President Obama to the rescue
Even though Donald Trump lost the election and it wasn’t close, he still feels the need to take credit for a COVID vaccine he had nothing to do with. This isn’t too surprising, as he can’t be seen as completely bungling the crisis even worse than he already has, and yet he can’t accept the possibility that his response was anything less than perfect. However, his administration and his loudest cheerleaders have begun to follow suit, with Kayleigh McEnany embarrassing herself at the last White House press conference by further pushing this nonsense.
The reality is that Donald Trump barely managed to get through a day wearing a mask in public, and his insistence on rushing a vaccine or potential therapy through before the election has made an overwhelming number of people distrustful of a potential vaccine when it comes out. It would probably take some time for the vaccine to be produced and safely distributed, but Trump can only think of these things in how they’ll affect him politically rather than their impact on America’s well-being for the long term.
Fortunately, his opponent in the race has been careful to set a good public example for how people should behave in a pandemic. Now, Trump’s predecessor is also showing a better example of leadership. On Wednesday, President Obama gave an interview on Joe Madison’s Sirius XM radio show where he said he would voluntarily take a vaccine on live television to convince Americans that the new medical breakthrough is safe and effective.
Obama then went on to say that health workers, seniors, and people with an underlying medical condition should seek the vaccine out when it’s available. At the closing of the Trump era, it’s another painful reminder that Trump not only failed to outdo his predecessor in just about everything, but Obama is still relevant and showing more leadership even when he’s no longer the president.
James Sullivan is the assistant editor of Brain World Magazine and an advocate of science-based policy making