It's said that success has a thousand fathers, and failure is an orphan.
Enter Dr. Anthony Fauci, who now claims credit for the COVID vaccine.
According to the Daily Mail:
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation's leading infectious disease expert, appeared to claim credit for the decision to quickly develop vaccines against COVID-19 on Sunday - in comments that are sure to anger Donald Trump.
Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, made the comment in an interview with CNN for a special, diving into the details of America's pandemic response.
'When I saw what happened in New York City, almost over-running of our healthcare systems, and that's when it became very clear that the decision we made on January 10 to go all out and develop a vaccine, may have been the best decision that I've ever made with regard to intervention as the director of the institute,' Fauci said.
Fauci's remarks seemed to gloss over the key role played by pharmaceutical companies and Operation Warp Speed - the Trump administration's program to manufacture, test and deliver vaccines to the public in record time.
Trump, who has frequently expressed frustration with Fauci publicly, touts Operation Warp Speed as a key achievement of his presidency, and says he pushed the program forward even when Fauci was dismissive of it.
The credit, of course, belongs to President Trump, who initiated Operation Warp Speed, which cut and streamlined red-tape medical bureaucacy regulation, and incentivized pharmaceutical companies, all to clear the path for its development. Such as here. Remember this?
Operation Warp Speed is a public-private partnership to facilitate, at an unprecedented pace, the development, manufacturing, and distribution of COVID-19 countermeasures, between components of HHS, including CDC, FDA, NIH, and the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA); the Department of Defense; private firms; and other federal agencies, including the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Energy, and the Department of Veterans Affairs. It will coordinate existing HHS-wide efforts, including the NIH's ACTIV partnership for vaccine and therapeutic development, NIH's RADx initiative for diagnostic development, and work by BARDA.
Guarantee you Fauci wasn't doing all that.
It was Trump's baby and from Fauci, all he heard were catcalls. Fauci was politicking, and Big Pharma, notably Pfizer, was carefully witholding news of its vaccine within the deadline time in order to make sure Trump got no credit for it on election day.
It all stunk.
But Fauci's naysaying is well worth noting, starting with this testimony warning of the risk of the vaccine in this report from MedScape:
Manufacturers will begin producing COVID-19 vaccine doses in anticipation of approval so that if a product gets the okay for usage, distribution can begin quickly, according to Anthony S. Fauci, MD, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
"We will be producing vaccine at risk, which means we'll be [investing] considerable resources in developing doses even before we know any given candidate or candidates work," he testified during a May 12, 2020, hearing of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee.
"It will take at least a year to a year in a half to have a vaccine we can use," said National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) director Anthony Fauci, MD. Though work on a novel coronavirus vaccine has been some of the fastest on record, Fauci said, he explained to senators that a vaccine candidate must be proven safe and efficacious in a multi-step trial process.
You'd think that as a top regulator he'd know what was going on with Big Pharma, but he didn't. Or maybe he did, but wanted to keep people discouraged, which wouldn't be unusual for him, given his true area of expertise, which is not infectious diseases, but medical politics.
What we have here is a sorry bid by Fauci to claim credit from President Trump's initiated effort. Trump's accomplishment was comparable to the moonshot, but Fauci can't bear to give him credit. He still doesn't, and that's not objective expertise at work there, that is bias.
Such a small, small, little man, so politicked-up he's unable to give credit where credit is due, or tell things like it is.
Image: Screen shot from CBS News video, via shareable YouTube
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