Dr. Anthony Fauci stood at the White House press briefing podium early in the Biden administration trashing former President Trump’s pandemic response, and now he is taking credit for the vaccines brought forth by the Trump administration.
He did this on CNN’s “COVID WAR: The Pandemic Doctors Speak Out” without mentioning former President Donald Trump’s Operation Warp Speed, which brought vaccines from scratch to emergency-use authorization in less than a year.
Fauci, the director of the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, made developing a vaccine for the COVID-19 virus during a burgeoning global pandemic a novel idea, apparently, and one that was all his own.
“The decision to develop a vaccine may have been the best decision that I’ve ever made,” Fauci told Dr. Sanjay Gupta on Sunday night’s special report.
Fauci added, that “became very clear” when the COVID-19 outbreak began spreading wildly in New York City under his watch as the nation’s top infectious disease expert.
“When I saw what happened in New York City almost over-running of our health care system, it was like, ‘Oh my goodness,'” Fauci told Gupta. “And that’s when it became very clear that the decision we made Jan. 10 to go all out and develop a vaccine may have been the best decision that I’ve ever made with regard to an intervention as the director of the institute.”
Trump, however, made the big bets with taxpayer dollars, funding Big Pharma companies to research and develop a vaccine that used to take five years to get through U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval. Trump launched Operation Warp Speed in May.
Unlike former President Trump, a skeptic of globalism and the World Health Organization, Fauci has long been a supporter of globalism in dealing with worldly viruses, and a backer of the WHO. Although he also admits the failures there spread during this pandemic.
“So, lessons learned looking forward, we need the WHO, and the world needs an organization that coordinates the global health issues,” Fauci said. “But they need to reform in a way where they could go in and tell the member-state China that you absolutely need to give us this information. And they didn’t.
“The Chinese said, ‘no, we’re not going to give it to you.’ And that was it — with no consequences — and that was not right, and that’s got to change.”
Even Fauci admitted he should have seen that lack of transparency as dangerous and deadly for the Americans he is assigned to protect from infectious diseases around the globe, particularly in trusting China.
“I always had skepticism about it because of what we went through with SARS,” Fauci told CNN. “You know, people forget, but in SARS the Chinese is saying, ‘oh, it’s flu, it’s flu.’ And then the next thing you know that SARS was all over the world, in Canada and Australia, all over the place.
“So, they are not very transparent in the past. It wasn’t outright lying; they just didn’t give you all the information.”
On the vaccine development, Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson were all under trials during the Trump administration, as Trump told Newsmax TV last week.
“They know I got the vaccine,” Trump told “Greg Kelly Reports.” “I got the FDA to do it in 9 months, instead of 5 years; they wouldn’t have had it. You wouldn’t have gotten it ever.”
“We have 4 vaccines and probably another one coming out soon – all done during my administration – done by me to a large extent, because I got the FDA to do things that, frankly, they didn’t know they were capable of doing,” Trump told host Greg Kelly.
Source: Newmax
