Democrats, smart and good. Republicans, ignorant and bad.
That’s the only way that the national media know how to portray developments of the pandemic (and basically everything else political). So it continued this week with a front-page story in the New York Times implying that the Trump administration is already screwing up the distribution of coming coronavirus vaccines by declining to order as many doses as possible.
“U.S. rejected chance to buy more vaccine,” the story’s headline said. The report said that pharmaceutical company Pfizer, which has created a highly effective vaccine on track for emergency distribution, earlier this year offered the U.S. “the chance to lock in supplies beyond the 100 million doses” that the government initially ordered. The administration, the report said, “never made the deal, a choice that now raises questions about whether the United States allowed other countries to take its place in line.”
The idea here is that the administration has left us short on a vaccine that’s in high demand, allowing other countries to swoop in and take what could have been ours.
It’s not until about much later in the piece that a more complete picture emerges.
“Pfizer has struggled to meet initial expectations,” the report finally gets around to admitting. “This summer, the company predicted that it would have 100 million doses by the end of the year, but in November, it said manufacturing challenges forced the company to scale that back to 50 million.” It also notes that “vaccine manufacturing is notoriously unpredictable and any number of factors … could cause further setbacks.”
In other words, Pfizer, like every other pharmaceutical company attempting to manufacture a vaccine, was never a sure bet.
White House officials on a Monday call with reporters denied the thrust of the New York Times’s report. It’s not necessarily false that the administration declined to lock in a purchase of more vaccines that it had initially agreed to buy, but that point is neither here nor there. It wasn’t until after the election in November that Pfizer announced it had a vaccine with a roughly 95% success rate.
Negotiations between the government and pharmaceutical companies were happening back during the spring and summer, when there was no guarantee that a vaccine would come any time soon at all, let alone one that could be so effective. Did it make sense for the government to wait and see what it was getting?
Pfizer was trying to get the government to gamble that the company would be the first to produce a vaccine. What the administration did instead was spread out the odds by making deals with six manufacturers, two of which, Pfizer and Moderna, have produced promising vaccines.
This isn’t a matter of President Trump failing to get us as many doses as possible. It’s a matter of Pfizer perhaps winning the bet that everyone has a stake in.
Speaking of which, since when has the media assumed the best of profit-driven Big Pharma? Apparently since it could be used to make Republicans look bad once again.
