White House press secretary Jen Psaki ridiculed the idea of giving former President Donald Trump’s administration credit for setting up a vaccine distribution system before President Joe Biden took office.
“I don’t think anyone deserves credit when half a million people in the country have died of this pandemic,” Psaki said, in response to a reporter who asked if the Trump administration deserved some credit for “laying the groundwork” for vaccine distribution.
Psaki said Biden’s focus would continue to work on increasing the number of vaccines and vaccinators.
“There’s no question and all data points to the fact that there were not enough of any of those things when he took office,” Psaki said.
On former President Trump’s last day in office, 1.5 million doses of the vaccine were delivered, according to the Bloomberg Vaccine Tracker.
The very first vaccine shot was administered on December 14, just 37 days earlier.
Six weeks after he took office, President Joe Biden is currently averaging at 2 million vaccine doses delivered per day, with a peak delivery of 2.4 million doses delivered on February 28.
Former Assistant Secretary for Health and Human Services Admiral Brett Giroir criticized Biden in February for falsely claiming the Trump administration failed to formulate a vaccination plan.
“I am so tired of the continuing lies that the president inherited a COVID-19 [coronavirus] vaccine mess, when in fact 99 percent of current vaccine manufacturing and distribution is EXACTLY as planned and explicitly described by Trump Administration’s Operation Warp Speed,” he wrote on Twitter.
For months, Trump’s administration set up a distribution plan for coronavirus vaccines and started shipping them within 48 hours of their official approval.
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