Joe Biden's COVID-19 strategy was a spectacular failure. Frankly, he'd do well not to make it an issue of the 2024 presidential campaign, yet for some reason, he's decided to do just that.
On Monday, Biden gave remarks at the National Association of Counties Legislative Conference, and he claimed that Trump was at fault for not vaccinating the public, which Biden claimed caused the deaths of more than a million Americans.
"You know, after we — the fellow who’s running again — well, I .... After he did no — he did not move on making sure that we dealt with vaccinating the American public," he said. "We ended up losing over a million people dead — a million people. A million."
Biden just said that "we lost 1 million people dead" from covid because President Trump "did not move on making sure that we dealt with vaccinating the American public." pic.twitter.com/dJ6FH2geJM
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) February 12, 2024
Let's just ignore questions about the vaccines' effectiveness for the moment because, according to Biden, mass vaccination was the stake through the heart of COVID.
Let's look at the facts.
The Pfizer and Moderna COVID vaccines first became available in December 2020; they were developed in record time under Operation Warp Speed. The Trump administration ordered at least 400 million vaccine doses from Pfizer and Moderna — enough vaccines to innoculate 77% of the United States population eligible to receive a shot — before Biden even took office.
The Biden administration also inherited a vaccine distribution plan that the Trump administration developed under Operation Warp Speed, and vaccine production and distribution under Biden followed the same trajectory as they did under Trump.
But we didn't lose a million Americans under Trump. In fact, it was 16 months into Biden's term before we lost a million lives to COVID.
For our VIPs: More Bad News For The COVID Boosted
“Today, we mark a tragic milestone,” Joe Biden announced on May 12, 2022. “One million American lives lost to COVID-19. One million empty chairs around the dinner table. Each an irreplaceable loss. Each leaves behind a family, a community, and a nation forever changed because of this pandemic.”
At this point, Biden had been president longer than Trump during the pandemic, but he still blames Trump for the lack of vaccinations and the more than a million American lives lost to the virus — most of which actually happened on his watch, not Trump's. It's true.
By late December 2021, more Americans had died from COVID under Joe Biden than under Donald Trump. That same day, the same man who promised he would "shut down the virus" decided to shift the responsibility of ending the pandemic onto our nation’s governors, arguing that “there is no federal solution [to COVID]. This gets solved at a state level.” This came just a few short months after he demanded that governors “get out of the way” of federal efforts in the fight against COVID.
Biden campaigned on the idea that he had a plan to end COVID and that Trump didn't. Yet more people died from COVID under Joe Biden than under Trump, even with the vaccines, and the tragic milestone of a million COVID deaths took place well into his presidency.
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