A Fox News personality wants to ensure that President Donald Trump, who has made relentless efforts to undermine science while sowing doubt about the integrity of the agencies involved in approving treatments against the coronavirus, gets a consolation prize for the development of a COVID-19 vaccine.
To soften the blow of defeat Fox's Geraldo proposes naming the vaccine after Trump. "It would be a nice gesture to him and years from now it would become kind of a generic name. Have you got your trump yet, I got my trump, I'm fine. I wished we could honor him in that way." pic.twitter.com/fM8qwFhxF6
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) November 20, 2020
A network correspondent, Geraldo Rivera, said on Friday that as pharmaceutical giants put forward vaccines that they have said are more than 90 percent effective, a consideration for contenders which so far include Pfizer and Moderna, should be naming the finished product after the President who continues to coddle his wounds amid his election loss.
“I had an idea, with the world so divided and everybody telling him he has to give up and time to leave and time to transition and all the rest of it, why not name the vaccine the Trump?” Rivera said, “Have you gotten your Trump yet? It would be a nice gesture to him.”
“I wish we could honor him in that way because he’s definitely the prime architect of this Operation Warp Speed and — and but for him we’d still be waiting, you know, into the grim winter for — for these amazing, miraculous medical breakthroughs,” the correspondent added.
President Trump promptly credited himself for the scientific breakthroughs after Moderna’s vaccine announcement, saying in a tweet on Monday that history should remember the discoveries “took place on my watch!”
President Trump has suggested for months that a “deep state” was conspiring against the delivery of a successful vaccine against coronavirus before the Nov. 3 election where he was defeated by Democratic opponent Joe Biden.
In late September, after repeatedly assuring voters that a vaccine would be ready “soon,” the President told supporters at a rally in Jacksonville, Florida, that a group of unnamed detractors were coordinating a “political hit” to delay vaccine development to intentionally damage his reelection bid.
Trump has remained bitter since then, and his administration has extended its wrath to a refusal to brief Biden’s transition team about distribution of a vaccine which is expected to require significant planning to roll out.
President-elect Biden told reporters during a news conference on Thursday that the impact of the Trump administration’s failure to cooperate in an effort to coordinate vaccine distribution “puts us behind the eight ball” and costs lives.
The comments come after Health and Human Secretary Alex Azar prohibited department officials from cooperating with Biden’s transition team.
“It’s going to put us behind the eight ball by a matter of a month or more, and that’s lives,” Biden said. “How many would be lost as a consequence of that I can’t tell you.”
