Kamala Harris was asked by Axios’s Mike Allen, “What are you finding that’s harder about the pandemic? How are you finding the hole is deeper?” Her response was:
“I mean, the challenge, Mike, is what I explained to the mayors, there was no stockpile. There was no national strategy or plan for vaccinations. We were leaving it to the states and the local leaders to try to figure it out. And so, in many ways we’re starting from scratch on something that’s been raging for almost an entire year. Our standard has to be everything is possible, but we’re gonna have to work like heck to get it done. No patience for delay. No patience for no. No patience for it can’t be done.”
Of course, this is untrue. Not only was a vaccine created & approved faster than almost anyone thought was possible, but Donald Trump did have a national plan. Not only were almost 32 million doses of the vaccine delivered in December, but there were also many articles, even from mainstream media sources, talking about how Trump was speeding the distribution of the vaccine up in January. For example, here’s a Bloomberg article noting that the Trump administration was already meeting Biden’s lofty goal of a million doses per day,
The U.S. is close to administering Covid-19 vaccinations at a pace of a million doses a day, suggesting that the Biden administration’s 100-million-doses-in-100-days goal may be a modest aspiration. In the week Biden was sworn in as president, nearly 983,000 shots a day were administered on average over the seven days ending Friday, according to data from Bloomberg’s Vaccine Tracker. The most recent three days topped a million doses.
On the day Biden was inaugurated, 1.5 million new doses were administered, which is fairly notable since the Biden administration is only averaging about 1.6 million doses per day now. If all that isn’t enough to convince you, it’s worth noting that even Anthony Fauci admitted that there was already a plan in place.
Today CNN has falsely claimed over a dozen times that the Trump Administration left no vaccine plan and the Biden Administration had to start from “scratch.”
Even Fauci said that was a lie: “We certainly are not starting from scratch.”
Just more fake news. pic.twitter.com/w6leDKb9mN
— Steve Scalise (@SteveScalise) January 22, 2021
The reality is that the Trump administration got a vaccine approved shockingly fast and did a fantastic job of rolling it out to the public. Trump may not get the credit that he deserves, but Kamala Harris and the Biden Administration shouldn’t be allowed to create their own alternate reality where nothing was happening until they showed up and took credit for all the work Trump had already done.
John Hawkins is the author of 101 Things All Young Adults Should Know.
