Effective leadership through the remainder of the pandemic will require honesty, not cynical press strategies.
A week in, the Biden administration’s efforts to speed up vaccine availability and distribution have been tangled up with a cynical press strategy.
People on the Biden team have repeatedly described their efforts as breaking new paths when they are basically picking up a challenging but impressive project from their predecessors. Last week, as I noted here, they made the absurd claim that they were starting from scratch and had been handed a total failure, even as they scrambled to pretend that a pace of vaccinations that had already been reached by the Trump administration would make for an ambitious goal for their first hundred days. Yesterday, they put the president himself in the position of describing as novel and transformative a set of steps that were a straightforward extension of the program they inherited.
Biden did improve on his goal, telling reporters on Monday, “I think with the grace of God, the goodwill of the neighbor and the creek not rising, as the old saying goes, I think we may be able to get that to 1.5 million a day, rather than 1 million a day.” The U.S. is not far from that goal, as the seven-day rolling average of daily vaccinations is at 1.3 million now, according to Bloomberg’s vaccine tracker. But sustaining a pace of 1.5 million-per-day over three months is at least more ambitious, and that’s good to see.
But the administration has kept up its habit of describing its efforts as a break from those of its predecessor when they are a direct extension. Yesterday, the president personally announced that the administration was modestly increasing the volume of vaccine shipments to the states and finalizing deals with the two manufacturers of approved vaccines to purchase an additional 200 million doses so that the government has enough doses by the end of the summer to vaccinate as many as 300 million Americans. This is a good and welcome move. But the president couldn’t help himself and insisted that this was a change from the trajectory of Operation Warp Speed.
The article describing the announcement in today’s New York Times, a newspaper that was (quite rightly) never shy about calling out Donald Trump’s deceptions, exhibits exceptional gentleness in reproaching this claim, but it nonetheless makes the point clear:
But while Mr. Biden said the moves were “going to allow millions more Americans to get vaccinated sooner than previously anticipated,” that was likely not the case. Next week’s increase to the states was expected as vaccine makers ramp up manufacturing. And the replenishing over the summer — when the government was likely to run out of supply — was anticipated under contracts signed by the Trump administration, which gave the government options to continue increasing its commitments in increments of 100 million doses.
Exactly. Because the contracts between the Trump-era HHS and the manufacturers were reached before it was clear whether one or both of the mRNA vaccines would be successful and safe, both contracts involved options for massive purchases after the original commitment. The Pfizer contract allows the government to purchase up to an additional 400 million doses, and the Moderna contract up to an additional 300 million doses. The Trump administration had already exercised part of this option in December, and now the Biden administration has exercised a further part.
This is good. It’s the right move. But it builds on the impressive effort the administration inherited. Especially given the number of headaches and problems this administration inherits on other fronts, it should not be so hard to acknowledge that on this front in particular the Trump administration did some important things right, and that our country is by no means starting from nothing or reversing course.
Effective leadership through the remainder of the pandemic will require honesty, not cynical press strategies. That’s one thing the Biden administration surely could do differently from its predecessor, yet has so far chosen not to.