Trump Has Tarnished the One Major Achievement From His First Term

“God sent me President Trump.”

That is the line history will remember.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said those words as he stood in the Oval Office on Thursday afternoon, having just been sworn in as the new Secretary of Health and Human Services.

Trump stood smiling, as if the appointment of this nepo baby-nightmare was not further trashing the single indisputably great achievement of his first term as president and, if things keep going this way, all his time in the White House.

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Back on May 15, 2020, in those early months of the pandemic when some 1.4 million had been infected with COVID, 85,000 had died, and nobody could say with any certainty when it would end, Trump had stood in the Rose Garden and pledged to develop a safe and effective vaccine. He called the effort, Operation Warp Speed.

“That means big and it means fast,” he said. “A massive scientific, industrial and logistical endeavor unlike anything our country has seen since the Manhattan Project.”

He continued, “Its objective is to finish developing and then manufacture and distribute a proven coronavirus vaccine as fast as possible…We’d love to see if we can do it prior to the end of the year.”

Alongside Trump stood Dr. Anthony Fauci, then the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Fauci is a careful man and, unlike Trump, he was wearing a face mask. He had cautioned a congressional committee earlier that week. “There’s no guarantee that the vaccine is actually going to be effective.”

But Operation Warp Speed lived up to its name, and had it been a week speedier, Trump might have actually beaten Joe Biden on Nov. 3, 2020.

Five days after Trump’s defeat, Pfizer announced that it had developed a COVID vaccine that was 90 percent effective. Trump returned to the Rose Garden on Nov. 13 to announce an actual HUGE success, but it was too late for him. He of course took full credit.

“My administration has initiated the single greatest mobilization in U.S. history—pioneering, developing, and manufacturing therapies and vaccines in record time, numbers like nobody has seen before,” he said.

He continued, “No medical breakthrough of this scope and magnitude has ever been achieved this rapidly, this quickly. And we’re very proud of it.”

Just after 9.20 a.m. on Dec. 14, 2020, a 52 year-old intensive care nurse named Sandra Lindsay of Long Island Jewish Medical Center became the first person in America to receive a COVID vaccine.

“It does give me tremendous hope,” Lindsay said.

Two other vaccines were soon approved and by May of 2021, more than 100 million doses had been administered. The Rand Corporation estimated that COVID vaccines had saved 140,000 lives just in America.

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But, after claiming credit for the development, Trump would have to share credit for the subsequent success of the vaccine with his successor, even as he was insisting the election was stolen.

And, as he perpetuated that falsehood, he found common ground with the conspiracy-minded anti-vaxxers.

The jab was not completely without side effects, but they were generally minor. They were certainly less serious than those faced by Gen. George Washington’s troops when he ordered them all to be inoculated for smallpox during the second year of the Revolutionary War. The freedom Washington fought for was not just to do whatever you want. The spirit of 1777 was that you should assume a small risk for yourself to prevent larger harm to others and promote the common good.

But skeptics in search of a cause seized on the vaccines. Kennedy’s iconic last name amplified him to the forefront of fearmongers.

“The deadliest vaccine ever made,” he proclaimed in 2021.

A Journal of Medical Internet Research study found him to have been incredibly active in spreading falsehoods online.

“Tweets by a small group of approximately 800 ‘superspreaders’ verified by Twitter accounted for approximately 35% of all reshares of misinformation on an average day, with the top superspreader (@RobertKennedyJr) responsible for over 13% of retweets,” the study found.

Kennedy also spread falsehoods about vaccines in general, alleging that they caused a host of ills, including autism. He contended that vaccine research and bioweapons are “the same tract.”

During his Senate confirmation hearing, Kennedy insisted he has never been anti-vaccine and accused others of twisting his words. He will fit right in with his new, perpetually aggrieved new boss, whom he called “a hero.”

At Thursday afternoon’s swearing-in, Kennedy stood to Trump’s left, just as Fauci had at the Operation Warp Speed event. Kennedy has called for Fauci to be prosecuted because “he caused a lot of injury.”

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In the office once occupied by his uncle, President John F. Kennedy, this lesser Kennedy extolled Trump: “I’ve told you before, I genuinely believe that you are a pivotal historical figure, and you are going to transform this country at a time when we see all of the indicia of democracy now in tatters in our country.”

Kennedy said he particularly appreciated Trump’s decision to terminate USAID, a JFK legacy credited with saving millions of lives.

“My uncle started USAID in 1961 for humanitarian purposes to put our country on this side of the poor,” he said. “It has been captured by the military industrial complex. It has become a sinister propagator of totalitarianism across and war across the globe, and very few people understand how sinister this agency really is.”

Kennedy was now speaking a conspiracy theory in the Oval Office during his first moment as the nation’s top health official.

“And President Trump saw that, and he stood up to it with a master stroke,” he continued. “And we want to do the same thing with the institutions that are stealing the health of our children.”

The nepo-nightmare said he will now concentrate on what he called a “breathtaking epidemic that is disabling our people.”

“For 20 years, I’ve gotten up every morning on my knees and prayed that God would put me in a position where I could end the childhood chronic disease epidemic in this country,” he said.

He then said that the Almighty had sent him Trump, who he described as a hero, “a man on a white horse.”

The real heroes in this story, though? The life-saving vaccine and the people who helped create it at warp speed and the brave nurse who volunteered to be the first to test it.