When you read this, I may be feeling lousy. I just had my second COVID-19 vaccination shot, and antibodies generated by my first are about to begin their struggle against the new invaders. Many people have found this uncomfortable.
But my feeling right now, as I write, is one of relief and hopefulness that we’ll all soon jettison social restrictions that have made the past year so grim and weird, plus admiration for the efficiency of the operation that got the life-sustaining juice into my arm.
By “the operation,” I mean both the functionality of the mass vaccination site I’ve just been to in a vast parking lot outside Washington, D.C., and the public-private combo that developed these new medicines from scratch in less than 12 months.
The vax site was staffed by scores of nurses and National Guard soldiers, all of whom were polite, humane, and businesslike in directing thousands of patients into and out of drive-thru tents where yet more nurses did their needlework. It is operations such as this one, at an amusement park that can perhaps soon reopen, that are now administering more than 3 million doses nationwide each day.
Aside from a dip because of heavy snow in mid-February, the number of daily doses injected has risen steadily since they got the federal green light for public use. The rate of acceleration did not change when Joe Biden took over from Donald Trump, which falsifies the current administration’s claim that it inherited a mess and deserves the lion’s share of credit for inoculating America. The number of shots administered each day has certainly increased over time — if it hadn’t, it would deserve to be counted a terrible failure — but where we are now is where the trajectory suggested we’d have been even if Trump were still in the White House.
Biden arrived saying 100 million shots would be administered in his first 100 days. He underpromised — the rate was nearly 1 million a day when he was inaugurated — so he could overdeliver and look good. Sure enough, more than 200 million doses are now in people’s arms.
A very senior foreign diplomat, whose own country’s vaccination program is a genuine mess, told me Operation Warp Speed (in which Washington injected $800 million into the development of a range of vaccines by several pharmaceutical manufacturers) is recognized overseas as “good Trump” even if many people in America want for political reasons to deny the 45th president credit. However flawed other aspects of Trump’s pandemic response may have been, he got this part right.
The gap between the truth and critics’ accusations is, of course, politics. It’s the same with the equally controversial matter of voting laws, which is our magazine cover story this week, under the headline “The Voter Suppression Lie.” Ilya Shapiro examines various state voting laws, notably the one in Georgia that Biden unconscionably described as “Jim Crow on steroids,” and finds that Democratic charges against Republicans are hypocritical bunk.
Finally, I would like to end by thanking Fred Barnes for the features and columns he has written for the Washington Examiner magazine since its launch in January 2019. Fred joined us late in his stellar career, and I am enormously grateful for his input and support. Enjoy your retirement, Fred; you deserve it.
