In the clip below, Donald Trump lies by taking credit for the COVID-19 vaccines developed by Pfizer, Moderna, and AstraZeneca.
And what did I do? I came up with vaccines that people didn’t think we’d have for five years.
It is worth remembering that, unlike Trump, companies like Moderna got to work right away to try to do something about the COVID-19 outbreak. By February 24, 2020, Moderna had actually begun shipping out samples of its experimental vaccine to US government researchers.
Meanwhile, in late February 2020, Donald Trump was still trying to bullshit his way out of the pandemic, dismissing the threat of the disease by saying things like this on February 26, 2020,
. . .when you have 15 people, and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero, that’s a pretty good job we’ve done.
Trump doubled down on this statement on the following day on February 27, 2020,
It’s going to disappear. One day — it’s like a miracle — it will disappear. And from our shores, we — you know, it could get worse before it gets better. It could maybe go away. We’ll see what happens. Nobody really knows.
The main thing Trump did through his longstanding denial and sabotaging o public health efforts is guarantee that Americans who might have lived long enough to receive a vaccine instead died prematurely from the disease.