CNN Ridiculed for Double Standard Over Biden and Trump's Vaccine Strategies
On the first full day of President Joe Biden’s administration, the establishment media reported that Donald Trump had left the new team with absolutely nothing in terms of a vaccine strategy.
“There is nothing for us to rework. We are going to have to build everything from scratch,” one source said in the initial report. “Wow, just further affirmation of complete incompetence,” another told them.
There should have been good reason for the media to be skeptical about the story. For one, there were almost no details about how the plan was lacking or evidence that significant portions of it were missing. It just wasn’t there.
There was no explanation as to how shots were finding their way into arms or how the cold-chain for the vaccines — at that point, both the available shots were mRNA inoculations, which require storage at temperatures significantly lower than other jabs — was being handled.
On the first few days of the Biden administration, some of its officials vouchsafed there was no plan without extrapolating on any of the particulars, and many media outlets took the claims at face value.
One source that reported this, you might not be surprised to learn, was CNN.
Since then, its reporting on vaccinations has been transparently problematic.
Trump basically spent a year twiddling his thumbs and giving extemporaneous lectures about dubious treatments, according to CNN. Operation Warp Speed, which apparently emerged from the primordial ooze of the swamp and received no direction from the president or his administration, miraculously created two vaccines with no help from Trump.
Then came Biden, who cut out the malarkey on Day One and, through sheer force of will, ramped up America’s vaccine effort in just weeks. It’s a modern-day miracle. FDR winning World War II? Nothing compared with what Joe Biden has done since Jan. 20. His aggressive tactics are winning the war on COVID.
Funny, considering aggressive tactics on vaccines weren’t very much in vogue before Biden became president:
This is @CNN. pic.twitter.com/CyWxdsP0dd
— Drew Holden (@DrewHolden360) May 3, 2021
As conservative writer Drew Holden noted, when Trump reportedly was trying to get vaccines out faster, CNN framed it as if he were only interested because he wanted to win the November election.
While the 45th president was a weak, suppurating man whose interest in achieving herd immunity was solely political, the 46th is a bold “wartime” leader, getting vaccines into arms and turning us “from having one of the worst Covid responses in the world to being a global leader in vaccinations.”
The articles themselves are just as bad.
Here’s the report on Trump’s efforts to get the vaccines out: “A likely contagious President Donald Trump returned to the White House Monday evening, whipped off his mask and filmed a video, heavy on bluster and short on facts, that proclaimed: ‘The vaccines are coming momentarily,'” CNN reported Oct. 6.
“In his conversations with major drug-makers working on coronavirus vaccines, Trump has been explicit in telling the companies’ CEOs that he’d like to see a vaccine move quicker than some of his health advisers say is reasonable, according to a person familiar with the conversations. He has asked whether they believe they can speed up their timelines and has suggested he is concerned that the FDA’s regulatory process could slow down progress.” [Emphasis added.]
Just over a month after Trump recklessly pushed “a vaccine move quicker than some of his health advisers say is reasonable,” on Nov. 9, Pfizer and BioNTech announced their vaccine was more than 90 percent effective. On Dec. 14, The Washington Post reported, the first vaccine was given in the United States.
The vaccines indeed were coming momentarily — but, at the time, it was dismissed as the silly whim of a leader who was venturing off into Idi Amin-esque flights of fancy.
Meanwhile, here’s CNN’s April 26 story on Biden’s pandemic response, the other half of the Holden double-standard tweet: “The effort, described to CNN during in-depth interviews with three of the administration’s top Covid advisers and two other White House officials, has allowed the US to go from having one of the worst Covid responses in the world to being a global leader in getting shots in arms.
“The interviews reveal how the Biden team inherited a pandemic at its zenith with a high demand for vaccines and little supply, along with no long-term plan to vaccinate millions of Americans. The President, at times impatient, pressed his advisers harder on ways to improve the federal government’s response to the virus.”
Biden was “impatient?” I was under the impression from the Oct. 6 report that Trump’s impatience was a bad thing. I guess that changes when the president has a D after his name.
Others on Twitter called out the double standard:
Strange the same act received vastly different coverage from @CNN.
Surely this isn’t political. https://t.co/nyRZoPmhnW
— Winston Smith (@Brain_Pwr) May 3, 2021
No self-awareness. Whoever trusts CNN is a product of America’s public schools. https://t.co/WAvteddZah
— Freedom X (@FreedomXLaw) May 4, 2021
They lie daily and don’t care. https://t.co/tvHTg6ndkA
— Jeanine Fitzgerald (@JeanineDFitz) May 4, 2021
Wartime effort? https://t.co/xrC2iAvxQn
— Problematic Pleb (@ProblematicPleb) May 5, 2021
And so what’s the big difference between the two plans? According to one of the advisers on Operation Warp Speed, not a whole lot.
The difference, Dr. Moncef Slaoui told CBS News, is the Trump administration helped get the vaccines developed via the public-private partnership with the drug companies. The Biden administration is now handling the wider rollout, although not in a substantively different way than the Trump administration did.
“I do think we had plans,” Slaoui said during the March interview. “In fact, 90 percent of what is happening now is the plan that we had.”
“Of course, the first thing was to accelerate the development of the vaccine,” he added. “We contracted specifically 100 million doses of vaccine, but also built into the contract options to acquire more vaccines once we knew they are effective.”
And now that those vaccines have proved effective, Joe Biden has the necessary infrastructure to acquire and distribute them. He also has a media willing to say there were no plans to do any of this when he took office — and that his wartime presidency is what saved us all from the coronavirus.
In fact, reading the article on how Biden’s “impatient” leadership is helping win the battle against COVID, there’s one thing that stands out: Operation Warp Speed isn’t mentioned once.
The only difference between CNN and state propaganda is that the Democratic Party needn’t even acquire the cable network to parrot its views. CNN will do that free of charge, it seems.
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