Blaming All COVID Deaths on Trump

This is absolutely disgraceful, but not surprising, considering the source.  What is surprising is that this article comes from the Washington Post. Right now, it's behind a paywall, but I managed to copy some of it.

 Biden faults Trump’s vaccine rollout as he cites total covid death toll 

"After President Biden took office, he would often misleadingly claim that the Trump administration had vaccinated relatively few Americans during the coronavirus pandemic compared to the Biden administration. But this was inaccurate framing.

"When Biden became president, vaccinations had been available for a little over a month. Health-care workers, residents of long-term care facilities, front-line essential workers and people over the age of 75 were first in line. By the time Biden took office, on Jan. 20, 2021, with a stated goal of reaching 1 million vaccinations a day, shots had reached a seven-day average of more than 1 million a day — and 19 million people had been vaccinated, 10 times the number Biden used last month.

"In recent weeks, Biden has expanded this long-standing talking point to include the total number of dead from the pandemic. To some ears, he seems to be blaming Trump for the total covid death toll. The New York Post editorial page called it a “vile lie,” and some readers complained to The Fact Checker. But Biden’s phrasing is sufficiently subtle that a link is not so easily established. A White House official speaking on the condition of anonymity said Biden was not trying to blame Trump for the deaths and said that his comments reflected reporting that criticized Trump’s vaccine rollout effort and noted Biden’s pledge to ramp up shots.

"Trump can certainly be faulted for a chaotic, nonscientific approach to the pandemic. Two of our colleagues wrote an excellent best-selling book, “Nightmare Scenario: Inside the Trump Administration’s Response to the Pandemic That Changed History,” that detailed many missteps, including a failure to take the pandemic seriously from the start, inconsistent messaging on shutdowns and distancing, and a shunning of masks. But his administration’s successful push for a vaccine in less than a year, dubbed Operation Warp Speed, is considered a success story.

"In February 2020, as the pandemic appeared to be headed our way, Anthony S. Fauci, then director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told reporters that a vaccine 'would not be applicable to the epidemic unless we really wait about a year to a year and a half.' But in the end an effective vaccine was approved by November, just eight months later. By Dec. 8, the first vaccines outside a trial were given to people.

"At that point, 300,000 people in the United States had died of covid. The vaccines do not prevent people from getting covid but they significantly reduce the risk of hospitalization and death.

"Death toll:

• 2020: 385,666
• 2021: 463,262
• 2022: 246,161
• 2023: 72,827
• 2024: 10,611 (to date)

"By presidential term, that means:

• Trump: 465,043 (39 percent)
• Biden: 713,484 (61 percent)

"But notice how Biden frames this:

• “He [Trump] did not move on making sure that we dealt with vaccinating the American public. We ended up losing over a million people dead — a million people.”
• “We lost over 1,200,000 people because of the slow start in all this process.”
• “You had over a million people dying — a million people dying, and we had trouble at the front end of realizing there wasn’t much done to deal with it.”

"As we noted, the vaccine was created in record time — a fact that Biden at times has credited to Trump. “Thanks to the prior administration and our scientific community, America was one of the first countries to get the vaccine,” he said in 2021.

"But now when he mentions Trump and vaccines, he also references the total dead, even though Trump has been out of office for three years."

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I can still remember how overcome with emotion and relief I was when, in January 2021, I was able to secure an appointment for a COVID vaccine for my father, who was in the first group to be given the shot. After the fear and worry of 2020, we were grateful and thankful that a vaccine had been developed "at warp speed."

So to have Biden attempt to blame the entire COVID death toll on Trump is extremely disingenuous and desperate, and, for Biden, par for the course. The whole motto of this administration has always been "It's Trump's Fault."