While I wholeheartedly applaud this amazing achievement of technology, I think that it's an open question as to if this was a political "noteworthy achievement" that differentiates the previous US administration from any other past, future or hypothetical alternate administration.
i.e. Yes, they signed off on "operation warp-speed", but who wouldn't? Isn't this the bare minimum, easy decision that any administration would affirm? It's throwing money at big private company, and that is how the US government under any administration likes to tackle big problems, rather than than the messy details and "big-government" stigma of co-ordinating a response in house?
In normal times, there is the potential for reputational damage from a Solyndra-style failure, but this was clearly not normal times.
We still underspent especially on manufacturing leading to the winter of 2020-2021 with very little administered.
Around 200 other countries did not!
Other powers with large economies also spent a lot - notably, Germany funded the development of Pfizer's COVID vaccine, and the UK funded the Oxford-AZ vaccine.
So, it would not be accurate to say that "operation warp-speed" was unique.
Who are you attributing this to? It's a cheap way to delegitimize people who disagree by making general derogatory statements about nobody in particular.
> Let's applaud the achievements that saved lives, regardless of the administration that promulgated them.
If that's what happened.
And that sentence is a comfortable cliche that invites one to stop thinking about the matter any further.
Often, if you have a "shades of gray" situation, I think it's more interesting to examine the seeming contradictions and try to find out where exactly your intuition went wrong. In this case, how did a chaotic organisation like the Trump administration, headed by someone with a history of scam and fraud, manage to pull this off?
...or you could just say "world is complicated" and be done with it.
Since they were also spectacularly incompetent at getting jabs into arms — Biden had to pick up the pieces on distribution — why do they deserve the benefit of the doubt?
As for undercutting experts, the current Vice President literally said she wouldn't take the vaccine, implying it couldn't be trusted because Trump was engaged in the rollout [1] while the current President said the vaccine was rushed and that people shouldn't trust it. [2]
Numerous "experts" threw FUD at the vaccines, calling them rushed repeatedly. [3] Dr Fauci himself said a vaccine's approval was "rushed" by regulators in some markets. [4]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dAjCeMuXR0
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/16/us/politics/biden-trump-c...
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/02/us/politics/coronavirus-v...
[4] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/fauci-says-uk-rushed-covid-vacc...
He was never branded as racist over the travel restrictions, but rather over his overt racism. Things like derisively calling it the Wuhan Flu. Trump, in fact, is the one who lied about Biden's criticism.
https://www.cnn.com/factsfirst/politics/factcheck_8df18b2a-2...
And Fauci was clearly expressing surprise at British regulatory process, not casting any doubt on the vaccine efficacy since Fauci had already endorsed the vaccines in question.
Here's a pretty thorough breakdown of the dozens of explicit lies Trump told specifically about covid and covid policy up until election day
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/11/trumps-...
I posted the receipts, they repeatedly questioned whether the vaccines could be trusted -- publicly, often.
You say my claims are untrue, yet you don't provide counter evidence that they did not claim the vaccines were "rushed" or could not be trusted. That'd be very hard to prove, since it's plastered all over media :)
>He was never branded as racist over the travel restrictions
Yeah, that's false. [1] He used the word "xenophobia" in direct response to the border closures.
>Things like derisively calling it the Wuhan Flu
Very dishonest argument, considering even NPR used this terminology early in the pandemic. [2] CNN, which you cite, also used this terminology. [3]
You must appreciate the irony of you claiming this terminology "derisive", while citing outlets who use the very same terminology, right?
>And Fauci was clearly expressing surprise at British regulatory process
You didn't refute my claim that he called it "rushed", which he did. Calling vaccines "rushed" is anti-vaccination disinformation.
[1] https://twitter.com/JoeBiden/status/1223727977361338370
[2] https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/01/30/8003939...
[3] https://edition.cnn.com/2020/02/05/health/wuhan-coronavirus-...
Oh come on. Yes, NPR and CNN referred to it as “the Wuhan coronavirus” at a time when it had just left China and looked like it might still be containable to the region. The only people still calling it “Wuhan flu” (particularly in fall of 2020 when it had long ago spread to everywhere else) were people who wanted to downplay its severity by comparing it to the flu and who wanted to really hammer home the point that it was from China. “Wuhan flu” is not some organic thing that people were just saying, it’s deliberate vice signaling on the part of conservative politicians.
I've watched the debate on this specific quote from Europe. I don't know how it was meant but I read it as "Please stop calling this the Chinese virus" (or something such, I don't remember the exact terminology adopted by Trump at the time).
Seen from Europe, the way that Trump called it was indeed... surprising. Everybody else (in our media) called it "the coronavirus" or "covid". I'll take your word that everybody was using that term in the US, I don't follow CNN or NPR.
Took me some time to realize why US Conservatives understood that tweet as branding closing travel from China as racist.
Now, I remember that closing travel from China was very much criticized, but for other reasons:
- the way it was implemented was extremely porous (you only needed to change plane anywhere on the way and you could get into the US), so this travel ban was guaranteed to have very little impact on circulation of the disease;
- actual policy didn't block travel from China, as US citizens (and I think several other countries, if my memory serves) could take a plane from China to the US.
- numbers from China closing internal travel showed that it had delayed the epidemic by ~24h, if my memory serves, so epidemiologists kept warning that it wouldn't solve anything but were drowned in the media circus;
- epidemiologists were begging for quarantines to be implemented – they weren't.
In other words, that travel ban was basically security theater.
> Calling vaccines "rushed" is anti-vaccination disinformation.
Have to agree with you on that one. Fortunately, I believe that this didn't last.
I already said this isn't true. It's already a facile argument when you say "the vaccine" knowing that multiple are in production. Biden, Harris and Fauci all very unequivocally endorsed the vaccines that passed the rigorous approval processes laid by my medical experts. Trump said vaccines cause autism repeatedly and as recently as 2015
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/09/health/trump-vaccines.htm...
He endorsed Hydroxychloroquine and injecting disinfectants.
But you didn't prove it. Your source doesn't mention it, mine does. At this point, it's merely conjecture on your part. I cited a source for my claim.
This could easily have become the next boondogle, akin to Solyndra.
The fact that it didn't, and achieved such a good result is a rarity.
To be honest, I don't consider the half a billion dollars from Solyndra to be much of a boondoggle, in the grand scheme of things. It's a loan guarantee that had intentional fraud by the borrower.
For some of us, it's a challenge to disentangle the achievements from the politics (e.g. "I hate Trump, so I refuse to believe his administration did anything of note"). But the world isn't a comforting black & white; instead, it's nuanced shades of gray.
Let's applaud the achievements that saved lives, regardless of the administration that promulgated them.