Dr. Fauci's Boss Makes a Long Overdue Admission About Trump's Operation Warp Speed

Well before Joe Biden was sworn into office, the mainstream media and Democrats were shifting gears in how they talked about the coronavirus vaccine’s availability, efficacy, and rollout.

Gone was their skepticism about the vaccine’s effectiveness. Gone were their supposed concerns about the vaccine being made available in record time. Gone were Joe Biden’s calls for a “board of scientists” to review the vaccine before it was distributed.

The reason for their change in heart was pretty clear in the minds of Biden’s critics: It was time to give the incoming president credit for a vaccine that he, his running mate Kamala Harris, and many other Democrats and media figures undermined prior to the election.

In their eyes, Trump didn’t deserve credit for anything.

But here we are a month into Biden’s presidency, and though some in the Biden administration – like VP Harris and Biden’s chief medical advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci – are giving decidedly mixed messages about the vaccine, the rollout process, and what was in place before Biden was inaugurated, others are going on record to give credit where it’s due.

Dr. Francis Collins, who is the director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), sat down with Axios recently for an interview and was asked to give his thoughts on where he thought the Trump administration got it right.

Collins, an Obama appointee who also happens to be Dr. Fauci’s boss, had this to say:

Axios’ Nicholas Johnston: “Let me talk a little more of the Trump administration. Mask-wearing aside, what did they get right?”

Dr. Collins: The Operation Warp Speed, for which I give a great deal of credit to [former Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar], was a effort that many of us were not initially convinced was going to be necessary. And it was thought about as a Manhattan Project – those words were used sometimes to describe what needed to happen in order to get all parts of the government together in an unprecedented way to test up to six vaccines in rigorous trials and to do this at-risk manufacturing so that if any of those trials happen to work, you would already have doses ready to go into arms.

That would not be the way that things are traditionally done. That effort and the recruitment of Dr. Moncef Slaoui was an incredibly important step forward that the administration deserves credit for because that did motivate a lot of actions, a lot of coordination.

The fact that we in December had not one but two vaccines that had gone through trials of at least 30,000 participants and had been judged safe and effective by a very rigorous and very public FDA process – it’s just breathtaking that that got done in 11 months from when we first knew about this virus. It’s at least five years faster than it’s ever been done before.”

Watch:

The Director of the NIH has praise for the Trump administration developing and distributing a COVID vaccine at "breathtaking" speed. pic.twitter.com/i8cNjh5SKp

— MRCTV (@mrctv) February 22, 2021

Fauci, too, has praised the success of Operation Warp Speed (back in December). But in the media’s/left’s rush to blame the Trump administration for the problems the Biden administration has had with their vaccine rollout, what’s gotten lost in the shuffle – and deliberately so – is the vitally important record-time work done by members of Trump’s team that helped lead us to the point right now where we’re talking about realistic vaccine timelines and lights at the end of the tunnel.

Trump got widely mocked and ridiculed six ways to Sunday by the Usual Suspects for his aggressive pushes to get a vaccine ready for distribution by the end of the year. In the end, it was one of many things he got right and his critics got wrong. The media and Democrats don’t like for people to point that out, which is precisely why people should be reminded as often as possible – including when the reminder unexpectedly comes from someone in the Biden administration.