made possible by the sheer force of his personality. Trump’s relentless pressure on private companies as well as the sprawling bureaucracy turned what many in the left-wing media and even some in the medical community regarded as a pipe dream into a lifesaving reality.
It’s as if his take-no-prisoners determination was made for the moment, an impression that adds to the irony given that the pandemic wrecked the final year of his presidency and probably cost him four more years. In the run-up to the election, most voters gave the president a thumbs-down on his handling of the coronavirus, with an early October Pew poll giving Biden a 17point advantage on the topic, despite the fact that the Democrat had not proposed anything significantly different from what Trump was doing.
Recall, too, that prior to the outbreak, Trump looked to be headed to almost certain victory largely on the strength of the roaring economy. Unemployment rates for blacks and Latinos hit historic lows, and wages were rising faster for workers at the bottom and middle than at the top.
The median family income in 2019 was the highest ever recorded at $68,703, an increase of 6.8 percent in just one year, according to Census Bureau statistics. That amount was more than $6,000 higher than median household income in 2016, the last year of the Obama-Biden administration.
But the fear and the political fearmongering, combined with an economic freeze that cost upwards of 40 million people their jobs at some point, vaporized the president’s major strength.
His pledge to rebuild what had been destroyed failed to counter the argument made by Biden and the media that Trump had failed initially to grasp the seriousness of the outbreak and lacked heartfelt sympathy for grieving families.
So despite the fact that the vaccine came soon enough to save an enormous number of lives, it came too late to save Trump’s job.
Still, it was a remarkable achievement for which all Americans should be grateful.