During a recent event at The Queen theater, President-elect Joe Biden spoke about using $100M from the Defense Production Act for administering vaccines and speeding up distribution. He slammed President Trump’s initiative “Operation Warp Speed” as a dismal failure, despite their efforts of developing two coronavirus vaccines within a year, and called on controlling the virus with aimed efforts.
“We’ll use the Defense Production Act to work with private industry to accelerate the making of materials needed to supply and administer the vaccine — from the tube and syringes to protective equipment. Even though we don’t have the authority yet, go out and identify those companies that are prepared and will be able to do what we’re going to ask,” Biden said.
Biden went on to declare that we needed to harness the “full resources of the federal government” to establish more community vaccination centers, noting that his administration would prioritize black and Latino communities. The Act would also look to shore up necessary supplies and train 100,000 new workers to administer the critical shots.
President-elect Biden also introduced the “American Rescue Plan” with a hefty price tag of $1.9 trillion. It would include $1,400 stimulus checks, an extension of moratoriums on evictions and foreclosures, as well an increase in the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour.
While mainstream media continues to praise Biden for his talks of using the Defense Production Act, others argue that actually invoking it won’t increase production capacity or cause production lead times to magically shrink.
President Trump and his administration have already invoked the Defense Production Act on more than 30 instances, to generate N-95 respirators, ventilators, and boost testing resources. He also used the Act at least nine times to secure N-95 respirators, which were in dire shortage all over the world. They reported on August 14 that 218 million N-95 respirators had been delivered to the healthcare and essential personnel workforce.
The Trump Administration also leveraged the Defense Production Act through September to apply priority rated orders for contracts with Becton Dickinson and Quidel Corporation – two companies that helped deliver COVID-19 vaccinations. Using the Defense Production Act helped expedite shipments to nursing homes and diagnose COVID-19 infections in approximately 15 minutes.
“The federal efforts to supply nursing homes with rapid point-of-care antigen instruments and tests is our highest priority to save lives and the US Government will exert its full authority to complete this mission,” said Assistant Secretary for Health and COVID-19 Testing Coordinator Admiral Brett Giroir.
President-elect Biden is just using another play from Trump’s book. The mainstream media won’t cover the numerous times that President Trump has used the Defense Production Act to secure medical equipment in the middle of a pandemic and keep his nation safe, but will slap Biden right on the headlines the first time he mentions it.
