It is now an established fact that the many naysayers who predicted that President Trump would never be able to deliver a vaccine this year were wrong. Fortunately, he did what they wished could not be done.
But the no-can-do crowd now has a second childish act: a stingy and grudging acknowledgment of the miracle that Trump and his team have accomplished. Those who express a haunted gratitude for a fact they cannot deny include the man who has reason to be the most grateful of Americans.
“I think the government deserves credit for getting this off the ground with Operation Warp Speed,” Joe Biden said while getting his vaccination with Trump.
“What credit?” Who then deserves the rest of the credit?
Also note that Biden cannot bring himself to say ‘President Trump’. It is simply the “administration” that deserves “some credit”.
This is stingy stuff. Imagine if Trump hadn’t pushed as hard as he had and instead allowed the vaccine research, development and human trials to follow the usual drawn-out process through the maze of approval checkpoints.
That would mean a delay of possibly four or five years, which would allow the vaccine to debut by or after the end of Biden’s term. How many Americans would have died from the coronavirus in the long interval? Half a million more? One million, 2 million?
Whatever the extra gruesome toll, the worst has clearly been avoided and many, many lives have been saved.
Also consider the economic consequences of another four or five years without a vaccine. Repeated waves of infections would have met with more lockdowns and restrictions, lowering or eliminating the incomes of tens of millions of families and driving cities and states closer to bankruptcy. Even Washington’s money printing presses would have had a hard time keeping up.
There’s no question how Biden himself would have responded without a vaccine. He said he would “follow the science” during the campaign and if that meant national lockdowns and home stays, so be it. One of his top advisers suggested that a country-wide lockdown would take “four to six weeks” to get the pandemic under control and reopen the economy.
Right, except that the initial lockdowns would only last for two weeks and that would be enough to flatten the curve. That was nine months ago.
In fact, the Trump vaccine is a great gift to the nation and the world, and so is the Biden administration. Her agenda on issues like climate and tax increases would have been dead on arrival with no way to reopen the country and give people hope that better and safer days are to come.
The vaccine will also allow Biden to pursue something like a normal presidency in the sense that he will no longer be forced to avoid most human contact due to his age and health concerns. He campaigned mainly from his Delaware basement, but it is inconceivable that he could have reigned while isolated in the Oval Office and locked up in the White House.
The vaccine will set him free personally, so it shouldn’t be asking too much of Biden to fully and honestly acknowledge Trump’s contribution. But apparently it is asking too much.
Nonetheless, Operation Warp Speed should be considered Trump’s greatest achievement as president, as the vaccine has been successfully produced and now millions of doses are distributed and administered. It’s hard to believe that any other modern commander-in-chief would have done almost as well, let alone better.
This was a triumph of the first order, made possible by the sheer power of his personality. Trump’s relentless pressure on private companies and sprawling bureaucracy turned what many in the leftist media and even some in the medical community saw as a dream into a lifesaving reality.
It’s as if his determination not to take prisoners was made right now, an impression that adds to the irony, given that the pandemic devastated the last year of his presidency and likely took him four more years. In the run-up to the election, most voters gave the president a thumbs down on his handling of the coronavirus, with a Pew poll in early October that gave Biden a 17-point lead on the topic, despite the Democrat not having. done. represented something significantly different from what Trump did.
Remember, too, that before the outbreak, Trump seemed headed for an almost certain victory, largely on the basis of the roaring economy. Unemployment rates for blacks and Latinos were at all-time lows, and wages rose faster for bottom and middle workers than at the top.
Median household income in 2019 was the highest ever recorded at $ 68,703, up 6.8 percent in just one year, according to Census Bureau statistics. That amount was more than $ 6,000 higher than the median household income in 2016, the last year of the Obama-Biden administration.
But the fear and political terror, combined with an economic freeze that at one point cost more than 40 million people their jobs, evaporated the great strength of the president.
His promise to rebuild what had been destroyed did not contradict Biden and the media’s argument that Trump initially did not understand the gravity of the outbreak and had no genuine sympathy for grieving families.
So despite the fact that the vaccine came fast enough to save a huge number of lives, it came too late to save Trump’s job.
Still, it was a remarkable achievement for which all Americans should be grateful.
It is his slogan!
Headline: Robinhood accused of misleading investors.
I don’t think the investors have read the book. Robin Hood and his Merry Men are stealing from the rich. That is their job!
A cure for dead voters
Reader Frank Giabia has an idea of how to combat one form of voter fraud: dead people voting. He writes: “When my father passed away, I contacted Social Security to advise them. They told me they already knew. Apparently they were advised by a funeral home or received the death certificate.
“Why can’t the same system be used to inform election committees?”
Biden’s signals to ‘independent’ AG
Joe Biden has said repeatedly, including at Tuesday’s press conference, that he will not discuss the FBI’s criminal tax investigation into his son Hunter Biden with the person he is nominating for attorney general.
He doesn’t have to. By publicly suggesting, as he did on Tuesday, that some of the media coverage of his son’s behavior is “Russian disinformation,” Biden is sending an unmistakable signal that Hunter Biden is a victim and not a perpetrator.
Any potential AG nominee who misses the signal won’t get the job. Case closed.