Well, this has been a week. We got an acquittal in Trump’s second impeachment trial. Also, we received new C.D.C. guidelines for in-person schooling. President Biden announced how he would have enough vaccine for everybody by the end of July. He also claimed his actions would save us from Trump’s failures. All of this gave us some insight into the competence of the Biden administration. The signs aren’t good.
Knowing you’re going to lose a battle and attacking anyway may make for a stirring poem. Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade” highlighted reckless bravery. It wasn’t a good idea then, and it’s foolhardy politics. There never was a chance of getting 17 Republican Senators to convict Trump. Why would you give the Ex-President a victory to lord over you? All it did was further divide the country along partisan lines. Wasn’t Joe all about bringing us together?
There was a win-win way out of the Capitol Riot mess if only Biden had the sense to see it. Republicans offered a censure rather than impeachment—a bipartisan measure condemning the departed President for his part in the rampage showing unity rather than division. A Gerald Ford moment is opting to focus on the National healing and needs instead of revenge. The Democratic left-wing might scream, but most of the nation would think of Biden as a bigger person.
Instead of asserting control of his party as all successful presidents have done, he allowed his party’s legislators to charge into “the Valley of Death.” Now Biden is faced with following the divisive impeachment with the highly partisan Covid Relief Bill. This massive legislation will lack any Republican input. It would’ve been far better to have a unifying action under his belt before pushing this highly partisan package. This sequence negates Joe Biden’s campaign promise to be a unifier. Worse, it upends his claims to competence.
Niall Ferguson, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, had a great tweet the other day, “In truth, the vaccination program, combined with the naturally acquired immunity of people previously infected with the virus, would probably get the U.S. close to herd immunity by the summer, even if Joe Biden spent the next six months just riding his Peloton.” His contention that the vaccine regime Biden inherited will tame the virus by summer received even more clarity. Johnson and Johnson asked for FDA approval for its vaccine this week. Already in use in the U.K. since December, the AstraZeneca vaccine could be approved shortly. Novavax expects to have its results by the end of the first quarter.
The U.S. has contracted for 100 million doses from each company. Johnson & Johnson requires only one shot, while the other two need a double dose. These vaccines maybe a little less effective than the two already in use but are much easier to distribute. They require the same handling as our seasonal flu shots so they can use the same widespread system.
As I said in my 1/24 post “Birth of A Lie’,” the Biden administration could only mess things up. Specifically, I warned against placing orders for much more of the two already approved hard to distribute vaccines. Sure enough, Biden ordered 100 million more doses from each for delivery starting in the summer. If any of the three new vaccines in the pipeline are approved, you will have more than enough doses to vaccinate every adult in the country by then. (at present, there is no plan to include children).
Given the success of the already-in-place vaccine distribution plan, leaving it alone is the best policy. Just incorporate the already contracted new vaccines as they come online. How do we know the current program is a rousing success? Biden’s goal was 100 million doses to be administered in his first hundred days. We were already on that pace by his inauguration. He now aspires to get to a 1.5 million a day rate by the end of the hundred days. We have already surpassed that rate. Having met all the Biden goals, the Administration must agree this is a success.
The press plays up the uneven and, in some spots, problematic vaccine rollout. Remember, this was from a standing start. The special considerations with the two approved products ruled out the distribution network we used for other vaccines. I always say, we have to ask, compared to..? Faced with the same problems, the European Union is far behind our shot rate.
There will be glitches and weather disruptions, but with more vaccines and supplies coming online, we can feel confident we will continue to outperform the Biden goals.
Those goals point to a different problem, the ignorance of the Biden team. By issuing desired vaccination goals already attained and claiming the pandemic here will worsen when improving, the Biden administration is at odds with the facts. “A 100 million doses in 100 days” is a good slogan but had no basis in reality. The nation recorded well over 2 million shots the last two days. The Biden low-ball shows a remarkable lack of knowledge of Operation Warp speed. Is it ignorance or politics?
The administration has claimed inadequate transition information from the previous administration, but the info is public knowledge. I can assure you I have never had a government briefing. Yet, I have the needed information to know what’s happening. Given what the Trump administration put in the works, we will be swimming in Covid vaccines by the end of June. Like the GameStop bulls, I found it on the internet. Here’s your pandemic update from Johns Hopkins:
To give the appearance of doing something, the administration announced a couple of actions. It claimed to be increasing vaccine deliveries, but the New York Times reported this was already in the works. Also, it will send a million doses to 6,500 pharmacies. This action might be getting ready for the Operation Warp Speed’s supported Johnson and Johnson vaccine. Without special handling, this one dose vaccine is excellent for pharmacies and other local distribution points. The J & J vaccine is on the verge of approval. If not, it’s just diverting doses from a system already able to inoculate 1.5+ million people a day.
Recently, I wrote of Biden’s proposed Covid-19 solutions to problems already well on their way to being solved or were inflicted on us by Biden’s allies, the teacher’s unions, and the educational establishment. President Biden means with the help of his media allies to claim he defeated the virus. A Big lie is in the making.
