🔗 Link Post: COVID and vaccines are nonpartisan. Get the shot!
Look, here’s a message from Alex Azar, in a New York Times Opinion column, to all the unvaccinated. Remember, Alex Azar was secretary of Health and Human Services under President Donald Trump. He oversaw Operation Warp Speed, the program to expedite Covid-19 vaccines.
And yet the reluctance and even refusal of many Americans — including many of my fellow conservatives and Republicans — to get a Covid-19 vaccine is a frustrating irony for those of us who worked to expedite these vaccines.
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Any claims that the vaccines are unsafe or ineffective, or that corners were cut are not true. Americans should understand that the process by which our team helped expedite these vaccines was called Operation Warp Speed for good reason. With the numbers of cases and deaths climbing in April of 2020 and the economy contracting, we had no time to lose.
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At the same time, we made sure that there was no compromise on safety by conducting some of the largest and most extensive vaccine clinical trials ever.
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Operation Warp Speed committed to funding upfront various stages of development, including testing vaccines in humans to prove they are safe and effective, as well as the manufacturing of the vaccines.
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I’m glad former President Trump got vaccinated, but it would have been even better for him to have done so on national television so that his supporters could see how much trust and confidence he has in what is arguably one of his greatest accomplishments.
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Getting vaccinated is an absolute necessity to end the pandemic.
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They would also do well to continue to acknowledge the historic achievement of the Trump administration in expediting these vaccines.
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In seeking to end this pandemic, the Biden administration is exhorting all unvaccinated adults in our country to get their shots, and I fully support it in this call. It would be tragic to see more lives needlessly lost when we are so close to beating this virus once and for all.
Alex Azar was secretary of Health and Human Services under President Donald Trump. He oversaw Operation Warp Speed, the program to accelerate the development, manufacturing and distribution of Covid-19 vaccines and drugs.
