- The Washington Times - Friday, May 14, 2021

Former President Donald Trump complained on Friday about the lack of credit his team gets for developing the COVID-19 vaccines that are ushering in a sense of normalcy and led the new administration to relax its mask guidance.

The former president, who is banned from Twitter, argued in a statement that without his work, the world would have seen tens of millions of deaths on par with the Spanish flu pandemic a century ago.

“Because of the vaccines we pushed and developed in record time, nothing like that will be even close to happening. Just a mention please!” he said. “The Biden administration had zero to do with it. All they did was continue our plan of distribution, which was working well right from the beginning!”

Experts who’ve spoken to The Washington Times said the Trump administration did a good job in placing a number of bets on multiple vaccine companies using various technology platforms.

The strategy paid off, with a pair of groundbreaking messenger-RNA vaccines coming to market in less than a year — a pace that beat expectations.

One of them, Massachusetts-based Moderna, worked alongside National Institutes of Health scientists and received other federal assistance for research and development. Pfizer took a more independent approach with its German partner, BioNTech, but welcomed pre-purchases of its doses from the Trump administration.

The Biden administration took over the vaccine rollout in January and received kudos from some quarters for extending federal aid to states that requested it to accelerate their rollouts, instead of leaving governors to their own devices.

Mr. Trump received the vaccine in January but did it privately instead of on camera, forfeiting the chance for a public victory lap before leaving office.

• Tom Howell Jr. can be reached at thowell@washingtontimes.com.

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