During Thursday's White House Press Briefing, Jen Psaki decided to trot out some old Democrat propaganda of yesteryear when she claimed President Biden took office with "no real plan" in place to handle the pandemic or get Americans vaccinated.
"When we came into this administration — I would remind you, it's now a long time ago — there was no real plan, we were left no plan by our predecessors," Psaki asserted. "We needed to put in place a plan to not only get enough access to vaccines, but also ensure there are enough vaccinators, and vaccine locations," she also claimed.
PSAKI: "When we came into this administration...there was no real plan. We were left no plan by our predecessors" to get "access to vaccines." pic.twitter.com/LE9MbaJmuD
— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) March 17, 2022
This falsehood, dredged back up by Psaki for a lame Throwback Thursday, was one of Biden's main campaign criticisms lobbed at Trump: Elect me and I'll shut down the virus, Biden would say more than one dozen times as Townhall archived here.
But President Trump's Operation Warp Speed had already developed and began distributing multiple COVID vaccines in less time than anyone thought to be possible. Despite Biden's claims that his predecessor didn't have a plan, the Trump plan succeeded such that both Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were vaccinated before taking office, along with 18.9 million other Americans who had received at least one dose before Biden swore the oath of office on January 20, 2021.
The vaccines created and distributed through Operation Warp Speed "prevented more than 139,000 deaths during the first five months they were available" and "the economic value of preventing these deaths was between $625 billion and $1.4 trillion," according to a study from the National Institutes of Health. If that's "no real plan" according to Psaki, well that's on her. Even Dr. Fauci pushed back on Biden's claims from the White House podium, saying "we certainly are not starting from scratch" on vaccinations.
What's more, the supposedly new and brilliant plan that Biden promised Americans he would implement turned out to be mostly plagiarized. Bloomberg reported on the Biden administration's hypocrisy in a story headlined "Biden Covid Team Derides Trump Plan While Borrowing Playbook." The piece highlighted how the Biden "administration’s distribution of vaccines so far looks little different from that of its predecessor" and "made only modest changes to the plan that’s meeting their target pace of more than one million shots a day."
So Biden's plan that Trump allegedly didn't have was...pretty much just Trump's plan until Biden broke his promises that vaccination wouldn't be mandated at the federal level.
Regardless, Biden and the plan he touted would go on to miss his own goal for vaccinations last July and culminate in a frustrated throwing-up of hands as Biden declared there's "no federal solution" to the COVID pandemic despite his power-tripping mandates that would ultimately fail to survive scrutiny from the Supreme Court. Is throwing in the towel part of Biden's plan? Apparently so.
The statement from Psaki illustrates a larger issue for the Biden White House when it comes to ever accepting responsibility for its missteps. According to the White House, nothing is ever Biden's fault. There's always a scapegoat: Russia, COVID, Trump, and Republicans in Congress are just a few of many boogeymen the administration has used in order to maintain the illusion that Biden's tumultuous tenure has been flawless.
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