The Biden administration is now delivering on a promise from former President Donald Trump: all eligible Americans as of Monday can get a COVID-19 vaccine.
Operation Warp Speed, announced last May, was the Trump administration’s plan to coordinate federal and private resources to push out a COVID-19 vaccine.
“The Operation Warp Speed, for which I give a great deal of credit to [former HHS Secretary Alex Azar], was [an] effort that many of us were not initially convinced was going to be necessary. And it was thought about as a Manhattan Project.”
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 131 million (39.5 percent of the U.S. population) have taken at least one dose of the vaccine, and 84 million (25.4 percent of the U.S. population) have been “fully vaccinated” as of April 18.
The vaccine adverse event reporting system (VAERS) received 3,005 reports of deaths among people in the United States who had received one of the COVID-19 shots between Dec. 14, 2020, and April 12, 2021. More than 189 million doses of the shot were delivered during this time.
The deaths exceed the total number of fatalities following all other vaccinations from January 2010 to November 2020 before the rollout of the COVID-19 vaccines.
Over the 10 years, VAERS received 734 reports of death following the other vaccinations, based on a quick search on April 19.
VAERS is known to capture less than one percent of adverse effects from vaccines due to underreporting, according to a $1 million Harvard study funded by the CDC from 2007 to 2010.
The poll indicates that 47 percent of people who identified themselves as Trump supporters would not want to be vaccinated when the doses became available to them.
The survey found that 41 percent of Republicans would not take the vaccine, compared to only 11 percent of Democrats saying they wouldn’t take it.
