Trump Deserves No Credit For The Vaccine
The only real piece of good news that has come out in 2020 is that several pharmaceutical companies have made astonishing progress on developing an effective vaccine for the corona virus. Normally, the development of a vaccine can take years but these companies are ready to roll out a vaccine later this month. The first vaccinations in Nebraska will occur in mid-December.
Despite this welcome news, the pandemic is still ravaging the nation while Trump and his administration are offering no government help or protection for Americans. Here we are eight months into this pandemic and Trump and McConnell still don’t have a plan to tackle the gravest crisis in the U.S. since the Great Depression.
McConnell has obstructed any further stimulus legislation since May and Trump doesn’t have a national testing program and there are still shortages of PPE. It’s just disgraceful. The Republicans simply aren’t capable of governing competently.
Despite these failures, Trump and his followers are now trying to claim credit for the vaccine to salvage his tarnished reputation. However, if you look at the facts, Trump deserves zero credit for this lone positive development.
Kevin Drum of Mother Jones produced this revealing time line in a recent post:
“January 10: China releases genome of virus.
January 11: Scientists around the world immediately begin work on a vaccine.
January 14: Moderna begins development of its mRNA-based vaccine.
January 23: The Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations provides $12.5 million in seed money to three companies, including Moderna.
January 26: BioNTech begins work on its mRNA-based vaccine.
February 15: More than two dozen companies have announced that they are working on a COVID-19 vaccine.
March 26: Congress passes the CARES Act, which allots $9.5 billion for vaccine development. It is passed almost unanimously. President Trump signs it into law the next day.
April 16: HHS announces $483 million in funding for the Moderna vaccine.
April 29: Operation Warp Speed is revealed in the press.”
When the drug companies launched the development of a vaccine, Trump was claiming the pandemic was a hoax, wasn’t a serious problem and was going to disappear quickly like a miracle. Let’s take a little trip down memory lane and look at what Trump was saying about the pandemic when the drug companies launched their crash program to develop a vaccine.
January 22:
“We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China. It’s going to be just fine.”
February 26:
“[The number of people infected is] going very substantially down, not up.” “The 15 [cases] within a couple of days, is going to be down to zero.”
February 27:
“It’s going to disappear one day, it’s like a miracle.”
February 28:
“Now the Democrats are politicizing the coronavirus, You know that, right? Coronavirus. They’re politicizing it. They tried the impeachment hoax. … And this is their new hoax.”
It’s pretty evident that Trump didn’t feel any sense of urgency back in February when this crash program was launched. The former TV reality star probably believed that the development of a vaccine was entirely unnecessary. The Republicans in Congress enabled this appalling ignorance and incompetence.
It is no coincidence that this is the second consecutive Republican administration to lead the United States into disaster. This is the direct result of the GOP’s bankrupt governing philosophy that rejects science, expertise and government itself. The Republicans like to tell us that government doesn’t work and then they wreck government in order to prove it.
There will come a day where you won’t be able to find any Republicans who will admit that they once were fired up about Trump. We can’t let the voters forget about a second consecutive failed GOP presidency. GOP propaganda relies upon amnesia and bad memories. We can’t count on the mainstream media to remind people about Trump’s failures. As Democrats, we have the duty to refresh memories.
Former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum said it best: “When this is all over, nobody will admit to ever having supported it.” We can’t let the GOP away with it again!