Former President Donald Trump slammed the Biden administration on Friday after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s announcement concerning mask-wearing, complaining that his own administration’s names are “not even mentioned” in connection with the development and distribution of COVID-19 vaccines.
“Isn’t it incredible that because of the vaccines, which I and my Administration came up with years ahead of schedule (despite the fact that everybody, including [Anthony] Fauci, said would never happen), that we no longer need masks,” Trump said in a statement. “Yet our names are not even mentioned in what everybody is calling the modern day miracle of the vaccines?”
Under the Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed, $10 billion of the CARES Act, the first round of COVID-19 stimulus/relief package, provided support to pharmaceutical firms for research, development, and accelerated production of a safe and effective vaccine for COVID. Because of the push, the vaccine development time was reduced to less than one year, down from the usual 10-15 years normally needed to develop a vaccine.
President Joe Biden, while announcing the CDC’s pullback on masks in a Rose Garden address, said Thursday that the decision is a “great milestone” made possible “by the extraordinary success we have had in vaccinating so many Americans, so quickly.” He didn’t mention Trump or Operation Warp Speed in the announcement.
“Without the vaccines, this world would have been in for another 1917 Spanish Flu, where up to 100 million people died,” Trump continued Friday. “Because of the vaccines we pushed and developed in record time, nothing like that will be even close to happening. Just a mention please! The Biden Administration had zero to do with it. All they did was continue our plan of distribution, which was working well right from the beginning!”
Trump has frequently complained that the Biden administration has not given his administration credit for the development of the vaccines, including referring to himself in an interview late last month as the “father of the vaccine” and declaring that if he had not been the president, “you wouldn’t have a vaccine.”
He also insisted at the time that his administration had a “great delivery system,” but Biden’s administration got credit for the expanded rollout when “all they did is take what we had and keep it moving.”
Meanwhile, the Biden administration has frequently credited science and medical experts from Trump’s time in office for the vaccine production but Biden and other officials in his administration have slammed Trump himself over the handling of the coronavirus pandemic.
Biden has claimed that under Trump, the previous administration didn’t have a “real plan” to vaccinate most of the United States and said that the former president “failed to order enough vaccines, failed to mobilize the effort to administer the shots, failed to set up vaccine centers.”