Surprise: Trump Left Biden With a Vaccine Distribution Plan That's Basically a Xerox Copy of His Bare Ass

By Bess Levin, Vanity Fair

24 January 21

“Got ya, suckuh. I did nothing!”

omething you probably came to realize over the last four years was that Donald Trump was not a good president. In fact some might go so far as to say he was one of the worst presidents in U.S. history, a claim that fact-checkers standing by tell us is...100% accurate. Unfortunately, Trump’s badness wasn‘t eradicated the day he left office; instead, its effects will linger like a viral plague, or a ticking time bomb, or a series of booby traps spread around the federal government for God knows how long, which Joe Biden now has to clean up. Starting with: the fact that the Trump administration apparently left its successor with no COVID-19 vaccine distribution plan whatsoever.

CNN reports that within hours of the new president being sworn in on Wednesday, sources revealed that “one of the biggest shocks that the Biden team had to digest during the transition period was what they saw as a complete lack of vaccine distribution strategy” under Trump, despite the fact that multiple drugs had already been approved. “There is nothing for us to rework. We are going to have to build everything from scratch,” a person familiar with the matter told CNN, with another adding that the reaction upon learning they would have to start from “square one” was: “Wow, just further affirmation of complete incompetence.”

Last week, just when it looked like Team Trump couldn’t possibly do a worse job handling the pandemic if it tried—and putting Champ and Major in front of the coronavirus task force would’ve been a better idea—it emerged that despite the Health and Human Services Department announcing that the federal government would start releasing COVID-19 doses that had been held in reserve for second shots, no such reserve existed. Many states are now saying that they’re running out of doses, and thousands of people have had their appointments canceled. (Naturally, the Trump administration blamed the situation on states supposedly having unrealistic expectations for how many doses were on the way.)

Biden has said he wants to get 100 million shots into Americans’ arms within his first 100 days in office, a gargantuan task that obviously would have been made slightly easier had his predecessor spent his last two months in office focused on the deadly virus rather than trying to overturn the results of the election. While Trump was attempting a coup, the U.S. was barreling toward 400,000 COVID-19 deaths, a figure that now stands at 407,000 and counting. Shortly after taking the oath of office, Biden signed an executive order requiring masks on federal property, in addition to reversing Trump’s wildly petty decision to withdraw from the World Health Organization. On Wednesday night White House press secretary Jen Psaki said, “The issue that [the president] wakes up every day focused on is getting the pandemic under control,” which in normal times would go without saying, but given his predecessor’s history of effectively ignoring the crisis from the start except to suggest that people inject bleach into their veins, it apparently had to be said.

On Thursday, Biden is expected to sign another batch of pandemic-related executive orders, including directing companies to ramp up manufacturing of supplies for vaccines, testing, and PPE for health care workers. Speaking to reporters, Jeff Zients, the president’s coronavirus response coordinator, said that the administration expected the situation it was walking into to be bad, but never expected it to be this bad, even considering Trump’s historic level of incompetence. “What we’re inheriting is so much worse than we could have imagined,” Zients said.

Meanwhile, the gang at Fox News is incensed that Biden hasn’t thanked “Donald Trump and the Trump administration for what they did.”