Former President Donald Trump blasted President Joe Biden for his “dumb statement” during a CNN town hall this week when he claimed no COVID-19 vaccine existed before he took office.
“I saw that he said there was no vaccine when he came into office, and yet he got a shot before he came into office,” Trump said Wednesday on Newsmax’s “Greg Kelly Reports.” “It was already in early November when we announced it, but we actually had it substantially before that. We were giving millions of shots and millions of doses.”
Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine, the first in the U.S., was approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for emergency use authorization (EUA) on Dec. 11. The FDA on Dec. 18 also approved Moderna’s EUA request.
“So he’s either not telling a truth, or he’s mentally gone, one or the other,” Trump said. “Could he be joking? Because, frankly, that was a very dumb statement.”
During the Tuesday night town hall, Biden said: “We got into office and found out the supply, there was no backlog. There was nothing in the refrigerator, figuratively and literally speaking, and there were 1 million doses a day that were available. We’ve upped that, in the first weeks that we were in office, to significantly more than that.”
“It’s one thing to have the vaccine, which we didn’t have when we came into office, but a vaccinator — how do you get the vaccine into someone’s arm? So you need the paraphernalia. You need the needle, and you need mechanisms to be able to get it in. You have to have people who can inject it into people’s arms,” Biden said.
Trump said Biden is “being killed on that whole thing. Even the haters are saying, you know this vaccine was announced long before. He is getting lit up on that one.”
Meanwhile, the former president didn’t rule out another run for the White House.
“It’s too early to say, but I see a lot of great polls out there. We have tremendous support,” he said. “I won’t say yet, but I have tremendous support, and I’m looking at poll numbers that are through the roof.”
“I’m the only guy who gets impeached and my numbers go up,” he said.
Trump also said he was purposely “quiet” during Biden’s first few weeks in office. “I really wanted to be somewhat quiet,” he said. “It hasn’t been that quiet, frankly, but I wanted to be somewhat quiet.”
And Trump said Twitter is hurting after banning him.
“I understand on Twitter, it’s become very boring and millions of people are leaving. They’re leaving it because it’s not the same, and I can understand that,” he said.
“Twitter, we are looking at a lot of different things, but I really wanted to be somewhat quiet. They wanted me very much on Parler, you know they had a phony report that the man who was in there didn’t – I mean just the opposite, they really wanted me on Parler,” he said, adding that “mechanically they can’t handle” the amount of traffic that he could bring to the site.
“We’re negotiating with a number of people, and there’s also the other option of building your own site. I mean you can literally build your own site,” he said, noting that he just might build his own platform.