News on the “Omicron” front seems to be rather positive so far. Reports continue to be that it causes mild illness, similar to a cold. Further, the World Health Organization announced yesterday that no one has yet died of the new COVID-19 variant.
That hasn’t stopped the media from going all out, though. The fear is flowing on cable news and in left-wing publications. But Politico managed to take things a step further. In trying to assign blame, they think they’ve found the culprit — Donald Trump?
Yes, the bad orange man, who hasn’t been in office for over 10 months, is supposedly at fault for a variant that emerged across an ocean. Get a load of this logic reported by our friends over at Newsbusters.
Decisions by top officials responding to President Donald Trump’s edict to protect “America first” contributed to a global delay in Covid-19 vaccine donations and a lack of effort to assist low- and middle-income countries, according to five current and former U.S. officials who worked under Trump on the federal pandemic response.
The failure to view the Covid threat in global terms left some nations — including those where the Omicron variant emerged in recent weeks — lacking inoculation and much more vulnerable to mutations, the officials said.
I love the use of anonymous sourcing to make this stupid claim. If you are going to be on-brand, you might as well be completely on-brand right? The adhesion to the playbook here is almost impressive.
Regardless, let’s get into their claim. According to these “officials,” who are probably Miles Taylor and some other people we’ve never heard of, this is Trump’s fault because he took an “America First” approach to vaccine distribution early on.
But then he…left office…so I’m a bit at a loss of how a variant that emerged almost a year later is the fault of an initial push to get Americans vaccinated before doling out doses to the third world. On its face, that just doesn’t make much sense.
Besides, last I checked, Joe Biden is president. He’s had plenty of time to shower vaccines on Africa and Asia if that’s the concern here. Why would any of this be on Trump when the current White House resident has himself hogged vaccine doses in the past, drawing scrutiny for it? Even now, the rush to give “boosters” to young, healthy people who don’t need them in the first world is taking doses away from the third world. Isn’t that far more relevant than a policy Trump put in place in 2020? And that’s if you believe this theory about a lack of vaccinations in poorer countries causing mutations, an assertion that seems to lack evidence.
But what would be especially hilarious, given Politico’s framing, is if Omicron really does turn out to be a preferable variant. Yes, we’d all love for COVID-19 to be eradicated, but that’s never going to happen because it’s clearly endemic and seasonal. The question then becomes what variant is endemic and how it affects the world’s population. If the dominant variant is one that’s mild and doesn’t kill many people, then that’s actually a very good thing compared to the current dominance of the Delta variant.
Funny enough, in a roundabout way, Politico could be blaming Trump for a variant that might end up changing the course of the pandemic in a good way. So, orange man not bad?