In the least surprising news of 2021…
Vice President Kamala Harris claims Donald Trump left office with no Covid-19 strategy in place – and ‘no stockpile’ of coronavirus vaccines.
In an interview for Axios on HBO, Harris slammed the Trump administration’s handling of the pandemic. She said the Biden administration has been left “starting from scratch”.
“We were leaving it to the states or local leaders to try and figure it out, and so in many ways we’re starting from scratch on something that’s been raging for almost an entire year.”
Harris’ comments are similar to ones uttered by President Biden in an interview with CBS just over a week ago.
Biden said: “We thought that they [the Trump administration] had indicated there was a lot more vaccine available and it didn’t turn out to be the case.”
These claims made by the Biden administration are consistent with previous reports.
Last month, reports stemming from the White House found Trump’s Covid-19 plan to be “non-existent”.
White House sources told CNN: “There is nothing for us to rework. We are going to have to build everything from scratch”.
A second source spoke of having to start from square one in the attempt to roll out Covid-19 vaccinations. “Wow, just further affirmation of complete incompetence”, said the source.
The Trump administration had a degree of success with the swift manufacturing of Covid-19 vaccines under its Operation Warp Speed drive.
However, the distribution of said vaccines was less than successful.
Trump left it up to individual states and local authorities to decide when they would begin to start vaccinating the population, and how many vaccines were needed.
But this response to a global pandemic has been criticised by public health experts in the USA.
When Trump left office, just under three million people had received a coronavirus vaccination. This fell well short of Trump’s target of 20 million.
The United States has so far seen 27.7 million cases of coronavirus emerge. 485,000 people have lost their lives as a result.
