COVID vaccine success should be celebrated

When it comes to handling the COVID-19 pandemic, America can’t seem to do anything right, at least as far as most of the world is concerned. Now that the vaccine rollout is proving less disastrous than we were promised it would be, it turns out our success is a problem, too.

“We’ve done worse than most any other country,” Dr. Anthony Fauci said in an interview on ABC news last week.

Trump’s response to the crisis, originally decried as “xenophobic,” including by the current president, and overly alarmist at a time when the WHO was still waffling about whether or not the virus was a major concern, has now been reframed as woefully inadequate.

The world sees the high rates of death in the US and blames Trump, their favorite villain, along with a poor understanding of science, and a lack of mask- wearing ( despite plenty of evidence that the U. S. ranks higher than many European countries in mask compliance.)

The measures that seem to do the best at controlling the crisis, like strict, mandatory isolation and travel restrictions, and hyper- vigilant surveillance and contact tracing, are simply not feasible in a nation as large, diverse, and free as the United States of America.

Plus, the truth is that COVID numbers from countries like China, who lied about the pandemic for months, simply cannot be trusted at all.

Some estimates suggest that their death numbers may be off by a factor of

10!

So any analysis of relative success of different approaches must take that discrepancy into account.

But in any case, this story is not yet over, and the common narrative that Americans have done a terrible job containing the virus may end up nullified by the ultimate results of a historically rapid and successful vaccination program.

In the fall, when thenPresident Trump promised an effective vaccine in December, Democrats and the media called his words irresponsible and dangerous. Vice Presidential Candidate Kamala Harris publicly said she would not even trust it enough to take it herself if it was developed under Trump.

But Operation Warp Speed came through with spectacular efficacy results for not one, but two mRNA vaccines, which both gained approval before the end of the year.

Then the focus was on the halting distribution, as the medical supply chain struggled to ramp up in the race to get needles into arms.

But before President Biden took office, the U. S. had already reached a rate of a million vaccines administered in a single day, and things have only looked better since then. Less than three months after the vaccines were approved, more than 13% of the population has now received at least one dose, with another approved vaccine option, Johnson & Johnson, coming soon.

America now ranks among the top nations in the world for vaccine administration, and is by far the largest country to do so. By the end of the summer, every American adult will have had the opportunity to receive the vaccine.

This is a success story that will doubtless prove incredibly important in containing future waves of the pandemic in the coming months.

But of course, for some people, this is still a problem.

Now the criticism is that the U. S. is selfishly hoarding vaccines to use for Americans, while poorer countries around the world will stay unvaccinated for months and maybe for years to come.

Last week NBC published a scathing report on how Trump’s Operation Warp Speed initiative spent billions to get the vaccine developed and manufactured but unfairly prioritized Americans to receive the shot first. In addition, the U. S. agreed to pay far more, sometimes 3 and 4 times as much, as poorer countries were able to, jumping to the front of the line for distribution.

And despite the U. S. pledging billions of dollars to COVAX, a program that allows poorer nations to access the vaccine, WHO Director- General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus dismissed this as inadequate, saying that “If there are no vaccines to buy, money is irrelevant.”

Experts say the United States has a moral obligation to donate not just cash, but the vaccine doses to developing nations, even before their own population is fully vaccinated. This is wrong.

The reality is without the wealth of the United States being channeled into the effort last year, there would be no vaccines to buy at all. For anyone.

In less than a year, the United States was able to coordinate what amounts to a medical miracle, a miracle that will benefit the entire world and save countless lives.

In six months time, the U. S. will doubtless be in a position to shore up vaccine supplies for COVAX, once our own citizens have been protected.

This achievement is one that should be celebrated, not downplayed or denounced as unethical.