The Stunning Success of Operation Warp Speed
Joe Biden claims credit, but Donald Trump set the nation on a course to end this pandemic.
One of President Donald Trump’s many successes, and perhaps his longest lasting one, was Operation Warp Speed. That herculean effort facilitated the production of multiple COVID-19 vaccines in mere months, using scientific advancement on the very concept of a “vaccine” in the process. Thanks to that program, President NOT Donald Trump will benefit from a waning pandemic.
Joe Biden announced yesterday, “We’re now on track to have enough vaccine supply for every adult in America by the end of May.” That projection is two months earlier than his previous promise, and nearly 80 million Americans have already been vaccinated with at least one round (over 50 million with both), and there are nearly two million more doses administered every day.
Not bad considering Biden’s bogus claim that “we didn’t have [a vaccine] when we came into office.” Fact-checkers rushed to justify this as a Bidenism when he had elsewhere admitted the contrary. But for all those “fact-checking” fans of “missing context,” the fuller context of Biden’s remarks is a repeated trashing of the Trump administration’s efforts.
That he was so busy discussing what a bad job his predecessor did that he overstepped with one comment is hardly a defense.
Biden and other officials have either insinuated or outright alleged that there were too few vaccines and no distribution plan when Trump left office, which is dishonest. Warp Speed contracted for roughly 500 million vaccines. That they weren’t yet literally on the shelf on January 20 is not a failure of Team Trump.
Meanwhile, Biden is taking credit for Trump’s success. He said yesterday that this new May timeline is “a consequence of the stepped-up process that I’ve ordered.”
The Biden administration is also playing politics with the distribution plan, repeating the demands of teachers unions that educators move to the head of the line … so that schools can reopen, of course. We’re all for teachers being vaccinated and for schools reopening, but a non-politicized distribution plan would prioritize age, not favored vocation and political donations.
What does this success mean for a return to normal? Echoing Dr. Anthony Fauci, Biden hedged, “I’ve been cautioned not to give an answer to that because we don’t know for sure. But my hope is by this time next year, we’re going to be back to normal, and before that [is] my hope.”
To be fair, politicians are not prophets, and Trump most certainly misstepped with his messaging regarding COVID. Biden would like not to repeat that mistake.
Yet he’s setting a ridiculously low bar considering what American ingenuity has accomplished. Perhaps he hewed too closely to this New York Times headline: “The U.S. Is Edging Toward Normal, Alarming Some Officials.” Some folks just can’t let go of their power, and some Americans practically have Stockholm Syndrome over the whole thing.
In any case, widespread vaccination is good news, and combined with much of the population having already had COVID, we hope it means there’s light at the end of this year-long tunnel.