Trump and Biden did not do well with COVID-19 Vaccine messaging

On May 15, 2020, President Trump announced Operation Warp Speed during a press conference held in the White House Rose Garden. “Operation Warp Speed, that means big and it means fast,” said Trump. “A massive scientific and industrial, logistic endeavor unlike anything our country has seen since the Manhattan Project.” Speaking on a timeline, Trump said, “We’d love to see if we can do it prior to the end of the year.” Trump continued, “I think we’re going to have some very good results coming out very quickly.”

The doubters and naysayers were quick to pounce, as if Trump himself was developing the vaccine. Never before has a vaccine been approved in such a short period of time.  Traditionally, vaccines approved for emergency use were only administered to dying patients. What Trump proposed was the production of a vaccine or vaccines in less than a year, to be administered under emergency use provisions to healthy people, in an effort to prevent the spread of the COVID-19 virus, or as he likes to call it, “the China virus”. 

The highly toxic political environment leading up to the November 2020 elections, combined with the deep-seated hatred and mistrust so many democrats held in their hearts for Trump, contaminated the vaccine rollout with suspicion and skepticism. The democrat ticket of Biden / Harris was slow to change the narrative from mistrust to must have. Early on, both Harris and Biden were making public statements that surely discouraged some of their supporters from getting the COVID-19 shot[s].

In September 2020, then Vice President Candidate Kamala Harris said she did not “trust” President Trump. “I will not take his word for it. He’s looking at an election coming up in less than 60 days, and he’s grasping to get whatever he can to pretend he has been a leader on this issue when he is not.” Also in September, Presidential Candidate and former Vice President Joe Biden said, “My guess is he is going to announce a vaccine. He’s going to say it’s going to be available around Election Day. He’s going to hype it.” These types of comments from the soon to be President and Vice President of the United States certainly contributed to some of their supporters and followers to delay getting the vaccine. The consequences of any delay to get vaccinated based on these statements made by Harris and Biden are unknown, yet unavoidable. Some people took these words to heart and decided to “wait and see”.  And for some people, time ran out.

For his part, President Trump and National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Director Dr. Anthony Fauci did an awful job selling what they unfortunately referred to as vaccines. Biden supporters were not going to trust a word Trump said on the subject and Trump supporters saw Fauci as a man that frequently contradicted himself while stealing Trump’s thunder and light. With Trump preoccupied chasing down voter fraud in a last-ditch effort to stay in the White House, Fauci became a liberal media darling responsible for saving American lives while Trump was being accused of orchestrating an insurrection! Meanwhile, the American people were, and still are just trying to decide what’s right for themselves and their families without being bullied or forced into getting an experimental serum injected into their bodies! Surely this is no way to run a pandemic recovery effort. When even pandemics are politicized, it’s time to pause and think about what is really happening in our country.

For all practical purposes, these injections, from a public perspective, are more like flu shots than any previously FDA-approved vaccine. The public thinks of vaccines as injections that prevent diseases such as the measles, mumps, and rubella. The three approved “vaccines” for COVID-19 do not prevent the inoculated from contracting the virus. Instead, the injections provided by Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson / Janssen have shown to be effective at minimizing the symptoms of the COVID-19 virus – but are not protection against contracting the virus.

Because these vaccines were approved for emergency use, people that have been vaccinated have become part of the ongoing study to determine how the virus will react and impact the vaccinated. Since December 14, 2020 when nurse Sandra Lindsay received the very first COVID-19 injection at Northwell Health’s Long Island Jewish Medical Center, until yesterday when the CDC reported that 163,025,726 people, half of the U.S. population, the accumulated data clearly indicates that if you are vaccinated and become infected with the virus, your symptoms will be greatly minimized.

So why not just say that? Tell the public what they already know – the so-called COVID-19 vaccines are not vaccines in the traditional sense. Tell the public that there is no FDA-approved vaccine that will prevent you from contracting the COVID-19 virus. However, if you are fully vaccinated and you become infected with the COVID-19 virus, the odds of you becoming so sick that you require hospitalization are less than one percent.

On a weekly basis there are news reports of fully-vaccinated people becoming infected with COVID-19. The public hear these reports and wonder why they should get vaccinated if they still can get the virus. That is a very logical response. It demonstrates how terribly the Trump and Biden Administrations failed at accurately messaging these vaccines. Both administrations and the CDC have been peppering the target paper rather than delivering a simple, consistent, laser specific message that’s on target, every time, about these injections.

The three available COVID-19 vaccines will not prevent you from contracting the COVID-19 virus. However, all the data collected to date demonstrates that these injections will, in the large majority of cases, greatly minimize the virus symptoms and prevent hospitalization and / or death.

That’s the message the unvaccinated portion of the United States needs to hear at this time. The truth.