October82
Well-Known Member
There are two separate questions that are being conflated here. One of which is about policy to mitigate the harms of the virus, the other concerns manufacturing, distribution, and basic research. The Trump administration instituted policies that were in line with the rest of the world in terms of manufacturing and distribution. The basic research that led these vaccines to be developed had little to do with the Trump administration, and more to do with basic R&D over several decades. The policy failures (or successes) of the Trump administration to mitigate the spread of the virus are well known, and noting that they did some things right simply doesn't address those broader issues. They're just different topics.
*I should clarify my phrasing, I didn't mean to suggest that the federal government didn't do anything here. It was decades of basic R&D support and work by NIAID/BARDA that put us in a position to be able to develop a vaccine to a SARS or MERS like virus. The BioNTech and Moderna vaccines rely on new technologies are even bigger achievements of basic research. The current administration simply had little or nothing to do with any of this. The same is true of previous administrations and will be true of future ones.
If you want the US to lead on vaccine development, please ask your representatives to support funding for basic research. It's the overwhelming reason we have ended up with a successful vaccine.
I agree with you that policy is about more than the basic scientific facts. But science is not just biology, chemistry and physics. There are scientific answers to these policy questions, and I want the people who do that kind of science to be making the decisions. I'm not interested in a political debate, but the simple fact was that the Trump administration did not engage in a policy response to the Covid-19 pandemic that was in line with the consensus of the scientists whose job it is to answer questions like "how do we save the most lives with the least damage to the economy?" It's a problem when politics comes before science. When simple, popular, and convenient answers are substituted for the hard and unpopular ones.
The vaccine was developed by BioNTech, Pfizer is the manufacturing partner. BioNTech is a German company run by Turkish immigrants. BioNTech was funded by the EU and the German government while Pfizer only received late stage funds from the US government to support manufacturing. To be clear, none of this is meant to detract from the accomplishments or hard work that American scientists did here. There's plenty of credit to go around, even for the vaccines that have failed. The point here is to highlight that this is a global scientific achievement that we should all be celebrating, not one that should be turned into further political fodder.
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