Trump Signs Executive Order to Prioritize Americans on Vaccination | USA elections

President Donald Trump on Tuesday signed an executive order to give “priority to Americans” in the administration of vaccines against covid produced in the United States, before providing doses to other countries. In the event of problems with pharmaceutical companies, he warned, Trump will invoke the Defense Production Law, enacted at the start of the Korean War in 1950, authorizing the president to require companies to prioritize contracts for products deemed necessary for national defense. The signing came in the course of what he called a “vaccine summit,” held at the White House, two days before the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) publicly meets on Thursday to evaluate an emergency use authorization for the Pfizer and BioNTech vaccine, which this Tuesday began to be administered, outside the framework of a clinical trial, in the United Kingdom.

The outgoing president, who has summoned his appearance at the same time as the president-elect Biden introduced the team he’s tasked with managing the health crisis when he arrives at the White House on January 20, has wanted to take part of the credit for the rapid development of vaccines against covid. Trump did not save superlatives. He spoke of “an incredible success”, “a monumental national achievement.”

The public activity of the US president has been dramatically reduced since he lost the elections on November 3, a defeat he still refuses to admit, and their interventions are basically limited to spreading false accusations about an alleged massive electoral fraud that neither the state authorities nor the courts, to date, have detected. Thus, the impromptu “vaccine summit” was the president’s only public event on Tuesday, and it was overshadowed by the fact that both Pfizer and Moderna, the two US pharmaceutical companies among the developers of the most advanced vaccines, have declined the invitation to attend the meeting.

The President, Vice President Pence, members of the White House coronavirus team and executives from drug sales, distribution and logistics companies attended the “summit.” No one from President-elect Biden’s transition team has been invited, despite the fact that it will be the Democratic Administration that will have to manage the bulk of the vaccination operation. Nor has Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases, attended, who after advising the Trump Administration, with whom he has had notorious disagreements, will also be Biden’s chief medical advisor.

Beyond the propaganda exercise of a president eager to clean up his criticized crisis management, the event has constituted a new exercise of pressure on the FDA to proceed with emergency authorizations. “We are days away from approval by the FDA,” Trump said, “we are putting a lot of pressure on them.”

The signing of the executive order has allowed him to sing again, just over a month after he is forced to leave the White House, his slogan of America first (United States first). However, doubts prevailed on Tuesday regarding the scope or specific tenor of the executive order. Doctor Moncef Slaoui himself, at the head of Operation Warp Speed (which could be translated as “enormously fast”), Trump’s public-private initiative to accelerate the creation of a vaccine, has assured in the morning on ABC television that it was not clear to him. “Frankly, I don’t know, and frankly, I’m going to stay out of this. I don’t know what that order is about, ”he said.

The meeting comes after it was reported that the United States missed an opportunity in the summer to purchase millions of additional doses of the Pfizer vaccine, which could delay the distribution of the second batch of vaccines until producers honor their contracts with others. countries. It is expected that 100 million doses of the vaccine will be distributed in the coming months, enough to immunize 50 of the 328 million Americans.

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