White House press secretary Jen Psaki declined to give the previous administration any credit for getting the ball rolling on vaccines during her Thursday press briefing.
Psaki, asked by a reporter about a claim from former Assistant Secretary for Health Brett Giroir that the Biden administration is following “99 percent” of the Trump administration’s vaccine playbook, said she doesn’t “think anyone deserves credit when half a million people in the country have died of this pandemic.” (RELATED: Kamala Harris Says Administration Started ‘From Scratch’ On Vaccine Distribution)
I am so tired of the continuing lies that @potus inherited a #COVID19Vaccine mess, when in fact 99% of current vaccine manufacturing and distribution is EXACTLY as planned and explicitly described by Trump Administration’s Operation Warp Speed
— Brett Giroir (@DrGiroir) February 25, 2021
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“Our focus is on and what the president’s focused on when he came into office just over a month ago, was ensuring that we had enough vaccines,” she continued. “We are going to have them now.”
Psaki added that “there’s no question, and all data points to the fact, that they were not enough of any of those things when he took office.”
Some top Biden administration officials, including Vice President Kamala Harris, have claimed that the previous administration effectively left the Biden team without any real strategy on how to distribute the two coronavirus vaccines that had received emergency approval prior to Biden’s inauguration.
President Joe Biden himself, however, stated on Jan. 26 that everyone involved in Operation Warp Speed “absolutely” deserves credit.
“We want to give credit to everyone involved in this vaccine effort,” he said at the time. “That credit is absolutely due.”