The former head of the White House’s Operation Warp Speed partnership, Moncef Slaoui, said on Sunday that the Trump administration was responsible for “90 percent” of the COVID-19 vaccine rollout plan so far.
In an interview on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” Slaoui shot back at President Biden, who recently said former President Trump had failed to establish a coherent vaccine administration plan, order enough doses or set up vaccination sites.
“I think that’s a very negative description of the reality,” Slaoui said.
“I do think that we had plans and in fact 90 percent of what’s happening now is the plan that we had. Of course the first thing was to accelerate the development of the vaccine,” he continued. “We constructed specifically 100 million doses of vaccine, but also built into the contract options to acquire more vaccines once we knew they are effective. And the plan was to order more vaccines when we knew they are more effective.”
Slaoui said that he believed that the former administration could take credit for most of the manufacturing and distribution of the coronavirus vaccines. However, he added that vaccine administration and the utilization of the Federal Emergency Management Agency was “not part of the plan” and acknowledged that the Biden administration had taken the lead in those areas.
Brennan pressed Slaoui on any flaws that he saw in the plan he developed with the Trump administration, noting that several state governors reported problems at the beginning of the vaccine rollout,
“I think we have failed to communicate the fact that vaccine doses availability is going to be, you know, slow over time because we went so fast. There is no stock of vaccine, it was impossible to have enough vaccine doses quickly enough compared to the expectation,” Slaoui said.
In the same interview, Slaoui said that Trump’s refusal to concede the election may have delayed “ownership and full understanding” of the vaccine plan. He also said he believed it would have conveyed “important messaging” if Trump had received the vaccine on camera.