Former President Donald Trump hailed his administration’s COVID-19 vaccine efforts – buying billions of vaccines before they were even tested for efficacy and safety – as the “greatest bet in history.”
“Most people understand we were the ones that did it,” Trump told Rita Cosby on 77 WABC AM-N.Y. in a wide-ranging interview Thursday night, noting President Joe Biden’s administration is gratuitously taking credit for the work of others.
Trump’s Operation Warp Speed pushed the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to get the vaccines researched, developed, tested, approved, and distributed in nine months – and that work was not without risk.
“I did something which was maybe the greatest bet ever made in history, in a sense, because I bought billions and billions of dollars of the vaccine, before it was approved, before they knew for sure that it was going to work,” Trump told Cosby. “We had an idea, but we didn’t know for sure, and I bought billions. You wouldn’t have had your vaccines until October of this year, so nobody would have been vaccinated. I bought it before it was approved. And that was a big bet.
