Although they aren’t exactly scientists, the media said that COVID vaccines would take years or even decades to develop and test and that they would probably be only about 50-60% effective.
It’s not clear whether the media really believed their own dire predictions, or whether they were just rooting for the virus because they thought it hurt Trump and hurt America, both of which they like to see hurt. Although (or perhaps because) they’re not scientists and not very smart, they are Democrats after all.
In any event, the pharmaceutical industry proved them wrong. They developed new vaccines with new technology in a few months, then finished testing them in a few more months. The effectiveness is about 95%.
Expect media reports that in the 5% of the population where the vaccine seems not to work, it’s all Trump’s fault. The headline will read something like, “Although impeached and out of office, Trump is still killing people.”
Now that the scientists, physicians and businessmen at pharmaceutical companies have performed scientific, medical and business miracles, we can conquer the pandemic and get back to watching proper football in sports bars by simply taking the vaccine. Right?
No, not right. Because the simple distribution of the vaccines wound up the responsibility of the people who brought you the Obamacare website and VA Hospitals.
The first act in their comedy of errors was to suggest that the first people to get the vaccine should not be the people over 70 who are dying, but the people who have the darkest skin. Because social justice.
Imagine the vaccination center. Would they have a light meter to measure a person’s pigmentation, or would they just take the person’s word for it? What if they were white, color-wise, but identified as very black, at least on that day?
Ironically, or perhaps intentionally, but probably just carelessly, the effect of this scheme would be more deaths among both older whites and older blacks because the vaccine supplies would be used instead on not-at-risk younger blacks.
But no matter. The point was not to reduce white deaths or even black deaths. It was to feel very, very woke. After a suitable outcry from doctors – the kind with patients, not the kind jockeying for government grants – the government quietly backed off that racist plan.
The FDA finally approved the vaccine in mid-December. That was weeks after Great Britain already had. In the interim, another ten thousand died. The government boasted that we’d get 20 million doses administered by the end of the year. As it turned out, they administered only about 10% of that.
Happy New Year!
What happened? Intra-governmental squabbling between the bureaucratic Center for Disease Control and military brass heading up Operation Warp Speed (why military brass for that task?) consumed months. Eventually, they decided that the vaccinations should proceed in phases.
Fine. But they decided that we cannot go onto a new phase until the prior phase is finished. They never specified what “finished” means. Does it mean 100.00% of the people in the prior phase have been injected? What if less than 100.00% of those people actually want to be injected? Is 90% enough? Or 70%?
They never said. Meanwhile, millions of vaccine does were, and are, sitting in freezers while people continue dying at the rate of about 4,000 a day.
The vaccines are administered in two shots about three weeks apart. The government decided they couldn’t proceed to a new phase until they had in-hand enough of the vaccine to administer the second shot to people who’d gotten the first shot in the prior phase.
But the pharmaceutical companies had already told the government that their manufacturing capabilities are sufficient to manufacture those second shots on-the-fly. The government didn’t need to keep the second shots on ice. But the government did anyway, and still more people died.
Moreover, the data indicates that just a first shot is highly efficacious, so if somehow a person doesn’t get his second shot he’s very likely protected anyway. No matter, the government insisted on reserving a second shot for a person who’d taken the first shot rather than administering it as the first shot to another patient. Meanwhile, thousands more died.
Finally, the government relented and decided to administer that shot to new patients rather than reserving it to be the second shot for earlier patients.
Now we’re assured that the vaccination program is “on track” but we’re not given any metrics as to how it’s really going in comparison to the plan (assuming there really is a plan this time). In reality, over half the New York allotment of vaccine is still on ice.
This Keystone Kops routine has literally cost tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of lives. More Americans have now died of COVID than American soldiers died in WWII. But the government types don’t care because as “essential workers” they personally have gotten the vaccine.
Call me cynical, but are these lazy, selfish and inept government types the people we want running the health care system? Or anything else?
the Aspen beat 
So we got rid of the guy that actually made things happen, denying he could do anything as opposed to the guy that not only did nothing but what he did do didn’t work and cost a lot of money, he’s a Saint. No the USA in not on the wane……………
Where are the vaccines on ice being stored? Are they in control of fed govt somewhere?
Polis said Colorado only getting less than 1/2 doses of what the state was promised. Is that accurate? If yes, why?
Just trying to get the facts. I have spent a decent amount of time searching but can’t seem to find the answers.
I watched a few minutes of Denver news last night (CBS) and after Polis whined, it was mentioned that a power failure somewhere in the state caused more than 600,000 doses to be destroyed.
Polis is not whining if he was promised 279,000 doses.
News indicates 165 doses had to be destroyed. News also indicates Kaiser in Lakewood used 135 doses so they would not have to destroy. What happened to all the other promised doses?
Jakki:
Various sites indicate Kaiser had to destroy 165 doses after a power outage. They were able to distribute 135 doses before they expired. Polis was not whining. He said Colorado was promised 279,000 doses and got 79,000. If that is true, it wreaks havoc on distribution estimates. We need to know the actual numbers to understand what is going on. I do not give a shit about which party is saying what. These are critical times and people need vaccines. Getting people vaccines must be the priority.
Who made money while NIH delayed the approval of a the cheap and proven remedy – Ivermectin?
and HCQ…
Thanks for mentioning actual therapeutics that appear to have been banned.
So Glenn, still believe this was a fair election? Or is it soon going to be illegal to even ask that question? Is it also soon going to be illegal to question this sham impeachment? You should rethink some of your recent columns. You were among the bamboozled.
(1) I never said it was a fair election.
(2) Your comment fails to offer a scintilla of evidence that it was or wasn’t.
