In a tweet sent late last week, President Joe Biden again repeated the claim that infrastructure or plans to distribute Wuhan coronavirus vaccines were not in place when he came into office on January 20, 2021.
When Vice President @KamalaHarris and I took office, there was no national plan to get Americans vaccinated and jump-start our economy.
— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) March 11, 2022
The American Rescue Plan helped us get 500 million shots in arms and set off the greatest single year of job growth in our history.
This claim is not true and yet, Biden keeps repeating it.
On May 16, 2020, President Donald Trump announced the launch of Operation Warp Speed. The main objectives of the program were to repeal federal government bureaucracy in order to streamline vaccine and treatment development for the disease. The program included development of logistics to distribute vaccines once they became available. The Trump administration worked with UPS, FedEx and a number of pharmacies to get the job done.
"We drove early development in manufacturing by making pre-purchased commitments of more than $10 billion," former Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said in January 2021. "We provided comprehensive support for vaccine manufacturing operations, enlisting private sector advisers and logistics experts from the Department of Defense to ensure that production could scale up without a hitch."
“Operation Warp Speed delivered by the end of 2020 two FDA-authorized antibody treatments, two FDA-authorized vaccines, five vaccine candidates in Phase 3 clinical trials, and 20 million first doses of vaccine allocated, with the second doses on hand ready to be shipped a few weeks later," he continued. "This is unprecedented and historic. I am grateful to everyone who has worked tirelessly on this effort this year to save lives.”
A detailed explanation of the process was published by the Department of Defense.
When President Trump left office, one million Americans were getting vaccinated every day and more than 36 million doses had already been administered.
During his first primetime address in March 2021, Biden claimed credit for a vaccine rollout that had been set up and already implemented by the Trump administration. A year later, he's repeating false claims about vaccine development and the distribution process.