President Donald Trump was finally given an ounce of credit by Joe Biden last week for his work to respond to the Covid-19 pandemic with the fast creation of a vaccine.
“President Trump, early on, went out and tried to do the research to try to get the right vaccines,” Biden said, according to The Washington Examiner.
Though the 45th president’s efforts were not recognized to their full extent, Biden had previously avoided extending any sort of acknowledgment.
“But logistically,” Biden continued, “logistically, getting the vaccines from a container that gets delivered to you to a hospital to a state to a — and getting it in someone’s arm, that’s a very difficult thing.”
President Trump aided in accelerating the creation of COVID-19 vaccines through Operation Warp Speed, outperforming experts’ assumptions of how long it would take.
Biden taking credit for much of vaccination efforts in the United States ironically came after he publically sowed distrust in a vaccine created under the Trump administration while on the campaign trail.
“People don’t believe that he’s telling the truth,” Biden said according to PolitiFact in August of 2020, “therefore they’re not at all certain they’re going to take the vaccine. And one more thing: If and when the vaccine comes, it’s not likely to go through all the tests that need to be done, and the trials that are needed to be done.”
Kamala Harris joined Biden in making public comments suspicious of a Trump administration vaccine, saying she would take the vaccine if the public health officials recommended it but not if President Trump did.
“If Donald Trump tells us that we should take it,” Harris said in October 2020, “I’m not taking it.”
