National Conservatives are wrong to rob Trump of his vaccine success
Tiana Lowe Doescher
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The typhoid vaccine took decades of development before reaching American markets. Edward Jenner created the first successful smallpox vaccine, but it wasn’t globally distributed until 150 years later. So, when Operation Warp Speed created multiple coronavirus vaccines in under a year since the start of the pandemic, the scientific community widely regarded it as a generation-defying triumph. In 285 days, a whole-of-government approach to ending the pandemic succeeded, and the world has the distinct vision of Donald Trump to thank.
And yet, the Republican electorate is evidently rewarding the former president with scorn. In a clip gleefully shared by the 2024 campaign of Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL), an Iowa voter lambastes Trump, telling him, “We have lost people because you supported the jab.” Trump’s response that the majority of the country considers the vaccines “a great thing” was considered enough by team DeSantis.
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It’s hard to find one wrong word by Trump here. As he notes, he correctly opposed the vaccine mandates, and statistically speaking, most Americans did indeed get the jab. But the most important part of this clip is that Trump, as he usually does, says that he was able to do what nobody else could, and unusually for Trump, that assertion is true when it comes to the COVID-19 vaccine.
If you think about an alternate reality, President Ted Cruz or President Marco Rubio probably wouldn’t have spent nearly $4 trillion in taxpayer money on COVID-19, nor would they have intentionally sunk the Georgia Senate runoffs that gave Joe Biden the margin to spend another $2 trillion on the American Rescue Plan.
But would any other Republican in the 2016 race, almost all adherents to the limited government conservatism that defined the Reagan revolution, have initiated the whole-of-government approach to vaccine development as Trump did? For all Trump’s sickeningly profligate spending, his distinct theory of Big Government conservatism, the real progenitor of what effete intellectuals like to call “national conservatism” today, was put to the ultimate test in the form of a global pandemic.
And Trump’s theory won.
More than four in five Americans have received at least one dose of the COVID-19 vaccine, and seven in 10 are considered fully vaccinated. A study by the Commonwealth Fund found that from December 2020 through November 2022, the COVID-19 vaccination campaign prevented 3.2 million additional deaths and 18.5 million more hospitalizations.
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Obviously, the promise of the vaccines, that they would prevent both infection and transmission, was not fulfilled. Pushing the vaccine on children was obviously dumb and the mandates immoral. Public health officials disgraced their entire industry by refusing to address very real concerns, such as myocarditis cases in young men inoculated with the mRNA formulations, and the original, actual approach by DeSantis to focus on vaccinating the elderly should have been followed across the country.
But to paint the vaccines with such a broad brush is ignorant, and those national conservatives who indeed wish to use the government for their “common good” are unwise to discredit the most stunning and successful test of their theory ever achieved.