(3) I’m struggling to see the connection to the vaccine rollout. But maybe I’m just not connecting dots in a proper conspiracy theorist sort of way.
You can disparage my viewpoint however you wish. You got on Trump for insisting the election was stolen. Now if one says it, one is banished from social media, maybe soon from employment. There’s TONS of evidence, statistical & otherwise, that this election was stolen. If you haven’t bothered to familiarize yourself with the evidence, I sure can’t recite it all here. No court would even hear it. My point is you rail against the government’s willful incompetence here but fail to see the bigger picture. We are rapidly being subjugated by an evil & corrupt state. Stealing the election was merely part of this process. Conservatives viewpoints, including yours, will soon be stamped out. Just because you write a column doesn’t give your view any more weight or foundation than anyone else’s. It’s just one man’s opinion.
What evidence, Mr. Doug? If all of this evidence exists, it would have made it to the courts, including the GOP-majority SCOTUS. Every court rejected every lawsuit filed. Was it fair? Probably not. Was it proveable? Apparently not. The more we cling to this narrative, the most foolish we look and the less ability we have to move forward and plan to take back the House in 2022. It’s past time to let it go.
There is video evidence of major irregularities during the vote count. Ronna McDaniel has 4,000 affidavits documenting 12,000 incidents of fraud in the vote count (all sworn affidavits under the threat of perjury). No court has ever ruled on any evidence, just procedural issues. The truth is that no judge (all cowards) wants to get involved. Remember the law clerk who heard John Roberts say that the SCOTUS was not going to be responsible for causing rioting in the US? Just the fact that EVERY contested state used the same procedure to cheat: count enough votes to see how far Trump was ahead, then stop counting so they could import and/or manufacture enough votes to have Biden win. So, the evidence has never been considered in any court of law.
Call me skeptical, but nobody in his right mind would take this vaccine. Like COVID-19, both HIV and the common cold also are single-strand RNA (retro-)viruses; if it were so simple to develop a vaccine for an RNA virus, we would have eradicated AIDS decades ago.
So what’s different now? Mirabile dictu: mRNA vaccines! Instead of injecting people with dead or weakened versions of a virus, we’re now injecting people with nanoparticles of mRNA (encased in antifreeze) that penetrate every type of cell in the body and bind to the mitochondrial Ribosomes, converting a vaccine-infected cell into a factory for COVID-19 spike proteins — which contain sequences of human placental protein and HIV. What could possibly go wrong?
To turn from medical science to literature:
So those of us located and infected by the Government Dracula and its legions will become what Bram Stoker denoted as “the Undead” — neither imminently mortal nor any longer fully human? While those of us hunkering behind the equivalent of Holy Water, prayer, and The Cross of Christ may lose our lives but save them, as Jesus put it?
Such a choice!
The above comment was probably “weird,” so I’ll recast it. I had my first Pfizer dose several days ago, and although I’m not “mutating” yet (so far as I know), I can’t help but feel I may have made a mistake, mostly because of the political climate: If Biden is going to inject 100,000,000 people in 100 days, then, as you say, what can possibly go wrong? Does this thing even work? For how long? I think I prefer the Keystone Cops to Biden’s healthcare juggernaut.
As Robert Heinlein once said: Never ascribe an action of governrment to venality when it is more likely incompetence.
Neve ascribe to incompetence that which the evidence proves to be actual malice.
So our Governor in Nevada put elderly people in the 3rd tier to receive the vaccine; and put people in prison in the 2nd tier. Got a lot of flack for that. Now moved elderly people up to the 2nd tier;
and who know where the people in prison are now? Off the subject, I have a problem with giving top secret security clearance to someone with dementia; and also to congress people who have Chinese spies working for them for 20 years; and also to congressman who cavorts with a Chinese spy. All should have their security clearances pulled – like immediately!
Interested to know people’s thoughts on what looks like an approaching globalist “health dictatorship.” Even Bergoglio (the heretic pope) is promulgating something resembling a dogma of obligatory vaccination as a way of exercising our moral duty to the Brotherhood of Man. Already in Ireland, students are being denied access to Catholic schools if they have not been vaccinated.
Are conscientious objectors to be smeared as anti-vaxxers, analogous to Qanon Trumpers and climate deniers? O Brave New World.
Of course, and those of us who got the vaccine will be smeared as captives of the state. We live in a wonderland of “looking after everyone else’s business “.
I still say this was a created plague, biological warfare created to get rid of Trump and the populist movement .it’s succeeded in part, but only because of the brown shirt tactics employed by the government; we’re being Forced off of social media, Forced into taking medications of questionable effectiveness, Forced to accept a government we did not elect, and Forced to sit down and shut up.
Anarchy.
I will not submit.
Not anarchy — totalitarianism
“… are these selfish and inept government types the people we want running the health care system? Or anything else?” Silly Glenn, don’t you know what “we” want is irrelevant? Our political and moral betters controlling the government will TELL us what we are going to get, and give it to us, good and hard (pace Mencken). By stealing and facilitating the theft of the election from the actual voters, the oligarchs have effectively decided to turn the satire of Brecht into an action plan and simply dissolve the people, rather than the government. The announced intention of the Harris/Biden/Xi administration to legalize approximately eleven million illegal residents guaranties that our new citizenry will dominate the electoral process for the foreseeable future, thereby also guaranteeing that “we, the people” excludes “you.”
Probably 3/4 of the deaths in our country could have been avoided had the health authorities approved and promoted the Hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin protocols they only now are recognizing. Those ~300,000 unnecessary deaths and hundreds of thousands of more catastrophic illnesses could rightfully be termed “the biggest crime in American history.”