Let’s make a deal on Biden win, Operation Warp Speed
Cowards. Liars. Traitors.
Those are some of the nicer terms that my fellow liberals have been hurling at Republicans who continue to contest the presidential election. Every shard of real evidence demonstrates that Joe Biden defeated President Donald Trump last month, a result finalized with Monday’s Electoral College vote.
But many GOP leaders — and, by some estimates, nearly three-quarters of Republican voters — have continued to embrace baseless theories of fraud and corruption, insisting that Democrats will stop at nothing to keep Trump out of power.
So why are we feeding that false narrative by ignoring Trump’s actual triumph this fall?
I’m talking about Operation Warp Speed, the vaccine development project that he launched in the spring. It bore fruit Friday night, when the Food and Drug Administration approved Pfizer’s vaccine for use against the coronavirus. Americans started receiving this life-saving vaccine Monday. The FDA is expected to authorize another one, by Moderna, later this week.
To be sure, Trump — being Trump — misrepresented the federal role in the Pfizer case. Although Trump said its vaccine was “a result of Operation Warp Speed,” Pfizer didn’t accept any U.S. government money to develop, test or manufacture it. But the company did sign an agreement with the government to supply 100 million doses if the vaccine proved effective, which guaranteed it an American market.
In any decent and normal country, everyone would congratulate the president for a desperately needed project that delivered. But we are not a decent and normal country right now.
Surely Trump deserves praise
So Democrats mostly kept quiet about Operation Warp Speed, because they cannot bring themselves to say anything good about Trump. And that simply confirms his supporters’ suspicions about our bad faith.
Let’s be clear: Primary credit for the vaccines belongs to the scientists who developed them and the manufacturers who produced them, not to Trump. And there are still enormous questions to be answered about how the vaccines will be distributed and who will receive them first.
Yet surely Trump deserves some kudos for launching Operation Warp Speed, which doled out $10 billion to help drug companies accelerate their usual processes to create new vaccines and manufacture them at commercial scale. Up until now, four years was the fastest a vaccine was ever developed. So there was justifiable skepticism last May, when the president pledged to have a vaccine ready by the end of 2020. But he was right. There, I said it.
On the development of the vaccine itself, infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci has been unequivocal in his praise. At a conference last month, he called Operation Warp Speed “beyond historic.” It’s a “total revolution,” he added, producing vaccines more quickly than anyone had thought possible.
Likewise, former FDA chief scientist Jesse Goodman — a frequent critic of the Trump administration’s coronavirus policies — lauded its efforts on vaccines. “This is a bright spot in the pandemic response,” admitted Goodman, who directs Georgetown University’s Center on Medical Product Access, Safety and Stewardship. “I mean, the rest of it has been dismal.”
Both parties should give ground
So why can’t the rest of Trump’s detractors give credit where credit is due? Perhaps the Republicans are right about us: We’re simply blinded by our antipathy to Donald Trump. So even when he does something that is obviously admirable, we can’t summon the courage to acknowledge it. That doesn’t mean the GOP is right about Democrats “stealing” the election. That’s a lie, and a hugely dangerous one. The more that people believe it, the less faith they’ll have in our civic institutions going forward.
But you can’t move someone off a lie when you’re being less than honest yourself. By turning a blind eye to Trump’s victory on vaccines, Democrats make it harder for his loyalists to accept defeat at the polls. Why should they capitulate when we won’t give any ground, even where it’s so clearly warranted?
So I’ve got a deal to offer my Republican brothers and sisters. If you’ll stand down and congratulate Joe Biden on the election, we’ll stand up and applaud Donald Trump for Operation Warp Speed. He didn’t win the vote in November, but he did win the race for the vaccine. And we should all thank him for that.