It helps to see exactly where we were on Inauguration Day. The facts are, the virus has passed its apogee and is receding. Vaccine distribution is already on the pace to exceed 100 million doses in his first hundred days. The charts from 1/20 from Johns Hopkins and numbers from the CDC serve as base points.
As you can see, cases, hospitalizations, deaths, and test positivity on Inauguration Day are all heading down. The results were with record-high testing. I think the highs in these areas have passed, and we have seen the worst of the epidemic. It may be the result of mask-wearing and distancing being widespread. Johns Hopkins’ Dr. Marty Makary points to the beginning of herd immunity. Remember, we get this state when a significant percentage of the populace has had the virus, is vaccinated, or some combination of the two. While only 15 million are vaccinated, some have estimated up to a third of us have had the virus. Some people may have T-Cell immunity. The combination makes even this easy spreader’s job harder. The downtrends will only get more pronounced as people are vaccinated.
I predicted by 1/20, 15 million people inoculated. The total doses administered on that day were over one million. As forecasted, this rate meets Biden’s 100 million doses by the end of his first hundred days. With the infrastructure already in place to deliver a million shots a day, our delivery ability will only expand. Every day more inoculation locations are coming online. The only thing that might hold us back from far surpassing this goal is the vaccines’ timely delivery.
People might forget that Operation Warp Speed wasn’t about just the two vaccines we presently have. The Trump administration also invested in others. The AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccine is already vaccinating millions in the U.K. and Europe. Mid-April approval in the U.S.is expected. However, overseas success could speed up the timetable. Because it needs less special handling, it’s easier to distribute.
When Donald Trump became President in 2017, I expressed my concern for the Republican Party. On January 30, 2017, in a post, “And then the Republicans,” I questioned whether the Republican leaders in Congress could work with Trump. I asked, “This sets up a clash between Trump and the congressional leaders. Do the conservative leader’s tame Trump, so he obediently signs on to their program, or does he use his followers to bully Congress into submission?” For almost all four years, to my surprise, Trump and the leadership worked relatively well together. The fact the Democrats came down with a severe case of “Trump Derangement Syndrome ruled out any relationship with them. Democratic cries of Russian collusion will lead to impeachment precluded the Democrats and left only the Republicans. The GOP-Trump partnership resulted in a mass of conservative judges, tax reform, a strengthened military, and regulation reduction. The economy did well by a more significant swath of people.
This marriage of convenience was exposed during and after the election. When it looked as if the President would lose, he attacked mail-in voting. He told his supporters to avoid it in favor of in-person voting instead of using the pre-election time to getting their supporters to vote early. This stance hurt Republican early efforts. Even if you plan to vote on election day, something could come up preventing it. This is especially true in this time of COVID-19. In this close election, this proved to be foolish. The President seemed to want an excuse for losing while the party tried to win up and down the ballot. The alliance was fraying.
After he appeared to lose, Trump attacked the outcome. As I’ve written earlier, a close look at an election where widespread first time mail-in voting was done was certainly warranted. We needed to be assured the election results were correct. A wave of recounts and court rulings confirming they were followed. Even Bill Barr, the Attorney General, failed to find fraud that would’ve changed the result. Yet, Trump refused to accept the outcome. Worse, he attacked fellow Republicans. In GOP controlled states of Arizona and, more fatally, Georgia, President viciously attacked the Governor and Secretary of State of his own party. With two crucial Senate seats to decide the Senate’s control on January 5, a total Republican effort was needed to win.
I was watching an interview with Health and Human Services Secretay Alex Asar on TV. The conversation was mostly about the rollout of the COViD-19 vaccines. However, when he asked about the new treatments, my ears perked up. The treatments that put President Trump right back n his feet after being infected. Secretary Asar said the combination of monoclonal Antibodies, Remdesivir, and steroids were now widely available. However, in many cases, he lamented doctors weren’t using them early enough—this problem-centered on monoclonal antibodies. Waiting till a patient ends up in the hospital may be too late to be effective.
Confirmation of this problem wasn’t long in coming. On Face the Nation, Eli Lily CEO David Ricks complained his company’s monoclonal antibody treatment was piling up unused in warehouses. The monoclonal antibody regimen needs infusion centers. We’ve done this for chemotherapy for decades. Of course, they take place in different places. Ricks implored people at high-risk testing positive or with symptoms to ask their doctor about the treatment’s availability. Do we have to ask for the treatment the President received?
This revelation was dismaying. We have known almost from the pandemic’s beginning the elderly and those with pre-existing conditions are the ones most at risk. The vast majority of these people are under a doctor’s care. How hard is it to start the regimen as soon as someone reports symptoms or tests positive? The doctors should know where the patient can get treated and send them there. If it isn’t available, the doctors need to determine why not and push to rectify the situation. The at-risk are the ones jamming the hospital ICUs and, unfortunately, dying.
Detour on the Road 