“We’re looking to get [a vaccine] by the end of the year if we can, maybe before,” Trump said on May 15, during in a Rose Garden press conference. “We would love to see if we can do it prior to the end of the year. We think we are going to have some very good results coming out very quickly.”
“I think we’re going to have a vaccine by the end of the year,” he told the media later that day.
The media quickly went to the experts to throw cold water on Trump’s ambition prediction. NBC News “fact-checked” Trump, noting that “experts say that the development, testing and production of a vaccine for the public is still at least 12 to 18 months off, and that anything less would be a medical miracle.”
One expert, Dr. Paul Offit, a professor at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and the director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, told NBC News that he didn’t think a vaccine was going be ready until the middle or end of 2021. “I think it’s possible you could see a vaccine in people’s arms next year — by the middle or end of next year. But this is unprecedented, so it’s hard to predict,” he said.
Dr. Walter Orenstein, a professor at Emory University and the associate director of the Emory Vaccine Center, said that while it was technically possible “there’s a lot of things that could go wrong,” and that a vaccine within a year would be a “miracle.”
Well, thanks to President Trump and Operation Warp Speed, we got that miracle. A vaccine has been approved by the FDA and has already begun being administered.
Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar says that 20 million vaccinations are expected to be administered this month, and 100 million by the end of February, just with the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines.
CNBC reported that the coronavirus vaccine development “shattered every record in modern medical history.”
Trump delivered, giving America the miracle it needed. Sadly, former Vice President Joe Biden and Senator Kamala Harris spent months sowing the seeds of distrust in a COVID-19 vaccine.
“As we enter the height of election season, President Trump should assure us all that the White House will respect the independent authority of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to decide, free from political pressure, if the vaccine is safe and effective,” Biden said in July.
Kamala Harris even accused President Trump of wanting to put out an unsafe vaccine for political reasons. Trump is “looking at an election coming up in less than sixty days, and he’s grasping for whatever he can get to pretend that he’s been a leader on this issue when he’s not.”
Their efforts resulted in a significant decline in trust in a COVID-19 vaccination, necessitating three former presidents (Obama, Bush, and Clinton) to pledge to publicly take the vaccine on camera to restore confidence in it.
A vaccine produced this quickly would never have happened if Joe Biden had been running things. He even declared in his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention that “no miracle is coming.”
But as Mike Pence said during the Republican National Convention, “Joe doesn’t seem to understand is that America is a nation of miracles.” Then he announced, “I’m proud to report that we’re on track to have the world’s first safe, effective coronavirus vaccine by the end of this year.”
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Matt Margolis is the author of Airborne: How The Liberal Media Weaponized The Coronavirus Against Donald Trump, and the bestselling book The Worst President in History: The Legacy of Barack Obama. You can follow Matt on Twitter @MattMargolis
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