Last year was not so long ago.
Why, then, do professional talking heads keep bungling basic facts about vaccine development and distribution?
CNN chief political analyst Gloria Borger, for example, said this week that President Joe Biden deserves credit for getting 235 million people inoculated. But the president had nothing to do with the Trump-era program that made this to-date total possible.
Borger’s remarks came amid a broader discussion of Republican Sen. Tim Scott’s rebuttal to Biden’s address Wednesday before Congress.
“This was not a message that was a Donald Trump message at all,” she said. “[Scott] was not speaking to the base of the party, except in one area, where he was refusing to give Joe Biden any credit on COVID-19.”
Borger then referenced the part in Scott’s address where he said, “This administration inherited a tide that had already turned. The coronavirus is on the run. Thanks to Operation Warp Speed and the Trump administration, our country is flooded with safe and effective vaccines.”
The CNN analyst took issue with the senator’s version of events.
“Everybody understands that Operation Warp Speed happened under Joe Biden,” Borger asserted — completely in error, of course. “But getting vaccines into arms was a Biden operation.”
This is false. The Trump administration created Operation Warp Speed, which worked hand in hand with private biomedical companies to get the vaccines developed and distributed within a matter of months. The Biden White House did not exist.
Weirdly, no one on Borger’s CNN panel challenged her false assertion, which she later corrected.
“I misstated it earlier,” she conceded. “Donald Trump gets credit for Operation Warp Speed.”
However, she added, “Joe Biden gets credit on getting those vaccines, those shots, into your arms.”
This is also not accurate. We’ve been over this before, so bear with me.
The first coronavirus vaccine shots were administered in the United States on Dec. 14, 2020. By Jan. 20, 2021, the day of Biden’s inauguration, 15.6 million people had already been given doses. Nearly a million people were being vaccinated per day by that point. In fact, on Jan. 20 alone, an estimated 1.5 million inoculations were administered. Biden, who was already vaccinated at that point, had done nothing to make these numbers possible.
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.
Yet Borger and others claim Biden deserves credit for getting “those vaccines … into your arms.” Why? It wasn’t his program that got the COVID-19 vaccines developed within a few months, and it wasn’t his program that put the U.S. on pace for more than 1 million vaccinations per day.
