By Rich Lowry
Tuesday, March 16, 2021
Poor Joe Biden. It was his misfortune to inherit one
of the technological marvels of our time.
Before President Biden took office, the Pfizer and
Moderna COVID-19 vaccines had been authorized for use (with another,
from Johnson & Johnson, on the way), and were already being administered to
people around the country.
Typically, it takes ten years or more to develop a
vaccine, but here were two vaccines against a deadly virus that took less than
a year from inception to finding their way into people’s arms.
And yet, listening to President Biden and much of his
team, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Biden had to conjure the vaccines out
of nowhere because the Trump administration, in its callousness and
incompetence, chose to sit on its hands.
Despite his talk of unity and his irenic tone, gratitude
hasn’t been a Biden strong suit. He and his officials have blamed Trump in two
areas where they inherited success, the vaccines and the border, and
should have been absolutely delighted with their good fortune.
When President Trump began promising a vaccine before the
end of 2020, no one believed him. The Hill ran a piece
headlined, “Trump’s new vaccine timeline met with deep skepticism.” NBC News
published an article titled: “Fact check: Coronavirus vaccine could come this
year, Trump says. Experts say he needs a ‘miracle’ to be right.” Similarly, ABC
News ran a report titled, “Trump promises coronavirus vaccine by the end of the
year, but his own experts temper expectations.”
Back then, vaccine skepticism, which is now nearly
universally condemned, was acceptable at the highest levels of our politics.
Asked if she would take a vaccine approved prior to the election, then-vice
presidential candidate Kamala Harris said, “Well, I think that’s going to be an
issue for all of us.”
Now, these same vaccines are a key part of the success
story that Biden wants to tell about his response to the pandemic, and so the
Trump effort has to be ignored or run down. Biden has referred to “the mess” he
inherited, and Harris has said that “in many ways we’re starting from scratch
on something that’s been raging for almost an entire year.”
Never mind that without Trump’s Operation Warp Speed,
there wouldn’t be a Moderna vaccine.
Or that the Trump administration had contracts for 100
million doses of the Pfizer vaccine, 100 million doses of the Moderna vaccine,
100 million doses of Johnson & Johnson, and 800 million doses of vaccine
overall.
Or that on the last day of the Trump administration, 1.5
million people were vaccinated, putting Biden on a pace to easily achieve his
supposedly showy goal of 100 million vaccinations in 100 days.
Biden deserves credit for ramping up more production and
facilitating wider distribution, but there’s an enormous difference between
building on a predecessor’s undeniable, important contributions and starting
from nothing. Biden is doing the former and hoping most people believe it’s the
latter.
If this is galling enough, it’s even worse to overturn a
predecessor’s success and then falsely hold him responsible for the failure.
This is what Biden is doing at the border. He has begun
to dismantle the policies that Trump put in place to control the migrant crisis
of 2018–2019. As numbers predictably surge again, Department of Homeland
Security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has absurdly called out Trump for having
“dismantled our nation’s immigration system in its entirety.”
Nancy Pelosi chimed in over the weekend, claiming that
“what the administration has inherited is a broken system at the border.”
To the contrary, Biden has done the breaking. The Trump
administration had found ways, entirely in keeping with our laws, to turn away
illegal immigrants during the pandemic, and to discourage bogus asylum-seekers
by making them wait in Mexico while their claims are adjudicated.
The Biden administration has blown holes in this
arrangement without any evident follow-up plan except, of course, to maintain
that Trump is to blame.
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