This morning,
President Biden announced that
pharmaceutical giant, Merck
will help make Johnson & Johnson's
single-shot coronavirus vaccine.
Under the arrangement,
Merck will dedicate two facilities
in the US to producing the shots.
One will provide
fill-finish services,
the last stage of the production
process during which the vaccine
substance is placed in vials and
packaged for distribution.
The other will actually make
the vaccine itself and
has the potential
to vastly increase supply,
perhaps even doubling what Johnson
& Johnson could make on its own.
Now, this is not the sort of thing
that normally happens.
Normally companies like Merck do
not produce other vaccines for
other companies.
This is apparently a deal that was
brokered by the Biden
Administration which is great news.
However, Trump should have done,
we should not be now setting up
these deals.
We already have a delay in rolling
out the vaccine because we didn't
already do this.
And by the way, Biden announcing
this is great news eventually,
because it could take up to two
months to get the full finished
plant ready, and a few more months
took up the other facility to
actually make the vaccine.
So that will be good news, but
why weren't those facilities ready
to go?
They should have been ready
in December.
Let alone in March,
let alone now we got to wait until
the late spring.
So add this to the list of things
that if Trump gave a damn about any
of this, we could have been ready
with facilities like this
scattered across the country.
We certainly have the money for it,
but we didn't.
And so you getting vaccinated or
me getting vaccine is going to
needlessly take months longer than
it should.
And during that a lot more people
are going to die.
February was better than March, but
over 70,000 people still died in
the US during February.
It's entirely possible that March
will be just as bad as the highly
contagious variants of the COVID
virus continue to
spread across America.
We could be fully vaccinated in
a month or two if this work had
already been done.
But again, it just wasn't.
And that's totally cool.
It's apparently not illegal in any
way to totally hamstring
a country's response to the worst
disaster it's
had in our entire life.
And so this is good news, but
it's only sort of good news.
It's like a kind of a silver lining
and an only one that's going to
manifest in a few months from now.
>> I mean, 100 years ago with
the Spanish Flu we lost half
a million people,
here we are 100 years later,
science technology through the roof
still half a million people.
I mean, what are we doing here?
Now, there's a lot of synergistic
variables that are playing into why
people are a little bit more
laissez faire,
including politicians because
it's not affecting children as much
as it is an elderly population.
Now people really freaked
out during the Spanish Flu because
kids were dropping like flies.
So there's a little bit
more of a panic.
Well, obviously we don't want
to just shrug off our
elderly population.
I don't even want to blame Trump.
Honestly John, because there's
a lot of people that could have had
these wheels in motion.
And this guy Trump, didn't give him
any care about anything.
So if he had the right people
talking in his ear who really cared
about this country who are still in
office, by the way,
Trump may be gone, but
these people are still in power and
we're already seeing them.
We talked about the minimum wage
and how they're holding back
support for the American people.
This is just another
example of that.
And I'm a little bit interested to
know what sort of deal Biden made
with Merck.
What was the compromise?
Is it going to be, don't worry,
I won't push Medicare for all.
Don't worry, you're still going to
get paid down the road.
These are the kinds of backdoor
dealings that we don't know,
how that goes of government as they
call it.
So we're going to find out what
sort of deals were made, and
why- [CROSSTALK]
>> Sacrifices we have to do.
If it's any reassurance to Vivian
a, I don't think that Biden needed
to reassure Merck that he wasn't
going to push for Medicare for all.
>> [INAUDIBLE] already.
But yeah, I get what you're saying.
We wouldn't know, we can't know,
but I'm assuming a lot of money.
In this particular case,
in the absence of overhauling our
entire medical system,
I'm okay with some money going out
if it's actually going to result in
people receiving the vaccine,
especially considering
the populations that are being
worse devastated by COVID.
>> I honestly believe, and
this is really disgusting, but I do
believe politicians have considered
the benefit of losing our elderly
population as how much less it'll
cost them Social Security.
And it's ugly to say, but that's
really where we're at in this
country with predatory capitalism
and how we can save they've already
been trying to slash
Social Security benefits anyway.
And so here we have half a million
people dead,
and a lot of them over 65.
So these are our retirees.
I said this from the beginning and
I still stand by, the fact that I
think that this is a loss that
they're willing to take.
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