Trump blasts Biden, Harris for 'anti-vaccine rhetoric'

John Bowden
The Hill
Mon, 07 Sep 2020 18:31 UTC

President Trump on Monday took aim at his Democratic opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden, and Biden's running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), over remarks by Harris that she would not take Trump's word on the efficacy of a coronavirus vaccine without assurances from top health officials.

During a press conference Monday at the White House, the president pledged that a vaccine for the coronavirus would be available in "record time," and swiped at Harris in particular over the remarks, calling her "the most liberal person in Congress."

Biden and Harris, Trump said, "should immediately apologize for the reckless anti-vaccine rhetoric that they are talking right now, talking about endangering lives. It undermines science, and what happens is all of the sudden you'll have this incredible vaccine and because of that fake rhetoric, it's a political rhetoric ... that's all that is."

The Biden campaign responded on Twitter, pointing to a MSNBC reporter who fact-checked the president's comments and pointed out that Harris was not questioning the reliability of vaccines, but rather the president's rhetoric.

The president's remarks referred to comments made by the California senator a day earlier on CNN, where Harris said that she did not trust remarks made by the president about the coronavirus pandemic and would instead defer to top health experts on whether a vaccine potentially released in 2020 would be effective and safe.

"I will say that I would not trust Donald Trump, and it would have to be a credible source of information that talks about the efficacy and the reliability of whatever he's talking about," Harris said.

If the past is any indication, Harris added, those experts will "be muzzled, they'll be suppressed, they will be sidelined because he's looking at an election coming up in less than 60 days, and he's grasping for whatever he can get to pretend that he's been a leader on this issue when he's not."

Recent polls have found that a majority of Americans do not trust the president's statements about the COVID-19 pandemic; just 40 percent of Americans said they believed Trump's claims about the virus and the U.S. response in a recent CBS poll.

Comment: What makes this so entertaining is watching the media and various talking heads defend someone questioning vaccine safety in order to bash Trump. We're wondering when some of their heads are going to explode from the cognitive dissonance.

'Apologize!' Trump implies Kamala Harris is an 'ANTI-VAXXER' as Biden's team walks straight into Covid-19 vaccine trap

US President Donald Trump has lashed out at Kamala Harris, the VP pick of Joe Biden, for what he said was "anti-vax rhetoric," demanding an apology, as he turns the charge of "politicizing the vaccine" against his rivals.

The president condemned Harris and her running mate's stated distrust of Operation Warp Speed, the Trump administration's record-time Covid-19 vaccine rollout. "Biden and his very liberal running mate" - whom Trump initially did not mention by name - "should immediately apologize for this reckless anti-vaccine rhetoric that they are talking right now," he said.

"She's talking about disparaging a vaccine, so that people don't think [the Covid-19 vaccine] was a great achievement!" Trump later replied to a reporter's question that did name Harris after he finished his Labor Day remarks.

Claiming he'd spoken to the heads of Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson and "the greatest medical companies in the world," Trump insisted a vaccine for the coronavirus would likely be rolled out before Election Day.

"If this were the Obama administration, you wouldn't have this vaccine for three years! In fact, you likely wouldn't have it at all," Trump bragged. The usual vaccine development timeline in the US is about 10 years, and the record (according to even the nation's biggest vaccination cheerleaders) is about four years. However, Trump's "Warp Speed" jab, developed under the leadership of the man behind the UK's disastrous 2009 swine flu jab, would be developed in under 8 months if it came out in October as the president is already hinting.

Harris and Biden's sudden pivot from suggesting the country should remain closed until the emergence of a Covid-19 vaccine to casting doubt on Trump's version mirrors the about-face the president's own health officials have done when confronted by Russia becoming the first to approve a mass-market vaccine against the virus. A study published on Friday indicated recipients of the Russian formula exhibited an antibody response to the vaccine, though several test subjects experienced mild side effects.

Interestingly, when Trump discussed his meetings with the pharma companies, he did not mention Moderna, the newbie firm working on a controversial RNA vaccine - most of whose test subjects reportedly suffered nasty side effects.

Harris told CNN on Saturday that she "would not trust Donald Trump" regarding a vaccine rolled out before Election Day in November, insisting there would have to be a "credible source of information that talks about the efficacy and reliability of whatever he's talking about."

"I will not take his word for it," she continued. Harris, Biden, and others backing his campaign have accused the president of "politicizing" the vaccine development initiative, even as both sides attempt to wrangle the Covid-19 pandemic into a winnable election.