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Comment by krapp | Hacker News Reader

>What’s shocking to me is that he hasn’t been more pro-vax given we have the vaccines we do because of his administration.

He made vaccinations a partisan wedge issue to such a degree that he can't afford to walk back from it if he wants to run again in 2024, similar to the Republicans' former position on Obamacare.

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That seems a bit revisionist. To my knowledge, Donald Trump was always a vocal supporter of the Covid vaccine. Kamala Harris and Joe Biden were the ones sowing doubt about it - right up until they won the election. Harris, in particular, described Trump as irresponsible for advocating for Project Warpspeed and suggesting that people should take a Covid vaccine before it had gone through the full approval process.

I think you may be getting their personal stances confused with the partisan arguments about vaccine mandates that have evolved in the year since.

Trump didn’t make the vaccine a wedge issue, he made COVID a wedge issue by repeatedly calling it a political lie (which resulted in vaccines becoming a wedge issue).

I suspect the confusion between your perspective and that of the previous commenter is a result of the difficulty Trump experienced in trying to promote a vaccine for an illness he was himself at the same time claiming does not exist.

He also clung to and promoted a bunch of other unproven treatments leading up to the vaccine… why should anyone have trusted him by this point in the pandemic?

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