No, Democrats, You did not Invent the China-Virus Vaccines

MIAMI — President Joe Biden will address the nation tonight on the one-year anniversary of the World Health Organization’s declaration of the China-virus global pandemic. Biden will have a new opportunity to acknowledge President Donald J. Trump’s contribution to fighting this plague through the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines that his Operation Warp Speed program yielded in record time. Johnson & Johnson’s inoculation also was launched on Trump’s watch. However, it arrived during Biden’s tenure.

Biden might ignore these facts and pretend that Trump merely played golf as COVID-19 wreaked havoc at home and abroad. If so, this would echo the Democrat lie that Trump ignored the pandemic and had nothing to do with developing these life-saving prophylactics. 

For months, Democrats have spoken as if there were no COVID-19 vaccines until the lazy and unfocused “DonaldTrump” left office, and Jumpin’ Joe Biden took charge and personally coaxed these injections from his own laboratory in the White House residence.

Biden told CNN’s Anderson Cooper on February 16: “…it’s one thing to have the vaccine — which we didn’t have when we came into office.”

“…we’re starting from scratch on something that’s been raging for almost an entire year!” Vice President Kamala Harris told Axios a day earlier.

White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said: “We’re building out of the hole that we inherited.”

According to Governor Phil Murphy (D – New Jersey), “The Biden team is doing a great job. They inherited an empty cupboard.”

Official data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are a lethal injection in the arm of this nonsense.

The first COVID-19 vaccines were administered last December 14 — 37 days before Biden’s inauguration. That day, 3,550 people got the Pfizer shot.

Biden pledged to deliver 1 million vaccines per day. What a laudable objective! Indeed, this was such a great idea that it became reality on January 7 — 13 days before the Biden Era. That day, 1,085,618 vaccines were administered. The next day, 1,148,270 men and women got vaccinated. 

While these figures fluctuated and sometimes fell short of Biden’s benchmark, at least a million individuals were vaccinated on five different days in the final weeks of Trump’s term. This included four consecutive days: January 12 through 15.  

On January 19, Trump’s final full day in office, 1,245,550 people received either the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine. By that date, cumulative doses administered totaled 19,778,565. Those who had received one or more doses equaled 16,688,875. By the day before Trump flew to Palm Beach, 2,775,796 already had been given both doses of the COVID-19 vaccine.

Despite his mutterings to the contrary, Biden personally received not one, but two shots during Trump’s tenure. The first was administered on live TV on December 21. The second on January 11. These videos are readily available, if someone would like to refresh the president’s recollection.

Admiral Brett Giroir MD, former Assistant Secretary of Health, was deeply involved in Trump’s inoculation effort, Giroir wrote February 25 via Twitter: “I am so tired of the continuing lies that @potus [Biden] inherited a #COVID19Vaccine mess, when in fact 99% of current vaccine manufacturing and distribution is EXACTLY as planned and explicitly described by Trump Administration’s Operation Warp Speed.” 

“I pushed the FDA like they have never been pushed before,” President Trump told the Conservative Political Action Conference in Orlando, Florida, on February 28. “They told me that loud and clear. They have never been pushed like I pushed them. I didn’t like them at all, but once we got it done, I said, ‘I now love you very much.’ What the Trump administration has done with vaccines has in many respects, perhaps saved large portions of the world. Not only our country, but large portions of the world.”

“Not only did we push the FDA far beyond what the bureaucrats wanted to do,” Trump added. “We also put up billions and billions of dollars, 10 billion, to produce the vaccines before we knew they were going to work. It was called a calculated bet or a calculated risk. We took a risk because if we didn’t do that, you still wouldn’t have the vaccines.”

The Biden Administration, to its credit, got vaccinationsa up to its daily peak to date: 2,801,422 on February 26. Good for them.

But Team Biden should be honest, humble, and grateful enough to admit that they would have zero vaccines to ship today, were it not for Donald J. Trump,  his government colleagues, and their private-sector partners in Operation Warp Speed. They jointly created two vaccines in a record-breaking nine months and brought them to market by New Year’s Eve 2020, just as President Trump promised — despite the derisive laughter of his useless critics.

Deroy Murdock is a Manhattan-based Fox News Contributor, a contributing editor with National Review Online, and a senior fellow with the London Center for Policy Research.