In an exchange that clearly struck a nerve during a press briefing on Thursday, White House press secretary Jen Psaki flatly refused to give the Trump administration any credit for the vaccine rollout.
“I don't think anyone deserves credit when half a million people in the country have died of this pandemic,” Psaki said in response to ABC News Senior White House Correspondent Mary Bruce.
“What our focus is on, and what the president's focus is on when he came into office just over a month ago, was ensuring that we had enough vaccines. We have that -- we're going to have them now. We had enough vaccinators, and we had enough vaccine locations to get this pandemic under control. There's no question, and all data points to the fact that there were not enough of any of those things when he took office,” she said.
Bruce pressed Psaki on whether the Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed deserves some credit for work in beginning development, manufacturing and distribution of the vaccine, citing former Health and Human Services Assistant Secretary Admiral Brett Giroir, who recently vented frustration about the Biden administration’s repeated claims that the Trump team left it empty-handed. But Psaki pushed back strongly.
“We are open-eyed about the challenge we continue to live under, and that's why he has been focused every single day and doing everything possible to get the pandemic under control. But there were shortages in all of those areas which were preventing us from moving forward on getting the pandemic under control,” Psaki said.
In the past, Biden himself has acknowledged the Trump administration's efforts, saying in January, "We want to give credit to everyone involved in this vaccine effort and the prior administration and the science community and the medical sphere…for getting the program off the ground."
-ABC News' Sarah Kolinovsky
