Of course they would have. I suspect it took an army to keep Trump from trying to monetize the development and distribution.
OF COURSE, he doesn’t. This is little Donnie Trump’s modus operandi. Get out there and say we SHOULD do something, sit back and make up excuses why everyone else should be the ones to do it and then when it is done run out and take credit. If you push back then you are insulted, berated and denigrated. THIS time, WE did it. BIDEN did it. Not a single Republican voted to HELP, to give MONEY, to aid in the distribution.
“The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men. Gang aft a-gley.”
In this case, the mice were actually rats.
Strong in this one, is the delusion.
I just keep thinking about how much farther ahead we could have been if concurrent with the start of vaccine development, a parallel path of vaccine distribution logistics; vaccine eligibility; & vaccine scheduling could have been developed, QA/QC’d, and ready to hit the ground running as EUA’s were issued.
Like if Joe Biden had been President.
The best thing that Trump was capable of doing was to stay out of the way
- and he did a crappy job of that !
Planning takes research and thinking. Neither is a tRump talent.
??
Badonkadonk loves her some daddycakes …
You forgot that really great infrastructure week in the middle of lockdown.
They’re journalists. Logistics is not part of their training.
Fat donnie’s vaccine distribution plan will be ready in . . . two weeks.
- and if Trump had not been a monumental asshole obstructionist when it came to testing!
he savagely opposed both kinds of testing (and likely could not tell the difference between them)
- diagnostic for care & treatment
- population-wide for determination of prevalence - rate of spread - to inform the creation of action plans …
Trump was a destructive idiot as he pursued a Luddite-like approach to science, research and medical care … and cost thousands and thousands of lives as he indulged his ignorance
If Trump had responded more aggressively fourteen months ago when the threat of COVID-19 was first emerging there might be some credit for him. But he did nothing until the announcement of “Operation Warp-Speed” to develop a vaccine program in May of last year. And even at that, Trump’s so-called "leadership was ham-handed, contradictory, and inadequate. and now we have 230,000+ deaths in our country and millions more stricken with this deadly disease, and little Donnie Trump wants credit for the vaccines? Pardon me while I puke.
No kidding, the daily drama and soap opera of poor, poor Donnie was enough to make a person vomit.
There is a reason he lost interest in Covid. It might have been he considered the pandemic to be bad politics but it could also be he figured he couldn’t make enough money off the vaccine.
Far from establishing a plan for vaccine distribution, the Trump admin, after losing the election, was setting funding time bombs to go off after Biden took office and refusing to work together during the transition. Like everything they did in their 4 years, they lacked competence and only served the selfish interests of the sociopath-in-chief.
Meanwhile, Trump also recently owned shares of Regeneron (REGN) – as well as Gilead Sciences (GILD), maker of the antiviral drug remdesivir that the president is also taking. Both stocks were listed as assets on Trump’s 2017 filing with the U.S. Office of Government Ethics, though neither were holdings on the president’s most recent filing for 2020.
?
I don’t think that Trump even helped “scale up” manufacturing.
Pfizer developed the vaccine entirely on its own – in July, the OWS committed to spend $1.95 billion on their vaccine IF IT WORKED – but all the risk remained with Pfizer.
Moderna literally designed its vaccine in January 2020, within days of the vaccine being identified and its DNA being sequenced. By mid February, it had manufactured enough vaccine to apply for permission to begin Phase 1 trials. OWS didn’t even start until mid-May. Its almost certain that the private sector would have come through with the funds necessary to ramp up production once Phase II trials results started being published in July.
And as far as the J&J/Merck partnership is concerned, Trump’s efforts were a dismal failure. Merck was working on its own vaccine at the time, and didn’t abandon its efforts until Jan 25, 2021. Once the J&J vaccine was approved, Biden arranged for the manufacturing capacity that Merck had been preparing for its own vaccine to be used for the J&J vaccine.
Its POSSIBLE that OWS contributed to some increase in manufacturing capacity for both the J&J and Merck vaccines – but its equally possible that those companies would have done so on their own, without US government help, given the tremendous demand for a vaccine worldwide.
Trump’s plan was pretty much like his plan for anything else.
Let someone else figure it out and then take credit for any success.
At least he’s not around any more to really get in the way and fuck things up, as he did so often.