TRUMP’S LEGACY: The United States is Administering Vaccines at Rates Far Higher than Europe, Asia
Richard Moorhead
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The United States currently ranks fifth worldwide in distributing coronavirus vaccines to its population, with 16.6% of Americans having received at least one vaccine dose. The US trails Israel, the United Kingdom Chile and Bahrain, three much smaller countries and one large one. The US maintains a strong lead on other western democracies, with most European countries having vaccinated less than 7% of their populations.
As of March 5th, Israel is the only country to have vaccinated more than 50% of its population. The UK has vaccinated just over 30%, with Bahrain and Chile around 20%. For a nation of 330 million people, the high US vaccination rate represents a medical and scientific achievement.
Plans to manufacture and distribute the vaccine were largely formed under President Trump’s administration, with the then-President spurring the military, pharmaceutical companies, state governments and federal drug regulatory agencies to expedite the vaccine. His efforts appear to be paying off in his successor’s reign, with no other large country proving close as successful to the United States in distributing vaccines.
Experts agree that the United States had suffered from an elevated death rate due to a high level of obesity and other comorbidities among the national population, and free movement between the union’s states. Nations in Europe and across the world had the luxury of closing off their national borders and essentially isolating small populations of several million people, a factor that President Trump’s critics largely ignored in assessing federal handling of the coronavirus epidemic.
The US was already a world leader in vaccine distribution when Trump left office, holding the fourth place spot in world vaccination rates before Biden entered office. Biden claimed that President Trump had failed to develop a vaccine distribution plan, even after he himself personally received the vaccine while his predecessor was still President. Trump urged his supporters to receive the vaccine in his CPAC speech last weekend.
Sadly, with the media proving successful at spinning a narrative insisting that President Trump had mismanaged the coronavirus pandemic, it remains entirely unclear if the former President will receive the credit he deserves for overseeing the momentous scientific and medical project.
Follow me on Gab @WildmanAZ, Twitter @Wildman_AZ, and on Parler @Moorhead.
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