The only thing more shameful than the disinformation aired by CNN and MSNBC is that the self-appointed ombudsmen of the press have exactly nothing to say about it.
MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace, for example, told an astonishing lie this week when she asserted Operation Warp Speed, the Trump-era program that worked with private biomedical companies in 2020 to develop vaccines and get them to market before the end of the year, “didn’t do anything to get a needle into an arm.”
Not one of her colleagues, or even her peers in competing newsrooms, has challenged her completely fabricated version of events.
Wallace dismissed the accomplishments of Operation Warp Speed as she and her MSNBC coworkers, Joy Reid and Rachel Maddow, griped about Republican Sen. Tim Scott’s rebuttal of President Joe Biden’s address to Congress.
“This is a speech delivered from a planet where facts don’t matter,” said Wallace, “which is where the current Republican Party resides, so it’s really not his fault. But it is his responsibility to get his facts straight.”
She also said, “He said this, that ‘Biden inherited a country that had already rounded the bend on COVID.’ Four thousand people per day were dying in January, so I don’t know, again, on what planet we had rounded the bend.”
The MSNBC host is correct when she says the daily rate of confirmed COVID-19 deaths was unusually high in January:
But that has nothing to do with what Operation Warp Speed did or did not.
In Scott’s remarks, he said, “This administration inherited a tide that had already turned. The coronavirus is on the run.” This was obviously about the availability of vaccines, which changes everything. He didn’t say the pandemic was over in January or even that deaths had declined by the time Joe Biden became president. Indeed, the senator’s next sentence was: “Thanks to Operation Warp Speed and the Trump administration, our country is flooded with safe and effective vaccines.”
By the way, the daily rate of confirmed COVID-19 deaths has declined to nearly the lows of July of last year, back when nonessential businesses were shuttered and most group recreational activities were canceled.
This brings us to Wallace’s lie about vaccine development and distribution.
“Operation Warp Speed didn’t do anything to get a needle into an arm,” she said, adding without any trace of irony, “So, a lot of disinformation. It felt almost scripted by someone close to the president who wanted that revisionist history.”
One has to wonder how Wallace, a supposed professional analyst, thinks the vaccines got into the needles in the first place. Does she think the needle is what matters and not the vaccine? Who does she think developed the vaccines? How does she suppose this happened? How does she think they got to market?
Moreover, if Wallace is operating under the impression that inoculations didn’t really start until around the time Biden became president, she is sadly mistaken. Once more, for good measure:
The White House and its allies in the press like to say the president is responsible for the impressive number of doses administered in the U.S. But Biden didn’t really do anything. He just had to sit back and watch. Everything was already in motion before he was sworn into office.
Wallace is the former political operative who helped run Sen. John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign into the ground. She then sold off its secrets in return for media access and acceptance. In other words, she is not exactly the most ethical person in the news business. But this lie about Operation Warp Speed still seems to be a new low for the patron saint of mediocrity.
