Trump's Operation Warp Speed produces results, despite naysayers

Published December 24, 2020

By Mitch Kokai

Michael Goodwin of the New York Post credits the president for the speedy production and delivery of COVID-19 vaccines. It’s a fact some Trump critics acknowledge only with caveats.

It is now an established fact that the numerous naysayers who predicted President Trump could never deliver a vaccine this year were wrong. Thankfully, he did what they insisted couldn’t be done.

But the no-can-do crowd now has a second puerile act: a miserly and grudging recognition of the miracle Trump and his team performed. Those expressing pinched gratitude for a fact they can’t deny include the man who has reason to be the most thankful of all Americans.

“I think that the administration deserves some credit getting this off the ground with Operation Warp Speed,” Joe Biden said as he got his Trump vaccine shot.

“Some credit?” Then who deserves the rest of the credit?

Notice, too, that Biden can’t bring himself to say “President Trump.” It’s just the “administration” that deserves “some credit.”

This is stingy stuff. Imagine for a second that Trump had not pushed as hard as he did and instead allowed the vaccine research, development and human trials to follow the usual drawn-out process through the maze of approval checkpoints.

That would mean a delay of possibly four or five years, putting the vaccine’s debut near or after the end of Biden’s term. In the long interval, how many more Americans would have died from the coronavirus? Half a million more? A million, 2 million?

Whatever the additional horrific toll, the worst clearly has been avoided and many, many lives have been saved.

Think also of the economic impacts of going another four or five years without a vaccine. Repeated waves of infections would have been met with more lockdowns and restrictions, slashing or eliminating income to tens of millions of families and driving cities and states closer to bankruptcy. Even Washington’s money-printing presses would have had trouble keeping up.