Vaccine shortage bottlenecked by Donald Trump incompetence

This echo opinion amplifies the The New Yorker article by Masha Gessen, who explores a less-noted hallmark of Trump’s presidency: indifference! Where is the vaccine!

This is an echo opinion by Eric Black published in the Minnesota Post newspaper.

A key example was that the Trump administration didn’t take Pfizer up on an offer to reserve hundreds of millions of doses of its COVID vaccine for use by Americans.

Masha Gessen, the reliably perceptive writer for The New Yorker, points out one of the less-noted hallmarks of the Trump presidency, namely the stuff Trump just didn’t care enough to do anything about.

Indifference.

The key example, very much in the headlines at the moment, was that the Trump administration didn’t take Pfizer up on an offer from the drug company to reserve hundreds of millions of doses of its COVID vaccine for use by Americans while the vaccine was under development.

Donald Trump abandoned his responsibility to protect the health and well being of Americans!

Trump passed on it, or just ignored the offer.

There really is no good explanation. The result is that hundreds of millions of doses of the Pfizer vaccine, which could have been earmarked for use by Americans, has now been sold to other countries. Some untold number of Americans will die who might have survived if they had had earlier access to the first vaccine found to be effective, which is produced by an American company and which offered those doses to the Trump administration.

It’s an outrage, of course, if you assume that the job of a U.S. president, especially one whose slogan is “America First,” would be to do anything he could to lock up as much of that then-promising and now-proven vaccine for, y’know, Americans first.

Gessen includes the excuses the Trump administration has given for this act of indifference or incompetence, but they make no sense. Under the terms of Pfizer’s offer, the U.S. government would have been under no obligation if the vaccine, then under development, had not turned out to be effective.

But as we approach the end of the Trump hellscape, and as we struggle to understand it, Gessen offers a perhaps obvious and familiar but nonetheless shocking shortcut to how it worked. Trump was always very focused on things that would make him richer, more famous, more powerful. But if they weren’t in those categories, he couldn’t be bothered.

The full, smart, historically rooted and not-very-long Gessen piece is here.

The images of the first people to receive the covid-19 vaccine promise the end of this particular nightmare. But it’s likely that hundreds of thousands more will die in the United States before the pandemic is over. The return to life without social distancing and isolation, the end to our loneliness, could proceed with unnecessary slowness because the Trump Administration did not secure as many doses of the vaccine as it could have. We have come to expect this President to fail Americans, catastrophically, and we have become accustomed to understanding these failures through two traits of his Administration: cruelty and militant incompetence. But there is a third one, characteristic of many, if not all, autocracies: indifference.