Dr. Anthony Fauci pushed back on a report from CNN Thursday claiming Biden administration officials said they were left with no vaccine distribution plan from the Trump administration.
In response to CNN’s claims that the Biden administration would have to start from scratch on a vaccine distribution plan, Fauci told the network: “We are certainly not starting from scratch.”
“You can’t say it was absolutely not usable at all,” he added.
CNN had breathlessly reported just an hour earlier that officials in the Biden administration claimed they inherited “no coronavirus vaccine distribution plan to speak of from the Trump administration.” This is demonstrably false, since tens of millions of doses of the vaccine have been distributed and the Trump administration’s distribution plan is publicly available and easy to find with a simple Google search.
While citing Fauci’s pushback, CNN reporter MJ Lee went so far as to try and denigrate the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases by referring to him as “a holdover from the Trump administration,” even though the doctor has been part of the NIH under six presidents.
As The Daily Wire previously reported, CNN set up a narrative on Thursday that would make President Joe Biden look like a hero for something actually put in motion by the Trump administration. CNN’s article about the Biden administration claiming they inherited no vaccine distribution plan didn’t acknowledge that 17 million vaccines have already been administrated and that the U.S. was already on pace to vaccinate 1 million people a day, which was Biden’s goal.
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.