National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins is praising the Trump administration for the “breathtaking” speed at which a COVID-19 vaccine was developed.
During an interview with Axios, Collins was asked what the Trump administration got right amid the coronavirus pandemic.
“The Operation Warp Speed, for which I give a great deal of credit to Secretary Azar, was a effort that many of us were not initially convinced was going to be necessary and it was thought about as a Manhattan Project,” Collins said on Sunday.
He continued, “Those words were used sometimes to describe what needed to happen in order to get all parts of the government together in an unprecedented way to test up to six vaccines in rigorous trials… so that if any of those trials happen to work, you would already have doses ready to go into arms.”
Watch his comments below:
He also applauded the Trump administration for recruiting Operation Warp Speed chief scientific adviser Dr. Moncef Slaoui.
Collins said it was “an incredibly important step forward that the administration deserves credit for, because that did motivate a lot of actions, a lot of coordination.”
He added, “The fact that we, in December, had not one but two vaccines that had gone through trials of at least 30,000 participants and had been judged safe and effective by a very rigorous and very public FDA process is just breathtaking that that got done in 11 months from when we first knew about this virus is at least five years faster than it’s ever been done before.”
Not everyone is a fan of the Trump administration’s handling of the pandemic. President Joe Biden criticized the former president for his “failed” COVID-19 vaccine rollout plan on Friday, as IJR reported.
“Just over four weeks ago, America had no real plan to vaccinate most of the country. My predecessor, as my mother would say, God love him, failed to order enough vaccines, failed to mobilize the effort to administer the shots, failed to set up vaccine centers. That changed the moment we took office,” Biden said during a visit to the Pfizer plant.
During an interview with Newsmax, Trump said in response to Biden’s claim at a CNN town hall that there was no vaccine when he took office, “He’s either not telling a truth, or he’s mentally gone.”