Biden says he’s ‘turned the tide’ on COVID, omits Trump’s Warp Speed

President Biden touted his administration’s COVID vaccination drive in Ohio Thursday as having “turned the tide” against the deadly pandemic, but neglected to mention Operation Warp Speed, the Trump program responsible for the quick creation of most of the vaccines.

“From a year of darkness, we’re now emerging into the light,” Biden told an audience at Cuyahoga Community College in Cleveland, adding: “We’ve turned the tide on a once-in-a-century pandemic. We’ve turned the tide on a once-in-a-generation economic crisis, and families are beginning to be able to breathe just a little bit easier. We still have work to do, but our future today is as bright and wide open as it ever has been.”

According to the president, the turnaround happened because his administration “made the vaccine program a priority. As my friends in Congress will tell you, I got a lot of heat for just focusing on the vaccine.”

Biden claimed his administration was able, “through a lot of hard work, to get 600 million doses of the vaccine, enough for every single solitary American.”

He did not note that the vaccines were created in record time and orders were placed by the Trump administration in July of last year.

In total, former President Donald Trump’s administration purchased 200 million doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine and 200 million doses of the Moderna vaccine, enough to fully vaccinate 100 million Americans. In February, Biden announced that his administration had supplemented that purchase by ordering an additional 100 million doses each from Pfizer and Moderna.

Biden spoke on the eve of the planned rollout of his $6 trillion budget proposal, which incorporates his eight-year, $2.3 trillion American Jobs Plan and its $1.8 trillion counterpart the American Families Plan. The budget proposal also details the president’s $1.5 trillion request for annual operating appropriations for the Pentagon and domestic agencies.

The president defended his plan Thursday to boost taxes on corporations and high earners to help pay for his plans, which would still run the federal deficit to $1.6 trillion if approved.

“The best way to grow our economy is from the bottom up and the middle out,” Biden said. “You know, I don’t have anything against anybody in Wall Street. I don’t have anything against anybody making a million bucks, but Wall Street did not build this country. The middle class built this country and unions built the middle class.”

Biden also took a shot at the 2017 Trump tax cuts, which congressional Republicans have refused to countenance rolling back to help pay for the spending plans.

“We had no problem passing a $2 trillion tax plan that went to the top 1 percent that wasn’t paid for at all, just increased the debt $2 trillion,” he said. “But every time I talk about tax cuts for working class people, it’s ‘Oh my God! What are we gonna do?’

“Well, we’re gonna take back some of that 1 percent money and make them pay for it.”