The Coronavirus thread

Quote: JCW09

move along, it's over your head.

Quote: JCW09

move along, it's over your head.

Quote: Tripdufan

Wait, what did Biden lie about?

Quote: kenarman

So Trump has had a tremendous influence on you. All the time Trump was in the Whitehouse you were upset at what you said were lies. You have now changed your mind and accepted Trump was right and that a sitting president is allowed to lie.

Quote: kenarman

You should really follow the thread before you post.

Quote: Tanko

He’s taking credit for Trump’s work. T

That's as far as I got. Like watching paint dry.

Quote: Tanko

Great opening!.

"Good evening my fellow Americans. To light, I'd like to talk to you about where we are,...."



2:30. Claimed more Covid deaths than WW1, WW2 Vietnam and 9-11 combined. Not true.

8:30 "Two months ago, this country didn’t have enough vaccines to vaccinate all of the American public. Soon we will. We’ve been working with manufacturers to purchase hundreds of millions of doses of these three vaccines."

That was all Trump. On December 18, Trump announced the purchase of 100 million more vaccines from Moderna, and on December 23rd, he announced the purchase of 100 million more from Pfizer.

Prior to that, Trump contracted with drug makers for one billion vaccines, while they were still in clinical trial.

Pfizer-BioNTech: 100 million doses
Moderna: 100 million doses
Johnson & Johnson: 100 million doses
AstraZeneca: 300 million doses
Novavax: 100 million doses
Sanofi-GlaxoSmithKline: 100 million doses

“That was the whole approach of Operation Warp Speed,” said Dr. Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. “Not knowing which one would cross the finish line, the Trump administration took a portfolio approach and invested in multiple vaccines.”


9:45 “Now, because of all the work we’ve done, we’ll have enough vaccines for everyone in America by the end of May."

He’s taking credit for Trump’s work. Those are the vaccines ordered by Trump in December.

That's as far as I got. Like watching paint dry.

Fact Checks:

Politifact

Politifact

Politifact

Quote:

"Beyond the triumphant tone, a closer look at the ramp-up offers a more mixed picture, one in which the new administration expanded and bulked up a vaccine production effort whose key elements were in place when Mr. Biden took over for President Donald J. Trump. Both administrations deserve credit, although neither wants to grant much to the other.

The Biden administration has taken two major steps that helped hasten vaccine production in the near term. Even before Mr. Biden was inaugurated, his aides determined that by invoking the Korean War-era Defense Production Act, the federal government could help Pfizer obtain the heavy machinery it needed to expand its plant in Kalamazoo, Mich. The Trump administration had repeatedly invoked that law, but its order for Pfizer only covered single-use supplies like plastic liners, not durable factory equipment.

Crucially, Mr. Biden’s top aides drove another vaccine manufacturer, Johnson & Johnson, to force a key subcontractor into round-the-clock operations so its vaccine could be bottled faster. That company had fallen behind on the production targets laid out in its federal contract. Only after Jeffrey D. Zients, the White House’s chief pandemic adviser, and Dr. David Kessler, who oversees the vaccine effort, demanded the company commit more resources did it publicly pledge to meet a crucial deadline in May.

To Trump administration aides, the new president’s crowing rings off-key. Mr. Biden is proclaiming victory off his predecessor’s achievements while wrongly grumbling about a mess he says he inherited, they say.

“They criticize what we did, but they are using our playbook every step of the way,” said Paul Mango, the Trump administration’s deputy chief of staff for health policy and a senior official in the crash vaccine development effort then known as Operation Warp Speed. He said Mr. Trump’s team oversaw the construction or expansion of nearly two dozen plants involved in vaccine production and invoked the Defense Production Act 18 times to ensure those factories had sufficient supplies.

The Biden team is “maintaining a very nice trajectory,” Mr. Mango said. “But don’t criticize us to make yourselves look better.”

The biggest piece of locking in enough doses to cover the nation’s adults before June was Johnson & Johnson. As recently as two weeks ago, Dr. Richard Nettles, Johnson & Johnson’s vice president for medical affairs in the United States, would say only that the company would supply 20 million doses by the end of March and 100 million doses by the end of June. That fell short of its contract for 37 million doses by the end of March and 87 million by the end of May.

Reuters reported on Tuesday that Johnson & Johnson had informed European Union officials that production problems might delay shipments, and Canada’s prime minister, Justin Trudeau, said that he had heard similar warnings from the company.


In the United States, the company’s biggest worry was getting the vaccine bottled by two subcontractors. That “fill-and-finish” work is divided between a plant in Michigan run by Grand River Aseptic Manufacturing, or GRAM, and a plant run by Catalent in Bloomington, Ind. The Biden team pushed Johnson & Johnson to order GRAM to move from normal business hours to 24/7 operations, one senior administration official said. Another federal official said Johnson & Johnson was largely on track but did “scale up a bit faster” under pressure.

Officials also brokered an unusual partnership between Johnson & Johnson and a longtime competitor, Merck & Co. The Trump administration repeatedly explored using Merck’s plants to bolster vaccine production but never reached an agreement.