Joe Biden has barely been president a day and the media is already setting up a narrative that would give his administration an unearned win while trashing former President Donald Trump’s administration.
Biden pledged to get 100 million Americans vaccinated in his first 100 days in office. This sounds like an admirable goal, but it’s utterly meaningless, considering the U.S. is already on pace to do this thanks to the efforts of the Trump administration.
To make this seem like it will be Biden’s accomplishment, CNN has now reported that administration officials are claiming they inherited “no coronavirus vaccine distribution plan to speak of from the Trump administration.” Nowhere in the article does CNN acknowledge that more than 17 million vaccines have already been administered and that nearly one million vaccines are already being administered per day.
CNN’s claim that Biden inherited no vaccine distribution plan is also demonstrably false, considering the fact that 36 million vaccines have already been distributed to states and the distribution strategy is publicly available.
Administration of the vaccine has already increased since it was first made available. Bloomberg has a vaccine tracker that shows an average of 912,497 doses per day were administered last week.
In its article, CNN claimed the Biden administration would “drastically speed up the pace of vaccinating Americans against the virus,” yet Biden’s promise to vaccinate 100 million people in 100 days is by no means a drastic increase, but rather keeping the exact same pace left to him by the Trump administration.
This entire narrative seeks to set up Biden as some kind of brilliant administrator when he’s literally doing nothing different than Trump. The media is crafting this narrative by first, falsely claiming Biden inherited no vaccine distribution plan. This will make it appear as though the Biden administration came up with a successful distribution plan from scratch within hours or days of the inauguration. The media will paint this as extreme competency by the Biden administration in the face of extreme incompetency from the Trump administration.
Next, the media will tout Biden’s 100 million vaccines in 100 days as somehow ambitious when it’s not, considering we are already on pace to achieve that before Biden even took office. No matter, the media will claim it as such. Finally, since distribution and administration were already ramping up before Biden took office, and will continue to do so, he will likely reach the 100 million goal far sooner than April 30, the current deadline. This will be further touted by the media as a major accomplishment by the Biden administration when, in reality, everything was set in motion by the Trump administration and Biden didn’t have to do anything differently.
The seeds of this deception have already been set. Meanwhile, the media will continue to claim – also falsely – that the Biden administration has restored truth to the White House, when it is the administration pushing false claims about vaccine distribution that are incredulously accepted by the media.