Currently, about 40% of the United States is completely vaccinated, which is a remarkable achievement given where we were only a few months ago. Former President Donald Trump would like credit for the comprehensive vaccine delivery plan that is bringing our country closer to some semblance of normalcy, even though he has nothing to do with it.
He’s pleading with you to give it to him.
Trump, who has been barred from Twitter and pretty much any other social media site, sent his new message to his supporters in a press release, a dying art form that he is doing whatever he can to revive. Trump complained in the letter, which read like a long and rambling tweet, that the Biden administration is getting credit for his hard work:
“Isn’t it incredible that because of the vaccines, which I and my Administration came up with years ahead of schedule (despite the fact that everybody, including Fauci, said would never happen), that we no longer need masks, and yet our names are not even mentioned in what everybody is calling the modern-day miracle of the vaccines?”
There’s so much wrong with this argument that it’s difficult to know where to start, but to summarize, Trump’s Operation Warp Speed didn’t necessarily “make” vaccines; it simply allocated resources to expedite the trials and approval process. While it made a significant contribution to Moderna’s two-dose vaccine, Pfizer’s shot was completely financed by the business. And the technology behind these latest mRNA targeting vaccines has been decades in the making.
Still, Trump is pretty put out that Biden and his team haven’t even acknowledged his work in bringing these vaccines to the public, saying later in his statement: “Just a mention, please! The Biden Administration had zero to do with it.”
His argument contains several significant factual inaccuracies. Trump’s Operation Warp Speed sped up the vaccine approval process, but as has been widely stated, there was no infrastructure in place to enable a national vaccine roll-out when Biden took office. Despite the vaccinations being accepted late last year, the Biden administration had to start from scratch, and it’s only been in the last few weeks that they’ve been able to make significant progress.
Trump is, in essence, every guy you’ve ever had to work on a group project with in school who comes up with the initial idea but then disappears for weeks, enraged when his name isn’t on the final term paper.
