I have long argued that Donald Trump is criminally negligent for his gross neglect in handling the Coronavirus pandemic.
Trump admittedly lied to the American people about the threat of COVID-19 and deliberately downplayed the threat. He dismissed the scientific community for his own insane theories about injecting bleach and shining a light up your ass a cure for COVID-19. Like a snake oil salesman, he hawked the drug hydroxychloroquine for which the CDC had to issue a guidance that it was not an effective treatment for COVID-19. Trump attempted to corrupt the CDC by putting his political cronies in charge to alter or halt reports that were unflattering to the president and his administration’s response to Covid-19.
Trump eventually replaced Dr. Anthony Fauci as the face of the Coronavirus Task Force with a medical quack, Dr. Scott Atlas, who pushed a deadly theory of “herd immunity.” Donald Trump politicized the most effective means of preventing transmission of the disease: wearing a mask and social distancing. His disregard for these safety precautions led to him contracting COVID-19 and his turning the White House snd his campaign events into COVID-19 hot spots and superspreader events. By November, Trump had completely abandoned any effort to contain the Coronavirus pandemic. As a result, more than 400,000 Americans died from COVID-19 by the time Trump left office this week.
Trump has sought to take credit for the rapid development of COVID-19 vaccines, asserting that his Operation Warp Speed was responsible for the vaccines. Not true. Trump Takes Credit For Vaccine Created By Others, Including Immigrants: “The evidence shows Donald Trump had no role in creating the vaccines to fight Covid-19. There is nothing in the record that warrants him taking “credit” for the vaccines. A review of events shows immigrants and immigrant-led companies created the vaccines.”
The roll out of the vaccines has also been a disaster. Initially the Trump administration claimed 20 million vaccinations could be administered by the end of 2020. It vaccinated less than 4 million Americans.
The incoming Biden administration believed that this was just a problem with logistics and supply chain issues that its team of professionals could straighten out in due course.
Today we learn that President Joe Biden and his advisers are inheriting no coronavirus vaccine distribution plan to speak of from the Trump administration. This is another act of criminal negligence.
CNN reports, Biden inheriting nonexistent coronavirus vaccine distribution plan and must start ‘from scratch,’ sources say:
The Biden administration has promised to try to turn the Covid-19 pandemic around and drastically speed up the pace of vaccinating Americans against the virus. But in the immediate hours following Biden being sworn into office on Wednesday, sources with direct knowledge of the new administration’s Covid-related work told CNN one of the biggest shocks that the Biden team had to digest during the transition period was what they saw as a complete lack of a vaccine distribution strategy under former President Donald Trump, even weeks after multiple vaccines were approved for use in the United States.
“There is nothing for us to rework. We are going to have to build everything from scratch,” one source said.
Another source described the moment that it became clear the Biden administration would have to essentially start from “square one” because there simply was no plan as: “Wow, just further affirmation of complete incompetence.”
The incoming White House now faces intense pressure to make good on the promises that Biden made during the campaign and the transition phase to drastically turn things around on the pandemic and conduct himself entirely differently from Trump when it comes to the virus and vaccine distribution. During the transition period, Biden was openly critical of what he described as a “dismal” rollout of the Covid vaccines under the Trump administration, making clear that he placed significant blame on his predecessor for the situation he would ultimately inherit.
Two Covid-19 vaccines were approved for use in the United States before Trump left office. According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, around 16.5 million vaccine doses had been administered as of January 20 — far short of the last administration’s goal of administering 20 million vaccine doses by the end of 2020.
The new administration has asked some of the key players who worked on Covid and vaccines under Trump to resign from their roles, including Operation Warp Speed chief scientific adviser Moncef Slaoui and Surgeon General Jerome Adams. It has kept on others such as Dr. Anthony Fauci, who is now serving as Biden’s chief medical adviser on Covid-19. Adams was asked to stay on as an adviser.
Prior to Inauguration Day, some of Biden’s Covid-19 advisers had wanted to be careful not to be overly critical in public of the Trump administration’s handling of the virus and vaccine, given that the Biden transition team was already having a hard time getting critical information and [transition] cooperation from the outgoing administration, the source said.
Now that the transition of power has taken place, the Biden administration is hoping that they can quickly start to get a clearer picture of where things actually stand with vaccine distribution and administration across the country, going through something of a “fact-checking” exercise on what exactly the Trump administration had and had not done, they added.
CNN has previously reported that the Biden team’s most urgent concerns on Covid-19 include potential vaccine supply problems, coordination between federal and local governments, as well as funding, staffing and other resource needs for local governments. That is in addition to the emerging Covid variants, which the new White House — in consultation with scientists and experts — is watching warily.
Biden has made clear that slowing down the spread of Covid-19 and getting 100 million vaccine shots into Americans’ arms in his first 100 days in office are of utmost priority — goals that will shape whether Biden’s first years in office are ultimately deemed successful.
Having to build a vaccine delivery system from scratch will certainly delay this ambitious goal. Who could have foreseen that the Trump administration was so grossly incompetent that it had no vaccine delivery plan to speak of?
Criticizing the “lack of cooperation” from the Trump administration as an “impediment” for the new administration, White House Covid coordinator Jeff Zients told reporters on Wednesday that he was still confident that the administration can meet its 100 million vaccine shots in 100 days target.
“For almost a year now, Americans could not look to the federal government for any strategy, let alone a comprehensive approach to respond to Covid,” Zients said. “And we’ve seen the tragic costs of that failure. As President Biden steps into office today … that’ll change tomorrow.”
I don’t see how the Biden administration can possibly meet its ambitious goal. They were basically sabotaged by the gross incompetence of the outgoing Trump administration having no vaccine distribution plan.
If the Biden administration can still pull off its ambitious goal, it will be the greatest logistics and supply achievement since the American war effort in World War II.
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