(LifeSiteNews) — Former President and current Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump reiterated his conviction that his handling of COVID-19 and his accelerated delivery of the COVID vaccines is underappreciated in response to a question about the controversial shots’ ineffectiveness and apparent risks, leaving their final analysis to be determined by future studies.
Over the weekend, journalist Sharyl Attkisson published a lengthy sit-down interview with Trump for her weekly show Full Measure, which covered a broad range of topics.
“On COVID, you frequently say at your rallies and so on, that you don’t feel like you get enough credit on COVID,” Attkisson said. “But by nearly every assessment, the CDC failed miserably at job one. And yes, the COVID vaccines were developed in record time, but as we now know, they don’t prevent infection, illness, or transmission. And they have very potentially serious side effects. Do you think that maybe they were approved too fast and in hindsight, based on what we know now, what would you have done differently?”
“Well, I think they’re doing studies on the vaccines that we’re gonna find out. And it’ll come out one way or the other,” Trump responded. “But I really had a mandate to get vaccines done. And I got ’em done very quickly in record time. The Democrats love it. You know, the Democrats love it and the Republicans don’t. It’s very interesting.”
“I have a friend of mine who said to me, ‘why don’t you talk about the vaccine, what you did with the vac,’” he went on, repeating a common refrain of his COVID answer since leaving office. “He’s a Democrat, but I’m sure he voted for me. He said, what you did was the most incredible thing that any president has ever done. You’ve saved hundreds of millions of lives all over the world.’ And this was just recently, very smart guy. He said, ‘I don’t understand why you don’t talk about it.’”
After asking why Pfizer does not release “all sorts of statistics” they have on their mRNA COVID shot and “let people know,” Trump said “the Democrats would love to claim it” and lamented that “Republicans don’t want to claim it.”
“I say this in terms of overall, I think I did an amazing job with Covid. I never got the credit for it,” Trump continued. “Remember that more people died under Biden-Harris than died under Trump. And they had a much easier time because when it came in here, nobody knew what it was. It came from the Wuhan labs, which I always said. But nobody really knew what it was, where it came from.”
“I took a disaster that came into our shores,” he insisted, adding:
That dust flew in from China and we started making things like the ventilators. We were supplying the whole world with ventilators. Within a period of seven months, we took auto factories and started making ventilators and auto factories. We did the gowns, the cost, you know, all of the different things, all of the rubberized products, the masks, all, everything. And we also had to go, because our, you know, when I took over, the cupboards were bare. We had nothing. We had, we were supposed to have, but we had nothing. And in all fairness to previous presidents, the reason is that nobody really thought a pandemic in this world, in this age, was possible. You know, you remember 1917, we had the great pandemic that people talk about. A hundred million people they say died. And basically this would’ve happened here too. And it didn’t happen here.
In fact, Trump’s deference to the pandemic advice of former White House COVID-19 czar Dr. Anthony Fauci is one of the most controversial aspects of his presidency. His federal health agencies issued the lockdown and social distancing guidance that pressured states into shutting down the country, with ventilators alone possibly being responsible for 30,000 or more deaths according to some estimates.
But the most controversial aspect of that record was the COVID vaccines, which were developed and reviewed in a fraction of the time vaccines usually take under the Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed initiative.
A large body of evidence identifies significant risks to the COVID vaccines. Among it, the federal Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) reports 37,910 deaths, 217,931 hospitalizations, 21,917 heart attacks, and 28,602 myocarditis and pericarditis cases as of September 6, among other ailments. U.S. Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC) researchers have recognized a “high verification rate of reports of myocarditis to VAERS after mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccination,” leading to the conclusion that “under-reporting is more likely” than over-reporting.
An analysis of 99 million people across eight countries published February in the journal Vaccine “observed significantly higher risks of myocarditis following the first, second and third doses” of mRNA-based COVID vaccines, as well as signs of increased risk of “pericarditis, Guillain-Barré syndrome, and cerebral venous sinus thrombosis,” and other “potential safety signals that require further investigation.” In April, the CDC was forced to release by court order 780,000 previously undisclosed reports of serious adverse reactions, and a study out of Japan found “statistically significant increases” in cancer deaths after third doses of mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines, and offered several theories for a causal link.
In Florida, an ongoing grand jury investigation into the vaccines’ manufacturers is slated to release a highly anticipated report on the shots, and a lawsuit by the state of Kansas has been filed accusing Pfizer of misrepresentation for calling the shots “safe and effective.”
Many who support most of Trump’s policies yet pine for a “‘reckoning” with the COVID establishment have hoped that former Democrat and independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. joining the Trump campaign might lead to a shift in the former president’s thinking on the subject, given Kennedy’s status as one of the COVID establishment’s foremost critics.
In his August endorsement announcement, Kennedy said that unspecified differences remained between himself and Trump, but they were united on a handful of “existential” problems, including chronic disease among children.