Team Biden plays down Trump’s vaccine success
“I don’t think anyone deserves credit when half a million people in the country have died of this pandemic,” Press Secretary Jen Psaki told reporters last Thursday. The answer was in response to a question from ABC News senior White House correspondent Mary Bruce that noted that the Biden administration has been “following some of the same playbook” as the Trump administration when it comes to COVID19 vaccinations.
But Psaki is wrong. Trump has many failings, both personal and political, but in the case of the vaccines that were approved by the FDA last December to prevent COVID-19, he does in fact deserve credit for this historic achievement and the many lives it will save.
Psaki’s comment follows the narrative pushed by Biden and his team that Trump cannot be credited in any way, shape or form for Operation Warp Speed’s success in getting safe and effective vaccines to Americans in unheard-of time.
Indeed the Biden administration has been adamant that Trump utterly bungled the vaccine rollout.
One especially damning claim made by Biden has been that Trump failed to procure enough vaccines for the American population, while touting his own purchase of an additional 200 million doses from Pfizer and Moderna.
But factcheck.org has rated this claim “misleading,” pointing out that Biden’s purchases simply exercised options already written into the Trump administration’s contracts with both companies under Operation Warp Speed.
Furthermore, Biden’s goal of 100 million vaccine doses by the end of his first hundred days, which Michael Osterholm, a member of Biden’s COVID-19 task force, called “aspirational” in January, is set to be blown away, with over 80 million already administered before the halfway mark. That would never have been possible had the Trump administration not already reached the necessary rate of a million doses administered per day by the time Biden took office. Of course that rate has indeed continued to accelerate in the time since, but the facts simply cannot support the idea that the new administration was “starting from scratch,” as Vice President Kamala Harris put it shortly after taking office.
In fact, Trump deserves even more credit for standing by Operation Warp Speed and the vaccine development process in late 2020 in the face of politically motivated attacks during the election and outright derision from liberal academics and media personalities.
In September, then-Vice Presidential candidate Kamala Harris cast doubts on the safety of any vaccine developed under the Trump administration, saying that whether she would take a vaccine would “be an issue for all of us,” and suggesting scientists and other public health experts could not be trusted due to pressure from the president.
On the debate stage, Biden himself said, “There’s no prospect that there’s going to be a vaccine available for the majority of the American people before the middle of next year.”
For the Biden administration to attempt to downplay Trump’s significant achievements on the COVID-19 vaccine, when he massively outperformed their own publicly stated expectations for what was even possible, while they now build on his foundation, is petty and cynical.
We should expect better from our public officials when it comes to matters as important as this pandemic. Joe Biden and his team should have the decency and grace to give Trump credit when it is, as it is now, well-deserved.