Newly sworn in President Joe Biden and his advisers are inheriting no coronavirus vaccine distribution plan to speak of from the Trump administration, sources tell CNN, posing a significant challenge for the new White House.
The Biden administration has promised to try to turn the Covid-19 pandemic around and drastically speed up the pace of vaccinating Americans against the virus. But in the immediate hours following Biden being sworn into office on Wednesday, sources with direct knowledge of the new administration’s Covid-related work told CNN one of the biggest shocks that the Biden team had to digest during the transition period was what they saw as a complete lack of a vaccine distribution strategy under former President Donald Trump, even weeks after multiple vaccines were approved for use in the United States.
“There is nothing for us to rework. We are going to have to build everything from scratch,” one source said.
Another source described the moment that it became clear the Biden administration would have to essentially start from “square one” because there simply was no plan as: “Wow, just further affirmation of complete incompetence.”
The new administration has asked some of the key players who worked on Covid and vaccines under Trump to resign from their roles, including Operation Warp Speed chief scientific adviser Moncef Slaoui and Surgeon General Jerome Adams. It has kept on others such as Dr. Anthony Fauci, who is now serving as Biden’s chief medical adviser on Covid-19. Adams was asked to stay on as an adviser.
Prior to Inauguration Day, some of Biden’s Covid-19 advisers had wanted to be careful not to be overly critical in public of the Trump administration’s handling of the virus and vaccine, given that the Biden transition team was already having a hard time getting critical information and cooperation from the outgoing administration, the source said.
Now that the transition of power has taken place, the Biden administration is hoping that they can quickly start to get a clearer picture of where things actually stand with vaccine distribution and administration across the country, going through something of a “fact-checking” exercise on what exactly the Trump administration had and had not done, they added.
I trust none of this comes as a surprise. This would be a big challenge even if Team Biden were getting a handoff from a competent, caring, and diligent administration. And remember, right now we’re still experiencing over four thousand COVID deaths per day, with hospitals coast to coast full to bursting. We’re likely still not at the peak from the Christmas-celebration phase of the pandemic.
To be fair, it’s in the Biden administration’s political interests to emphasize what a crappy job Trump did with pandemic response, so that any blame they place on their predecessor for the inevitable bump or stumble sounds credible. And for all the justified criticism, the US is not doing all that badly when compared to other countries when it comes to getting people vaccinated. I’ve said before, the single most important thing that Biden can do to give Dems a fighting chance in the 2022 midterm election is to put the country back on a good track, and the two things he can do to make that happen are get the economy humming again and get everyone vaccinated. The incentives are lined up with the plan of action, the rest is all about getting it done. TPM and Daily Kos have more.
I just read on MSN that the hospitals are running out of vaccine, and distribution has stopped. I am going to fact check this. How did this happen?