What’s a Trump propaganda network to do when Democratic President Joe Biden spectacularly outshines Dear Leader on handling the pandemic?
The first seven minutes of a Special Report panel discussion on the pandemic suggested that Dr. Anthony Fauci and the media are responsible for Donald Trump’s election loss (because they didn’t buy into his still completely theoretical possibility that the coronavirus originated in a Chinese lab), they got around to suggesting Trump is now responsible for the pandemic recovery.
Anchor Bret Baier ran through the recovery statistics: New confirmed cases down 65% from the average one month ago, he said. Seven-day rolling average of deaths down 71% from three months ago, and the seven-day rolling average of hospitalizations down 51% from the beginning of March.
Joe Biden was president during that entire time period but panelist Katie Pavlich gave Trump most of the credit. She said, “The stats are wonderful and they can be attributed to Operation Warp Speed, and we are happy that the Biden administration has been able to get these vaccines out to people who want them.”
Pavlich also found an excuse to attack Biden while she was praising Trump. She added, “However, the president was pretty dishonest today when he started at the January 20th mark when it came to the overall decline in hospitalizations and vaccines, when we started seeing that number on January 9.”
“We’ve also seeing a habit of this administration of saying that they started from scratch when it came to vaccine distribution. They set expectations very low when it came to vaccinating 100 million Americans in the first 100 days when that was the speed that they were given when President Trump left office.”
FACT CHECK: The bar was set low only compared to the result. 200 million vaccines were administered within President Biden’s first 100 days in office. Also, Pfizer was never part of Operation Warp Speed.
You can watch Fox try to credit Trump for Biden’s work below, from the June 2, 2021 Special Report.
In reality, Operation Warp Speed was a publicity announcement, made by the Pence White House in their panic as they realized that they were deeply underwater in their efforts to stay in power in mid 2020. So they frantically told the media that somehow they would be able to provide a vaccine just in time for the November election and then everything would be all better. As it happens, the major companies like Pfizer were already working on that, from well before Pence’s childish spokesman opened his mouth.
And when the vaccines were finally ready to be distributed, it became clear that the Pence White House had no idea how to get them to the public. They had assumed that each state would somehow create their own distribution system, and they hadn’t bothered to do any work of their own. Result – complete disaster in terms of trying to actually get vaccines in people’s arms.
It wasn’t until the Pence White House left office in disgrace that the Biden/Harris team was able to roll out an effective production and distribution plan, one that saw a 200% success rate in Biden’s first 100 days.
I agree with John that it’s pathetic to see angry Right Wingers desperately trying to throw the credit for our current improvements to Pence’s spokesman. But one supposes we should have expected this, given how they played a similar game when President Obama took office. (We went from the Right insisting that there was no recession to suddenly declaring we were practically in a Depression and that it was all President Obama’s fault…)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmInkxbvlCs
