How President Trump and his administration saved the lives of millions. Donald Trump may have to wait for historians to give him the credit for the millions of lives that were saved by his administrations Operation Warp Speed. We always heard from the hack the fauch and saw his flip flopping But what about what his boss an actual expert had to say about Operation Warp Speed.
National Institutes of Health director Francis Collins tells “Axios on HBO” that the Trump administration deserves credit for the “breathtaking” speed of COVID vaccine development.
The big picture: The fact that it “got done in 11 months from when we first knew about this virus is at least five years faster than it’s ever been before before,” Collins said.
- “The Operation Warp Speed, for which I give a great deal of credit to [former HHS Secretary Alex Azar], was a effort that many of us were not initially convinced was going to be necessary. And it was thought about as a Manhattan Project.”
- “Those words were used sometimes to describe what needed to happen in order to get all parts of the government together in an unprecedented way to test up to six vaccines in rigorous trials … so that if any of those trials happen to work, you would already have doses ready to go into arms.”
The bottom line: “That effort and the recruitment of Dr. Moncef Slaoui was an incredibly important step forward that the administration deserves credit for, because that did motivate a lot of actions, a lot of coordination.”
When former President Donald Trump last year predicted a coronavirus vaccine would be ready by the end of 2020, multiple media outlets declared it a “pipe dream” and having vaccines that fast would require a “miracle.” However, both Moderna and Pfizer developed effective vaccinations that have entered tens of millions of arms.
“The fact that we, in December, had not one but two vaccines that had gone through trials … and had been judged safe and effective by a very rigorous and very public FDA process is just breathtaking,” Collins said, adding it was completed five years faster than had ever been done before.
Johns Hopkins’ Dr. Mark Makary has this to say.Makary thinks, assessing the data, that “The country is racing toward an extremely low level of infection.” He concludes that the U.S. is nearing “herd immunity” and that “COVID will be mostly gone by April, allowing Americans to resume normal life.”
And Mr Science Joe Biden?
Asked at a recent CNN town hall when the country might get back to normal, Biden meandered, first saying that maybe by Christmas we would see progress, but then suggesting that “a year from now, I think that there will be significantly fewer people having to be socially distanced, have to wear a mask, instead of – but we don’t know.”
Biden continued: “it is highly unlikely that by the beginning of next year, school – traditional school year in September, we are not significantly better off than we are today.”
In closing. Makary isn’t alone in reading good news in the virus statistics. Youyang Gu, a data scientist whose model has proved the most accurate forecaster of COVID deaths, predicts we will reach herd immunity (or “normality,” as his team now calls it) by June/July. Not as soon as April, but soon.
