President Joe Biden and his top advisers have derided the Trump administration’s playbook for distributing coronavirus vaccines, but so far have made only modest changes to the plan that’s meeting their target pace of more than one million shots a day.
Biden has said vaccine distribution was in “worse shape than we anticipated.” White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain said a Trump administration plan “did not really exist.” Adviser Cedric Richmond said they “didn’t leave a plan.” Xavier Becerra, Biden’s choice for health secretary, said it was like taking over a plane in a nosedive.
But while Biden’s approach to the virus — frank warnings about the pandemic, mask mandates on federal property — is a reversal from Trump’s policies, his administration’s distribution of vaccines so far looks little different from that of its predecessor. Before Biden was sworn in, vaccines already were being delivered at a pace to meet his goal of 100 million doses in his first 100 days as president.
The new administration has said they’ll order new doses, but will do so by exercising options in contracts negotiated by the previous administration, which thought it premature to do so. They say they’ll use the Defense Production Act, which Trump used repeatedly. Rather than a total overhaul, they have otherwise made course corrections and modest shifts.
Biden’s ability to sharply change direction is inherently limited. The sheer magnitude of the distribution efforts would make any major changes costly and risk backsliding, even if temporarily. Some aspects of the program don’t offer much wiggle room to begin with, while the trickiest parts are yet to come — and entirely on Biden’s shoulders.
Any efforts by Biden to shape the program also were undercut by Trump, who delayed the transition as he disputed the results of the election and refused to concede. Trump’s team said more than 300 transition briefings were held with health officials, though Biden officials have said the information exchange was limited until just days before the inauguration.
The actual manufacture of the vaccine (the supply), which all most people with the ability to reason understand is the limiting factor in how many people can receive their shots in any given week or month, is something beyond what anyone in the Biden administration can do anything about. It is not like the Biden administration can invoke the defense production act and have Ford, GM or some other company, with no experience or suitable facilities, suddenly start mass producing these highly complex and temperature sensitive vaccines in a converted warehouse or non-sterile car plant.
So the Biden administration, as much as they may hate the reality of the situation, has to instead try to the focus the public’s attention on the relatively symbolic mandates they have already elected come forward with. They just have to make the public think that their actions are something new and radical, that will somehow magically differ from the already existing Operation Warp Speed that the Trump administration put together.
Operation Warp Speed had a vaccination target of a million people per day, which they were meeting. So the Biden administration used Marketing techniques to say Biden was committed to delivering a 100 million doses of vaccine in his first 100 days. Well for those of you that can think and do simple math, that is the exact same one million doses per day that the Trump adminstration had already set up an infrastructure to deliver. It’s is just expressed differently and made to sound as if it is something new and impressive.
Obviously as other companies come out with their own versions of a vaccine, the supply will increase and the number of people being vaccinated on a daily basis will increase. However, that too was something that the Trump administration had planned for all along. So now as J&J annonces their new 66 percent effective vaccine today, the Biden administration will up the doses per day to 1.5 million or more. They have to point to something positive given all the destructive policy changes coming out of the White House in the last week. Again, simple supply and demand, but nothing really new and innovative from the Biden administration regarding Covid-19. As even more companies announce their own vaccines, the number of people per day that can be vaccinated will continue to rise.
Just like Biden has plagiarized others in his speeches and called it his own, his administration is now plagiarizing Trump’s Operation Warp Speed plan and saying it is something new and innovative from them. The media will support the lie, as they do with all Democrats, and much of the public may be dumb enough to fall for it. However, for those of us that keep track of the reality of all this, this is just more of the same old same old from the Democrats. Think people.
Operation Warp Speed worked perfectly to create and validate Covid vaccines.
Now Biden’s team needs to help the states fix their vaccine distribution and administration problems pronto so that everyone who wants a vaccine can get a vaccine without having to spend days on the phone and hours standing in line.
I’m an average Citizen. Retired. What can I do to not only expose the Leftist-Congress-Biden’s treasonous E-O’s, and the “cancel culture, and Big Tech censorship et al, but also to Fight for Truth, Justice, and protect and preserve our Constitutional God Given Freedoms?
KK in Alabama
AMAC MEMBER
The only good comment I have heard about the vaccines under Biden is from a retired federal employee who said he was grateful that Biden made it possible for the VA to send him an invitation to get his vaccination.