Trump Deserves Gratitude for Mobilizing Vaccine 'Miracles'
By: Larry Bell
Our great President Trump was a miracle worker as he fought the China plague and mitigated its effects through strong actions. America is a grateful nation for the efforts of one President, Donald J. Trump to guide us through this, to get a vaccine and to avoid total destruction of our economy in the process.
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Trump Deserves Gratitude for Mobilizing Vaccine 'Miracles'
We should all be enormously grateful for good reasons to hope that 2021 will finally offer relief from a dystopian year of death, despair, disruption and dysfunction.
Granted, there are no guarantees that the COVID crisis is over … no firm time schedule to sound an "all clear" siren…to return to those nostalgic "normal" conditions that so abruptly ended a year ago.
Nevertheless, few "experts" imagined that three new vaccines would materialize within 10 months after the first U.S. COVID death, rather than the 10 years it took to develop one for measles.
Even Dr. Anthony Fauci stated nine months ago that "It will take at least a year and a half to have a vaccine we can use."
After all, this is the same authority who Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser proclaimed December 24 to be "Dr. Anthony S. Fauci Day" dedicated to "a hero to our nation during this incredibly difficult year, working tirelessly to save lives and guide our nation's response to recovery from this pandemic."
But with all due credit, Tony Fauci wasn't the one that brought about that 10-month vaccine "miracle."
Dr. Paul Offit, a co-inventor of the first rotavirus vaccine in 2006 following 26 years of research, had told CNN , "When Dr. Fauci said 12 to 18 months, I thought this was ridiculously optimistic." Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center of the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, added, "and I'm sure he did, too."
A New York Times feature agreed with Dr. Offit, declaring that "The grim truth behind this rosy forecast is that a vaccine probably won't arrive any time soon."
The Times observed that any promising vaccine would encounter a bureaucratic FDA approval nightmare where for every scientist there are three lawyers that care only about liability. Those reviews typically take another full year.
Any claims that "corners were cut" in the clinical trials or the government's safety review and approval procedures are unfounded. Key reasons the process went faster than usual are because of rapid worldwide research on the coronavirus genetics that began last January with new scientific tools that made it possible to "read" the COVID-19 genetic material of the virus in days, rather than months.
Meanwhile, scientists and vaccine makers had already been working for years to develop a "platform" approach that uses messenger RNA (mRNA) as the delivery agent to teach the body how to recognize and fight a new virus .
The first vaccines to reach the market use this platform strategy. Other vaccines that are still being studied are based on vaccine strategies that have been used in the past, but these take longer.
Another big reason for spectacularly rapid progress was the Trump administration's government agreement to pay successfully competing companies to produce large amounts of their vaccines in advance, even while trials were testing how well the vaccines actually worked in people.
If those clinical trials showed a vaccine didn't work, or had unacceptable side effects, it would be thrown out – but the company wouldn't lose money. On the other hand, if the trials showed a vaccine worked and was safe, the companies would be ready to ship it out – which is what's happening now.
So yes, leaders of federal agencies, including directors of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the Federal Drug Administration (FDA), Health and Human Services (HHS) and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases played vital roles in expediting and monitoring those developments.
The approval process through the FDA employed an independent panel of experts to critically review the vaccine makers' study data before voting to approve their use on an emergency basis. The FDA also requires the companies to continue to track what happens to people who take part in its studies.
The CDC will monitor what happens to people who get the vaccine outside the studies.
And yes, hundreds of medical and public health schools, along with their associated research labs and tens of thousands of epidemiologists, virologists and other specialists, contributed in various ways to this progress. Many rightly claim that the virus' genome couldn't have been sequenced or prepared for fragile mRNA vaccine delivery systems without their help.
Let's also give some credit for major research and development efforts on the part of private organizations and donors such as the Gates Foundation which established a major "alliance to finance and coordinate the development of new vaccines" (CEPTI) in Davos, Switzerland as well.
And let's certainly not forget those all-important private, profit-seeking pharmaceutical corporations, including Pfizer, Moderna, AstraZeneca, BioMTech and Novavax who made the heavy lifting breakthroughs. Pfizer and Moderna vaccines which have been approved for emergency use are already on the way, and others are reportedly close behind.
All well and good reasons to be thankful, but not without recognizing the true leadership hero most responsible for transforming those timescale "fantasies" into "miracles" that those "experts" so recently dismissed and even ridiculed.
None of this would have happened were it not for President Donald J. Trump's Operation Warp Speed which organized and mobilized the great competitively innovative forces of American capitalism in a massive crisis intervention effort comparable to the Manhattan Project that led to victory in World War II.
It was Donald Trump who enlisted Moncef Slaoui — a former Moderna executive who divested himself of $12.4 million in stock options he held in that company — to manage and expedite the successful enterprise.
Recall that on January 31 — the day after the CDC publicly confirmed the first person-to-person COVID-19 transmission — Trump had overruled the WHO "experts" and shut down flights from China. Joe Biden criticized the China travel ban, stating, "This is no time for Donald Trump's record of hysteria and xenophobia."
In mid-March, President Trump signed the Families First Coronavirus Response Act that immediately launched a massive COVID testing program, and invoked the Defense Production Act, delegating authority to HHS and FEMA to produce and deliver humongous numbers of ventilators, surgical masks and gloves, and hospital beds for health care workers.
These efforts drew sincere praise from Democratic Governors Andrew Cuomo of New York, Gavin Newson of California and Phil Murphy of New Jersey.
Whereas the Trump-Pence administration scored repeated COVID field goals, the Obama-Biden administration punted with the Swine Flu pandemic which, very fortunately, was far less deadly.
And despite President-elect Biden's despairingly depressing forecasts of a dark winter ahead that "will only get worse," the rollout of Trump's miracle vaccines finally promises bright, long-awaited hopes for recovery.
Remember who to thank when you get that encouraging shot in the arm.
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Trump is a loser, I don't thank losers.
Trump lied to the American people about the threat of the virus, that's an established fact. Those lies and the downplaying of the virus which he admitted to cost the American people tens if not hundreds of thousands of lives. Just because months later he capitulated to the pushing and prodding of the experts desperate to get him to fast track the vaccine efforts does not prove he deserves any thanks or praise. Those suck up brown nosing sycophants who are praising him do so no matter what he does so their opinion is completely worthless. They are mindless slaves to his narcissism and will keep licking his toes no matter how much he kicks them. Trump is no better than pond scum, so what does that make those who prostrate themselves to pond scum? Nothing but the feces and bacteria the pond scum feeds off of.
That's a perfect description of Trump and his slavish cultists.
No, Trump worshippers are an actual cult. They have elevated Trump to a God-like status, shower him with worshipful adoration, show him unquestioning obedience and foresake all others to follow only his word. When he commands them to drink the Kool Aid, their response will always be: "How much, Lord?"