Trump tried to cut the research budgets of the NIH, CDC, etc. in every one of his budgets. Congress restored most of the cuts to keep basic and applied research alive in the US.
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The mRNA vaccines are based on more than 20 years of fundamental research.
http://www.news4jax.com/health/2021/02/12/technology-behind-covid-19-vaccine-is-years-in-the-making/
"It all comes down to this mRNA technology. Without it, the vaccine wouldn’t exist. But this technology is not new. Dr. Drew Weissman with Penn Medicine said it has been at least 22 years since he started developing the technology." [Weissman will probably get a Nobel Prize for the science of mRNA vaccines.]
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Trump shut down the pandemic team left in place by Obama. Trump withdrew the US scientists embedded in Wuhan in October 2019, 2 months before the new and unusual pneumonia appeared on the scene. Trump's attitude was, Hay! If something happens you just them back ... as if technical staff once relocated to new jobs and new projects will just zoom back and get up to speed in one day. There is legacy knowledge that is lost when you shut down programs and try to restart them without continuity.
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(The same applies to NASA engineers, computer programs (anybody remember COBOL?), etc.. Once you fire the experts, your legacy knowledge is effectively lost forever.)
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I have used a comparison that Trump would understand: If a golfer doesn't go golfing every weekend, he will lose an edge or bring back a bad habit. After 3 months not golfing, it might take another couple of months to get back up to peak levels. And that's just GOLF, not cutting edge science that advances with new knowledge, new results, and new methods every single day.
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Left to his own devices, w/o Congressional pushback, Trump would have SLOWED vaccine development ... such as by directing resources to research on intravenous or oral bleaching.
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Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin developed polio vaccines using cutting edge methods ... of the 1950s. Success took years. Well funded gov research programs led to the ability to speed up vaccine development to weeks and clinical trials and testing to months. AND TRUMP HAD NOTHING, ZERO, ZILCH, NADA to do with those aspects of the vaccine programs.
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Operation Warp Speed allowed the gov subsidized buildout of manufacturing and actual production to proceed BEFORE testing was complete. (A regular drug company would never produce millions of doses of a new drug until there was a LOT of clinical trial data to indicate it's likely approval by the FDA and its success in the market.) If the testing had been negative, 100s of millions of dollars of ineffective vaccines would have been tossed and the next version would have been brought along. As it happened, the early choices of both the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines MADE BY SCIENCE BASED DATA ANALYSIS were pretty good and that's we have now.
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Left to his own devices, Trump would be dead from his Covid infection.
Posted By: coeur-de-lion
All of you that have gotten the vaccine should take a minute this week and thank Trump for pushing the vaccine along so quickly. Virtually every Democrat, including Biden, Harris and Fauci last summer, said it was impossible to get a vaccine ready in 9 months as Trump predicted last April. The Dems said it would take a minimum of 2-3 years. If Biden had been in charge, no one would be vaccinated yet, so I call on the Libs here to thank Trump for potentially saving their lives if they have already gotten the vaccine.
With that said, there are Americans now that are refusing the vaccine because Biden and Harris convinced them during the campaign that a "Trump vaccine" would not be safe if ready so quickly and that they wouldn't take it. Now that both of them have taken it, when Harris was asked about her prior position and the things she said last summer, her answer was, "That was just politics." So playing politics with American lives is just fine in the Democrat play book.