Donald Trump hasn't been out of office 48 hours, and the Project Whitewash the Donald has already begun in earnest among some of the media's leftist personalities.
Before releasing their new COVID-19 executive action today, the Biden administration revealed in a press call that the just-departed Trump administration developed no logistical plan for COVID-19 vaccine delivery to speak of, leaving them, the Biden team, in the unenviable position of having to develop one from scratch. This isn't the first time President Biden's team has made it clear that Donald Trump did not bother to develop a comprehensive strategy for vaccination and that 'Operation Warp Speed' was focused nearly entirely on the speed of the development of vaccines rather than vaccination. The Biden transition team warned about this colossal failure of the previous administration as early as early December and as late as a day before taking office.
On December 4, 2020, the then President-elect warned with a degree of frankness the American political media is still getting used to after four years of Trumpian cover-ups that the Trump administration had shared no detailed vaccination plan with Biden's transition team, CNN reported.
"There is no detailed plan that we've seen, anyway, as to how you get the vaccine out of a container, into an injection syringe, into somebody's arm," Biden said at an event in Wilmington, Delaware.
"It's going to be very difficult for that to be done and it's a very expensive proposition," Biden said. He noted, "There's a lot more that has to be done."
And on January 19, CNN reported again on the Biden team's ringing of alarm bells about the lack of communications about a vaccine distribution strategy from their about-to-be predecessors. What they apparently found out upon President Biden taking office was that that there was no communication about a comprehensive vaccination plan from the Trump team because the Trump administration never bothered to develop a comprehensive vaccination plan.
Biden's team weren't the only ones left scrambling due to Trump's abdication of responsibility to develop a vaccination plan. Members of Congress and state officials were describing their experience (never mind the Biden transition's) in trying to get information about vaccine production and delivery as "pulling teeth."
Finally, when the Trump administration finally relented and agree with Biden's strategy to release all doses of the vaccine instead of holding back a stockpile for the second dose, the entire country, to its horror, found out that the Trump administration had been lying about that very stockpile all along. There was no stockpile held back to speak of. That isn't even a matter of news reports; as Trump's HHS Secretary Alex Azar openly admitted it before skipping town.
The fact that Trump's response to COVID in general, and specifically his approach to vaccination, is a catastrophe is a matter of record. The Trump administration had itself set a goal of delivering 20 million vaccine doses by December 31 but managed to deliver just 16.5 million doses through January 20, their last day in office.
To say that the public body evidence of the Trump administration's utter, criminal-level negligence on vaccine distribution is ample, overwhelming, and mounting would be an understatement. Even if President Biden's COVID team did not explicitly say that their predecessors left them high and dry, the evidence would speak for itself.
But not, evidently, to leftist journalists who plan on buttering their bread over the next four years by manufacturing controversies against President Biden and his team the way they did against Hillary Clinton and President Obama, and if that includes falsely rehabilitating the image of an insurrectionist, that's just an added bonus. Sam Stein, Politico's White House Editor and MSNBC commentator, is already on a mission to sanitize Trump's image as an insurrectionist who presided over 400,000 Americans dying from the coronavirus. Donald Trump did, too, leave a plan in place for vaccine distribution, insisted Stein, in response to the Biden team's predicament, because he "listened in on calls."
Here we go. @samstein joins the chorus of Leftists Lying for Trump. https://t.co/ImFTrtaQqc
— Reclaim the Fight 🇺🇸 (@reclaimthefight) January 21, 2021
Stein apparently never reported on those calls he listened in, though, and when asked exactly what he was talking about, Stein pointed to an aspirational, self-congratulatory document from the Trump administration with, once again, no detailed logistical plan. The document lays out certain options, contracts, and vague promises like plans "under development," hopes of distribution making "maximum use of all healthcare professionals," and leveraging "decades of experience." Despite the title, "From the Factory to the Frontlines," Stein's beloved Trump HHS document includes zero specific, logistical details on how to achieve any of it, let alone a full, comprehensive, and executable step-by-step playbook on getting the vaccines to people's arms.
However, that's beside the point. For people like Sam Stein and often for publications like Politico, facts are secondary to narratives, and the factual truth is expendable in favor of a narrative that they "feel" is true. Sam Stein doesn't really care about whether the Biden team is wrong about being left high and dry by the previous administration on an issue as critical as COVID-19 vaccination. Sam Stein is trying to say that he is bothered by how much better the Biden team appears in comparison to the rank incompetence of the Trump team, and therefore, in his mind, Trump just must not have been as incompetent as all the evidence proves him to be. Biden being unquestionably and in orders of magnitudes better and more effective in handling the pandemic may be the truth, but it's bad for conflict journalism.
Stein has long been a Bernie Sanders supporter who has shamelessly adjusted their "reporting" to be favorable to the far left and critical of pragmatism, even when the facts did not support it. A year ago in the midst of the Democratic primary, Stein admitted that Sanders was running a dirty campaign in contravention to his campaign pledge but openly marveled at Bernie's "stealth knifing" of fellow candidates. As a columnist for The Daily Beast, Stein wrote one puff-piece after another about Sanders, shedding all pretense of objectivity. In one column, Stein credited Bernie Sanders with "build[ing] the most powerful machine in Democratic politics" and called him a "master of the arts." In another, Stein gloats about Democratic internal worries about a possible Sanders nomination.
Notably, Sam Stein's hero-worship of Bernie Sanders then bore just as much connection to reality as his Biden Derangement Syndrome has now: Roughly a month after the above-mentioned columns were published, Sanders had effectively been eliminated from the 2020Democratic primary contest.