Donald Trump’s coronavirus vaccine botch job:
Robert Harrington | 10:30 am EST November 15, 2020
We have the Roman historian Tacitus to thank for the aphorism that has come down to us through many revisions as, “Success has many fathers but failure is an orphan.” While no clear-eyed retrospective of history will ever be able to excuse Donald Trump for his failure overseeing America’s role in the coronavirus pandemic, neither will it give him an ounce of credit for the coming vaccine. The credit is owed to Berlin, not Washington. Donald Trump and his much-vaunted, endlessly self-promoted “Operation Warp Speed” played no part.
That hasn’t stopped Trump from trying to seize credit, of course. Taking credit for the hard work of others is what he does. He began his pirate ship administration by trying to take credit for the economy he was handed by President Obama, an economy of such robust strength that it took him nearly four long years to ruin it. But history is not going to let him take credit for this vaccine. History is now being written by the winners again, and the winners are going to tell the truth.
And the truth is Pfizer didn’t receive a single penny of funding from Operation Warp Speed for the development, clinical trial and manufacture of the vaccine. Rather, its partner, BioNTech SE, has received all the money exclusively from the German government.
We ought to all give Pfizer and BioNTech and Germany the standings ovation they deserve. Meanwhile Donald Trump has never met praise for someone else that he didn’t become green with jealousy and rage over. He doesn’t just want some of the credit, he wants it all. And he can’t have it. Like I said, the winners have got this narrative, and we’re gonna tell it like it is.
The only thing America has done was to buy itself a privileged place in the queue back in July, if and when any vaccine was developed. The Trump administration agreed to pay almost $2 billion for 100 million doses, with an option to acquire as many as 500 million more, once clearance comes from the FDA for emergency use authorization.
No story about Trump trying to steal the credit for a vaccine he played no part in would be complete without a little world class incompetence mixed in. Donald Trump Jr had this to tweet about Pfizer’s vaccine revelation: “The timing of this is pretty amazing. Nothing nefarious about the timing of this at all right?”
In other words, we learned of the vaccine five days after the election, so it couldn’t help Trump steal credit for it early enough to help him con the American people into re-electing him. But an administration that was behind the vaccine all along should have known the vaccine was coming well ahead of the election, right? Once again, the Keystone Cops administration is out of step with itself.
