Former President Donald Trump is taking a shot at his political rivals for refusing to acknowledge his contributions to the development of COVID-19 vaccines.
In his latest tweemail, the 45th president linked to an article in the Palm Beach Daily News saying that Trump isn’t getting due credit for Operation Warp Speed, a 2020 Trump administration initiative designed to produce and distribute COVID-19 vaccines in under a year.
“Wow, so nice!” Trump wrote in response to the article, which argued that “every person in the western world who has been vaccinated to date should thank former President Trump, without whom the vaccines would not have developed as quickly and effectively.”
OPERATION WARP SPEED’S SUCCESS
Some scientists agree, including Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, who argued that the Trump administration deserved credit for Operation Warp Speed.
“The Operation Warp Speed, for which I give a great deal of credit to [former Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar], was an effort that many of us were not initially convinced was going to be necessary. And it was thought about as a Manhattan Project,” Collins said in February.
Since leaving office, Trump has touted his administration’s vaccine push, writing in a tweemail last month that the vaccine likely never would’ve come to fruition if not for his efforts.
“I hope everyone remembers when they’re getting the COVID-19 (often referred to as the China Virus) Vaccine, that if I wasn’t President, you wouldn’t be getting that beautiful ‘shot’ for 5 years, at best, and probably wouldn’t be getting it at all,” Trump said in the March 10 statement. “I hope everyone remembers!”
The Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson vaccines were all developed in 2020, and the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines earned emergency use authorizations from the Food and Drug Administration in December 2020, when Trump was still president. While all three were offered federal funding, Pfizer declined, with the company’s CEO saying that refusing Operation Warp Speed funds would “liberate [Pfizer’s] scientists from any bureaucracy that could come by accepting money.”
While a candidate, President Joe Biden expressed skepticism of vaccines produced by the Trump administration.
“I trust vaccines, [and] I trust scientists, but I don’t trust Donald Trump,” Biden said in September 2020.
He called on the Trump administration to reassure the public that politics, and specifically the pressure to produce a vaccine prior to the 2020 election, would not result in vaccines that fell short of scientific safety standards.
Biden’s then-running mate, Kamala Harris, said she would believe doctors and other health practitioners about the safety of vaccines, but she wouldn’t take Trump’s word for it.
“If the public health professionals, if Dr. [Anthony] Fauci, if the doctors tell us that we should take it, I’ll be the first in line to take it, absolutely. But if Donald Trump tells us we should take it, I’m not taking it,” she said during the vice presidential debate last fall.
Both Biden and Harris were fully vaccinated prior to Inauguration Day in 2021.
After actively promoting public vaccination once in office, Biden blamed his predecessor for vaccine rollout issues, and he argued that Trump left a poor blueprint for execution.
“The process of establishing priority groups was driven by science, but the problem is implementation has been too rigid and confusing,” he said in January.
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Last month, the White House announced its goal to have coronavirus vaccines available to 90% of adults by April 19, and Biden directed all governors to make all adults in their states eligible for inoculation by May 1.
More than 30 million cases of COVID-19 have been diagnosed throughout the United States, and over 555,000 deaths have been attributed to the disease, according to the Johns Hopkins University coronavirus tracker. More than 167 million vaccine doses have been administered, and 62 million people nationwide are fully vaccinated, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
