I&I Editorial
The Biden administration is playing up its role in combating the COVID-19 pandemic, big time.
“Help is here,” shouts a headline at the top of the WhiteHouse.gov website, referring to the $1.9 trillion spending extravaganza President Joe Biden signed a few weeks ago.
There’s no mention of the $3 trillion in help that was delivered last year by Congress and signed by President Donald Trump — in record time — to help small businesses stay afloat, workers stay attached to their jobs, customers to keep spending, and that has led to an economic recovery faster than the “experts” predicted.
But where the White House is really being deceptive is when it comes to vaccination progress.
On the front page of WhiteHouse.gov is a bar chart showing how many shots have been delivered relative to Biden’s new goal of 200 million shots by April 29. (See chart below.)
There’s a curious feature about this chart, however. Based on the scale, there were zero shots administered on Day 1 of the Biden administration. The chart is divided up into equal 50 million shot increments. So, it appears that on Biden’s “Day 1” there’d been none, when in there had already been more than 21 million shots administered.
The exact number of vaccine shots given by Jan. 20 was 21,746,697, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
On the day Biden was sworn in, more than 1.5 million people got immunized. The seven-day rolling average on Jan. 20 was just shy of 1 million. By the end of January, and well before any Biden policies were implemented, the seven-day rolling average was close to 1.4 million. That was from a dead start in mid-December. (See chart below.)
Put simply, the chart emblazoned on the White House home page is hugely deceptive, and intentionally so.
What did Biden do, exactly, to accelerate the pace of vaccinations? Nothing in particular. By the time he signed his $1.9 trillion “relief” bill, which was supposed to accelerate immunizations, the daily number was already above 2 million.
As a matter of fact, the one big project Biden did undertake to speed up vaccination rates — creating mass vaccination sites — has been a complete bust.
As USA Today reported in January, “As part of President Joe Biden’s COVID-19 strategy, such mass vaccination clinics will soon become familiar to millions of Americans.”
The paper went on to say that “The Federal Emergency Management Agency could run up to 100 high-volume sites nationwide within a month to help reach the administration’s goal of giving 1.5 million shots a day during Biden’s first 100 days in office.”
But just this week, Politico reported that:
The Biden administration is rethinking a costly system of government-run mass vaccination sites after data revealed the program is lagging well behind a much cheaper federal effort to distribute doses via retail pharmacies. …
Despite the money the federal government has spent on the mass-vaccination pilot sites, they are administering just a fraction of the shots given across the country each day. Federal data show the retail pharmacy program — which has signed up 21 chains and 17,000 stores — can reach far more Americans in a shorter time, according to four senior officials with direct knowledge of the matter.
Note that the retail pharmacy program was set up by … the Trump administration! In November 2020 it announced “partnerships with large chain pharmacies and networks that represent independent pharmacies and regional chains. Through the partnership with pharmacy chains, this program covers approximately 60% of pharmacies throughout the 50 states.”
In other words, Biden is abandoning his hugely expensive government-run vaccination program and relying on a private-sector arrangement established by Trump to get vaccines out quickly.
Yet the White House has the gall to imply that no vaccines had been administered when Biden took office?
And here we thought Donald Trump was the ungracious one.
— Written by the I&I Editorial Board
Buyer’s remorse yet, anyone?
During the campaign, Biden promised, “100 million vaccinations” in 100 days. The Google will provide tons o’ hits. Post election he changed that to 100 million shots. All the Covid-19 data are available at ourworldindata. You can roll your own plots. The only aspect that the data indicates a change in trends post-Biden is that the difference between the number of shots distributed and the number administrated has continuously increased. This morning that difference is 47 million; yes, 47 million!
The only aspect that Biden had any actual control over was getting shots in arms. That was a focus point in all his public announcements; massive increases in administration of shots was promised.
If you plot the cumulative number of shots you will not see a significant ( there’s none, really ) change in the trend post-Biden. None. A second-order polynomial fit to the data from December to late February, prior to any impacts by Biden actions, will, when extrapolated to today, be off from the actual data by about a 5 % under-prediction. The data to this day are following the trend set by President Trump’s Operation Warp Speed.
The data also show that a little over 200 million shots have been distributed. President Trump’s initial, sight-unseen-and-did-not-exist-product order has been distributed. To be locked up in freezers by Biden, apparently.
You can thank Trump for all successes in the handling of the Coronavirus. They were setting up quarantine centers in our country to allow for the repatriation of overseas Americans when Democrats were telling the population to resist Trump’s “draconian” measures “based on lies” and to go out in crowds and party like its 1999. They then claimed the vaccine could not be completed in a year, claimed Trump was moving too fast on getting the vaccine started, then complained he was moving too slow when it became apparent he was going to get it done in record time. Then Democrats steal the election, continue Trump policies and follow up with the outrageous lies that Biden, a senile, frail old man who would not leave his basement during the pandemic, was the real reason behind the success of the vaccination program. Make no mistake about it, Democrats will keep this whole pandemic “alive and well” for as long as they can as long as it can be used to control the American population and lower election integrity to banana-republic status.
It’s called lying. That’s the number one plank on the democrat platform.
Bottom line: the private sector always runs rings around any government effort to help. Government wonks and bureaucrats are the ones who couldn’t run a lemonade stand and make a profit. They have never, ever created anything, had to make a payroll or turn a profit. Why would any one in any business listen to any of them?
By the end of Biden’s first term an analogy of his performance would be for a child to drop their lollipop in a sand box.
Figures lie and liars figure. Democrats must believe that the whoppers Trump told on occasion have desensitized the people, and that the mainstream media will cover for slow Joe with rare exceptions. One of the most liberal propaganda sheets for the Democrats, the Washington Post, put its big boy pants on the other day and gave slow Joe Four Pinocchio’s for the lies he told about the Republican voting act passed in Georgia. But very few liberal news sources covered the story and official White House press people continue to propagate the lies as if the story never happened. There is no shame in Bidentown, none, and little truth. We must continue to criticize the lies while at the same time wolfing down our blood pressure medicine.