The White House has scoffed at the idea Donald Trump deserves any vaccine praise, saying that 500,000 people died on his watch.
Press secretary Jen Psaki refused to give the ex-president any credit when questioned about it during her daily briefing.
Ms Psaki was asked about recent comments from Admiral Brett Giroir, the former assistant secretary at the Department of Health and Human Services, who has said that the Trump administration deserves more credit for planning the distribution of the vaccine.
“I don’t think anyone deserves credit when half a million people in the country have died of this pandemic,” replied Ms Psaki.
“What our focus is on, and what the president’s focus is on when he came into office just over a month ago, was ensuring that we had enough vaccines – we are going to have them now.”
The Biden White House was critical of the Trump administration’s rollout plans when it took office with the goal of 100 million vaccinations in 100 days.
They are currently on schedule to beat that mark by weeks, and Mr Biden has said that they will have enough vaccine doses for every adult American by the end of May.
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Bloomberg statistics show that on 20 January when Mr Biden was inaugurated, the US was administering an average of 900,000 vaccinations a day.
That number has jumped to 2 million doses a day as of 4 March.
Dirigio on March 5th, 2021 at 00:01 UTC »
In the Spanish Flu Outbreak of 1918, 50 million people around the world died from it and 654,000 people died from it in the United States
In the Covid Pandemic, 2.5 million people around the world died from it and 500,000+ people in the United States died from it.
We have lost almost as many people in this country to Covid as we did with the Spanish Flu, and our percentage of deaths from Covid compared to the rest of the world is even greater than the Spanish Flu percentages.
This is what Trump considers winning.
baatezu on March 4th, 2021 at 22:00 UTC »
Dolly Parton deserves more credit for the vaccine than Trump.
AwesomeBrainPowers on March 4th, 2021 at 21:17 UTC »
Good, because Trump bungled the pandemic response so thoroughly that our deaths could have been nearly half of what they actually were.
To be clear:
Here is a recording of Trump (privately) acknowledging on Feb 7th that COVID is much deadlier than the flu, is aerosolized, and can be transmitted by asymptomatic people.
Here is a brief summary of just some of Trump’s many attempts to misrepresent the severity of the virus (including likening it to a simple flu) from March 27th—which is seven weeks after Feb 7th, when he (privately) acknowledged it was much deadlier than the flu.
Here is a study that shows that had the US enacted social distancing just one week earlier, at least 36,000 deaths could have been avoided.
Here is a statistical analysis that suggests the number of needless deaths due to Trump’s inaction could be far, far more than even 36,000.
Here is a brief timeline of Trump’s engagement with masks, the CDC, and COVID:
April 3: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention now recommends that people wear cloth or fabric face coverings, which can be made at home, when entering public spaces such as grocery stores and public transit stations.
May 5: Trump made himself Exhibit A for reopening the country with his Tuesday visit to an Arizona face mask factory, using the trip to demonstrate his determination to see an easing of stay-at-home orders even as the coronavirus remains a dire threat. Trump did not wear a mask despite guidelines saying they should be worn inside the factory at all times.
May 21: President Trump failed to wear a face mask as he toured a Ford facility in Michigan that’s manufacturing ventilators and personal protective equipment on Thursday, going against the policies of the facility, the governor’s executive order and warnings from the state’s attorney general.
June 6: The Maine swab factory that President Trump visited said that they will have to throw away everything produced while he was there because he didn’t wear a mask.
June 30: As the pandemic worsens alarmingly in large parts of the country, pressure from health experts and local officials is mounting for Americans to wear masks or face coverings, and congressional Republicans are telling President Donald Trump he should do the same.
That first story notes “that the White House pressured the agency to limit the scope of the wording of the new guidance. The CDC wanted to emphasize that the recommendation could be helpful for Americans in all parts of the country, given that it is becoming increasing difficult to designate particular areas as ‘hot spots,’ since the virus is present in so many areas of the country”.
Again, here is a recording of Trump (privately) acknowledging on Feb 7th that COVID is much deadlier than the flu, is aerosolized, and can be transmitted by asymptomatic people. This is two months before he pressured the CDC to downplay their own guidance.
Again, here is a statistical analysis that suggests Trump’s knowing and willful inaction lead to an untold number of dead Americans.
“But what about state responses?”
Good question!
Here is just one list of governors who were publicly complaining about federal lies about (or outright impediment of) COVID testing back in April.
Here is just one account of how federal inaction—or bad action—caused a bidding war and made it harder for states to acquire PPE, also from April.
Here is Trump admitting—in March—that he instructed Pence (the “head” of his COVID task force) not to reach out to governors who “weren’t appreciative” of his (objectively terrible) response to the pandemic.
None of the governors did an impeccable job—and it can’t be entirely blamed on Trump’s stunningly inept and willfully harmful federally-managed response—but any credible engagement with reality can only result in acknowledging Trump’s outsized role in turning this crisis into a catastrophe.
And all of that was written before we had confirmation that Trump silenced his own public health advisors and promoted disinformation even amongst his own staff.