The day when retired Air Force Col. Thomas McNish could play with his grandchildren again could not come soon enough. The former Vietnam POW thanks the fast Department of Veterans Affairs vaccine rollout and decisions former President Donald Trump made to cut through stifling bureaucracy.
“We took maximum advantage of the ability to break free,” McNish, 78, said of the vaccine he quickly received at his local VA hospital in San Antonio, Texas, in January and the one his wife got at a senior center shortly after.
The couple bought tickets to visit family two weeks after his wife’s second jab.
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“We're spending this week with my daughter, and we hadn't been able to see her, except briefly, for a year,” he told the Washington Examiner by phone from Raleigh, North Carolina. “I know several people who've gotten it through the VA and have been able to get in and out very quickly.”
Since the first vaccines were released to the department in December, the VA has fully vaccinated more than 1 million veterans of the 9 million it cares for. But nearly 250,000 veterans have been sickened by the coronavirus, and more than 10,000 have died of COVID-19.
President Biden used the Veterans Medical Center in Washington, D.C., Monday as the backdrop to highlight his administration’s production and roll out of vaccines.
“We’re really warping the speed now,” Biden told VA workers, seeming to take a swipe at Trump’s program for vaccine production and distribution, dubbed Operation Warp Speed. Biden and his team contend they have bolstered and sped up the federal government's efforts to purchase and produce doses, then get them into arms.
“We’re doing pretty good across the country. We’re going to hit 100 million soon," Biden added.
McNish, who went to medical school after his release from a North Vietnamese prison when the Vietnam War ended, later led a congressionally mandated VA advisory committee for 20 years. He served under eight Veterans Affairs secretaries in the late 1990s and early 2000s. But he said what he saw under Trump was different.
“The entire VA health system is working better over the past few years,” he said. “A large chunk of that, obviously, is investment, but a large part of it is the ability to get rid of some of the nonproductive bureaucrats that were in senior positions at the VA hospitals and large VA medical centers.”
Trump’s 2017 VA Accountability Act aimed to give managers new powers to fire ineffective personnel, he said.
McNish said he has seen the results play out in a more effective system capable of the massive vaccine distribution currently underway.
“A large part of that has been corrected by the law that was passed … which gave the authority to fire senior leadership in the hospitals where things were not working well and put in better leadership,” he said.
Vietnam Veterans of America President John Rowan told the Washington Examiner that the successful VA vaccine rollout has helped Vietnam veterans, but he pointed to a different Trump-era piece of legislation to streamline VA processes.
“Every time I used to hear them say ‘an elderly person with preexisting conditions,’ I said, 'That's every Vietnam veteran I know,'” Rowan said of the warning tied to those most at risk of death from COVID-19. “Our population really wanted that badly. We were scared, frankly.”
Rowan pointed to Trump’s effort to free up veterans' hospitals by giving veterans more choice to seek care in the private sector.
The VA MISSION Act, Rowan said, reduced the backlog.
“It wasn't a matter of trying to swap out the VA hospital for the private sector. It was allowing an increase in access through the private sector,” he said, noting rural veterans and those under 75 still need more help getting vaccinated quickly.
For McNish, the vaccine distribution is a positive sign of a new VA.
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“The [Trump] administration had a lot to do with getting changes made that allowed the VA to operate more efficiently now,” he said.
Describing his vaccination experience, McNish said: “It couldn't have been smoother. It was a total of 20 minutes from the time I parked the car.”
