President Joe Biden has a lot to say about what former President Donald Trump left for him to deal with when he was sworn in in January, and most of it is far from complimentary.
However, as the current president attempts to blame Trump for his own horrific handling of the Afghanistan crisis this month, he’s spent the better part of this year skirting around the fact that he was able to inherit his predecessor’s quick and successful program to produce a COVID-19 vaccine.
When Biden’s not taking credit for the development of the vaccine, with which he had very little to do, he’s insulting the intelligence of the unvaccinated, many of whom are loyal Trump supporters themselves.
However, the glories promised us by the swift production and delivery of the vaccine — credit whichever president you will for this vision of victory over the pandemic — have failed to come to fruition.
No sooner was the vaccine made widely available by April (something which Trump had indeed promised would be the case), than Biden was setting goals for vaccination rates he’d end up failing to meet a few short months later.
Meanwhile, the delta variant of the virus, we’re told, has presented itself as a worthy foe against the novel inoculation and as the administration has been dolling out money to TikTok influencers to try to sway the “vaccine-hesitant” to get their first shot, top federal health officials are already discussing boosters — perhaps taken at regular intervals.
On Friday, Biden revealed that he and his administration’s top medical adviser, the notorious Dr. Anthony Fauci, are now discussing the possibility of COVID-19 booster shots for those already fully vaccinated, at intervals as frequent as every five months.
Biden made the comments while speaking to reporters in the Oval Office, where he was meeting with new Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, as the New York Post reported.
“The question raised is should it be shorter than eight months? Should it be as little as five months? That’s being discussed. I spoke with Dr. Fauci this morning about that,” the president said.
Israel has already begun administering booster shots of the COVID-19 vaccine to senior citizens, despite pleas from the World Health Organization to wait until more shots can be made available to third-world nations still waiting for their initial round of inoculations.
The supposedly vastly empathic Biden said that booster shots “will start here on Sept. 20 pending approval of the FDA and the CDC committee of outside experts,” as apparently, the United States will also be disregarding the underdeveloped nations who haven’t had any vaccines at all for the sake of administering shots to those who have already received theirs. You know, just to be safe.
This week, the FDA fully approved the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, and the companies have now also requested approval for their booster shot. Also this week, the Post noted, Johnson & Johnson said that its vaccine, which is still under emergency use authorization, works better with an extra shot.
“We expect the rule will be simple. Get your booster shot eight months after you got your second shot,” the Biden administration’s COVID-19 response coordinator Jeff Zients said on Tuesday, although the president and Fauci have now apparently considered shortening this length of time.
Something tells me that this push for booster shots isn’t exactly going to make the hesitant very eager to get their first round of the vaccine.
With a daily average of over 156,000 new cases of COVID-19 reported over the last week, which health officials attribute to the delta variant spreading among a population that is already over 70 percent vaccinated, skeptics are unlikely to be convinced that this shot is effective at all.
Trump has been credited with overseeing the speedy development of the vaccine but has also been criticized for not doing enough to encourage his base to get vaccinated themselves. Although he has briefly recommended Americans get the shot and admitted that he has received it in passing since leaving office, no one could accuse him of pushing to see the high vaccine rates that Biden has vied for.
No, Biden owns his urgent, and at times incredibly condescending and paternalistic, insistence that all Americans get the shot.
If regular booster shots every five months become the norm and COVID-19 is still spreading through the country, where on earth are he and Fauci going to go from there?