WaPo wrote about many states getting notified by the feds that their shipments of Pfizer vaccine would be cut 30-40% next week. The Trump administration (they’re the ones who are still in charge for another month) said it was Pfizer having production problems.
Except Pfizer says there are no production problems. The vaccines are all lined up and are ready to go. There is no shortage. Pfizer is ready and able to fulfill its commitment. It just needs to know who they are going to ship it to in the individual states and the feds aren’t telling them.
Governor Inslee of Washington has been looking into the problem and says, “there is no explanation”.
So let me have a crack at it based on what we know about how the Trump administration works, or doesn’t work as the case may be.
1. It’s not the first time the Trump admin has created problems with supply chains. Jared Kushner’s task force made a royal mess of the PPE and ventilator supplies in the early days going so far as to impound shipments of supplies at the airports as they landed in the states that ordered them. They ordered tests from a middleastern country (UAE?, Qatar?), and let them languish in a warehouse without refrigeration causing them to become useless. So, there is precedence for piracy and incompetence. BiFF would say to never attribute to malice what might be explained by stupidity. In this administration, we can expect both.
2. We have what appears to be a malignant narcissist as the current outgoing president. He thought the Pfizer vaccine would be his apotheosis because of Operation Warp Speed. But as I have pointed out before, Pfizer has the size and resources to be its own planetoid called Pharmacopeia. It didn’t need to join OWS because it wasn’t waiting around with its thumb up its ass waiting for Beijing to tell it what to do. I can guarantee you that research investigators were working like Keebler elves on coronavirus back at the end of January. All they needed was a commitment from the feds to buy it when it was ready.
This very public rebuke of Trump trying to bask in the glory of the achievements of governmental and private industry scientists caused him narcissistic injury. He did not get the attention and praise he expected and he’s furious about it. For what it’s worth, I don’t see Biden taking credit for the vaccine either. That’s because he’s a wiser politician and wise politicians try to make friends with everyone especially the ones that save your bacon by making a life saving vaccine.
Trump also suffered an electoral college defeat. He is not going to be serving a second term. And the more he tried to cancel our votes, the more we loathe him. He knows this. He’s going to act out now.
How will he do it?
Well, the Moderna vaccine will be approved tomorrow. No, it really will. It’s just as efficacious as Pfizer’s but it’s easier to keep fresh without deep refrigeration. Also, unlike Pfizer, who has Beaucoup research dollars to slap together a vaccine in record time, Moderna accepted OWS research money. Who knows what the financial arrangements were with Trump personally. There must have been something.
Anyway, Moderna is going to start shipping their vaccine next week. Huh. Isn’t that when Pfizer was supposed to ship their second tranche of doses? You know, the tranche that is now going to be 30-40% fewer doses?
Never underestimate the ability of a narcissist to hold a grudge regardless of how much misery it costs other people. They love the fact that the rest of the world can’t be indifferent to them.
So, I’m guessing that the Moderna vaccine will get the shipping destination information and will have no problem delivering doses while Pfizer’s vaccines sit and rot for all Trump cares.
I don’t know if you can get the first shot with a Pfizer vaccine and the second shot with Modetna’s. A vaccine specialist I’m not. But it’s likely this question never even occurred to Trump, nor the concern of what might happen if the persons waiting for the booster never get it.
Pfizer is dead to Trump. He’s got Moderna now and if he gets nothing else from Moderna, I’m betting they are going to let him take a victory lap whether their scientists did the heavy lifting or not. When that sucker starts shipping, Trump will claim he knows more about mRNA than anyone. It will be all his doing. I’ll bet those swing state voters will be sorry they didn’t vote for him. Oooo, I’m sure he can make them sorrier. He can always let Jared work on the supply chain to turn it into a blue vs gray state thing.
Then some states will love him and bleach blonde Christian ladies of a certain age will claim he’s a godly man and that his Soviet style stern looking orange mug is kinda hot and he can grab their pussies anytime he wants and Incel ammosexuals can call into Rush and blubber that they would die for Individual One. Meanwhile the blue states hate his guts because they now have to scrounge in their cookie jars for money they don’t have, create a European style trading union with other blue states and cooperate on getting the abandoned Pfizer vaccines from the warehouses to their healthcare professionals before Jared’s pirates confiscate it and pull the plugs on all the -80°C refrigeration units.
Oh, sure he would do it. We’re talking about Trump and he has waaaay too much time left to get attention.
You heard it here first.
Filed under: General |
The Confluence 
Welp, we can thank the Clinton Derangement Syndrome of the Purity Left and the So-Called Liberal Media for this mess (among other causes, of course–Benedict Donald’s “election” was such a perfect storm of multiple Black Swan Events that I suspect the absence of any one of them would have kept him out of the White House).
Thanx, Stupid White Folks of Real Amurka, and Purity Leftists, and So-Called Liberal Dudebro Media.
We could have had competent Presidents mitigating the crises after 2016 (and after 2000), but NOOOOOOO… 😡
Yes, anything Trump can do to assert his evil, he will do. There is not an ounce of decency in him. The only thing to do is to wait for Biden to take over, and then perhaps we will get the vaccines, and they will be effectively distributed. Expecting Trump to do anything to alleviate this awful situation is futile.
This is the world about 47% of our population, over 50% in Red states, wants; or more likely, they don’t really want, but they are incapable of understanding, so they will blame all the shortages and wrecked economy and lost jobs on liberals, or as Loeffler terms Warnock, Marxists. There are no Marxists running in the Democratic Party, there never were. The Communist Party in America hated FDR, because they though that his programs were opiates which would forestall the revolution. There are. however, a lot o actual fascists in the Republican Party, and there are a lot of soulless social darwinists, but Democrats will not call them that, so the fascists keep effectively running against the phantasm of Marxists, while they rob the Treasury, take all the money for themselves, and enact policies which only benefit their corporate donors. And the people do not comprehend it. The media keeps saying that Biden is on the Left, which of course he is not. Sanders is on the Left, and AOC. The spectrum keeps being pushed further right, so that people like Collins and Murkowski, who are conservatives, are seen as moderate, and Pelosi, who is a left of center moderate, is portrayed as far left.. There is some article about the never-trumpers wanting to push Biden more to the center What center is that, the Romney center?
BTW, RD, I hope you saw my potential books on tape suggestions, which I wrote at the bottom of a thread the other day. You may well not choose to buy any of those, but they might spark other book listening ideas for you. Happy Holidays to you and to everyone who reads and comments on your always stimulating blog.
I did see the list! Thank you, William. I’m sure I will read something off your list.
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Exactly RD. Why should we expect any different behavior from Trump w/r/t the vaccine as ventilators etc. I’m just counting the days until he is gone. The bad thing is he’s probably taking a bunch of stuff to sell to Putin. Nary a peep out of conservatives about the Russians spending 6 months setting traps in our computer systems.