Joe Biden preemptively doubts whether a coronavirus vaccine will be “real,” and has questioned whether the vaccine will be distributed “with any degree of fairness and accomplishment,” which apparently contradicts public health experts even when the White House promotes the progress of the vaccine.
The Trump campaign has called Biden’s comments “irresponsible,” pointing to statements by senior officials at the National Institute of Health (NIH) that promise an effective vaccine.
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“How are you going to distribute the vaccine when it arrives, when it arrives, when it is there?” Biden asked Tuesday. “And the question of whether it’s real, when it’s there, requires enormous transparency. You have to make everything available to other experts across the country, so they can look and see. So there is consensus, this is a safe vaccine.
“Because it already has, what percentage do Americans say that if the vaccine were there tomorrow, they wouldn’t take it? And it’s not the usual crowd against vaccines. It’s beyond that because people are losing faith in what says the president. ” Think about it.”
Meanwhile, chief adviser to Operation Warp Speed, the government’s vaccination program, said this week in an interview with CNN that he expects efficacy rates “in the 90 percent range.”
“I think it will be a very effective vaccine. That is my prediction,” the scientist, Moncef Slaoui, told reporters. “My personal opinion based on my experience and the biology of this virus, I think this vaccine will be very effective.”
Slaoui predicted that “ideally” all Americans would have access to the vaccine in mid-2021.
Biden’s rhetoric comes as his campaign has intensified his attacks on the Trump administration’s administration of coronavirus tests. The former vice president said the coronavirus crisis in Arizona, for example, is “a direct result of Donald Trump’s lack of leadership and his desire to ‘slow down the tests’, and Americans are suffering the consequences.”
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Biden specifically asked the White House to “immediately resume government-run community-based operations across the country and establish multiple sites in Arizona.” And, in recent weeks, Biden has demanded that Trump “speed up testing” across the country, saying Trump has been “putting politics ahead of the security and economic well-being of the American people.”
However, during the 2009 swine flu pandemic, the Obama administration suddenly told states to suspend testing, without much explanation. And, Biden’s top adviser at the time acknowledged that the Obama administration did “nothing right” to combat that pandemic, before withdrawing those comments.
