>> Officials in more than a dozen states have complained that they
are receiving fewer doses of the Coronavirus vaccine than they had been promised. Now in
response Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar decided to blame Pfizer for manufacturing
challenges, however Pfizer has responded back saying that that is not the case.
They're not having any issues. And there's some sort of issue happening with
the Trump administration. So several states including Illinois, Washington, California,
Georgia, Hawaii and Nevada are only getting half of the doses that they had expected.
Four other States are getting about 30% of the doses that they were expecting.
And so, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has also said that the new shipments for the next two weeks
are halted and people are wondering what the hell is going on. Well, again, Alex Azar claims that
the company Pfizer had experienced quote, manufacturing challenges,
and the administration was working to get more visibility into Pfizer's manufacturing process.
In fact, he said part of our ongoing discussions is to remediate that and get better visibility
into what we're doing or what they're doing, what challenges they're facing because they've made
significant commitments to us, and others, Azar said. And of course he also noted that Pfizer
allegedly has only been able to make half of what it thought it would be able to produce this year.
Now, Pfizer responded immediately and said, no, we're gonna go ahead and point our fingers at
you guys. They say in a statement, this week we successfully shipped all 2.9 million doses
that we were asked to ship by the United States government to the location specified by them.
We have millions more doses sitting in our warehouse but as of now,
we have not received any shipment instructions for additional doses which could probably explain
why Ron Desantis says that the next two weeks worth of shipments have been halted.
Later, the Trump administration responded to Pfizer statement and it's interesting because
now they're changing their tone and they're arguing, no, actually what's going on is
we're holding on to certain doses because it's a two dose process and we wanna make
sure that we do this right. Two senior Trump officials say it had always been the plan to
distribute only 2.9 million of that 6.4 million doses produced in a first wave.
Another 2.9 million are in reserve to make sure people who got the the first part
of the two shot vaccine would be able to get the necessary second dose they said,
another half a million have been basically stored in a warehouse for unforeseen problems. So,
why did Azar say that there was a manufacturing problem?
That's what I wanna know. And what do you guys think is really going on?
>> I mean, ultimately here for me that the real issue is
there's a patent on the vaccine. It is their intellectual property,
meaning that it's not able to be mass produced in a way that can actually serve everybody.
Because we live in a capitalist system and somebody has to profit off of this vaccine, Pfizer
is the one producing it. And people are other companies are not allowed to actually produce
the vaccine, to mass produce it to be able to meet the demand. Now obviously, look there's gonna be,
there's always gonna be limitations on how much of the vaccine that Pfizer can produce themselves.
That seems obvious. And I don't think it's necessarily wrong to say that part of the doses
in the warehouses are for second doses because I don't think that's true, you need to two doses.
But ultimately the issue here is that there aren't enough doses of the vaccine and that's
because Pfizer holds the intellectual property and only they can produce it.
>> Yeah, I mean, there certainly is a problem with enforcing patents, and refusing to share
the information necessary to produce more of this vaccine
with other companies involved. Now as we know, there are other vaccines at play here. Moderna
for instance was just recommended by the FDA panel for emergency use authorization.
So it's, we're not there yet, the FDA still has to make a decision on that,
but it's planned. I mean, it's pretty much set in stone at this point, we're expecting that
authorization to come down pretty soon. But I also think it's kind of interesting that Azar had this
allegation against Pfizer manufacturing problems and then later we hear from the White House and
they say, no, actually we are storing some of these doses in warehouses and this is why.
And so I'm curious why that miscommunication if it's a miscommunication, or at least,
that conflict in messaging exists. Like Jayar, do you have any thoughts on that?
>> Yeah, this the hard part because we have to speculate to a degree about exactly why this
is happening the way that it's happening, but regardless of the speculation of the
whether or not Azar didn't know about the vaccine distribution, and then there's another the second
half is being kept until the second stage of doses happened which okay, let's address that one first.
Because I think between the first and second dosages is supposed to be 21 to 29 days. If I read
I quickly read something somewhere, so I don't even know if that's the full
real details. But, it's nearly three weeks difference, just over three weeks difference.
Do you have to hold half the shipments for the second half to come?
What, whoever's holding it, can't keep it there until these three weeks have passed for the
people to get their second doses? It just doesn't make a lot of sense. And then so, whether or not
Azar knows that or whether or not he's accusing Pfizer of being the problem when they aren't,
whatever it is, this operation warp speed isn't operating at the way that
it was built, is supposed to be this innovative break down,
get it to everyone at the at the highest priority possible and we're gonna get this done.
We should praise Donald Trump for it. How many times have you heard we should be praising Donald
Trump for the vaccine, or rather said we should name it after him. Mark Levin said that we should
have a ticker tape parade. Nobody does ticker tape parades anymore. That's just that football game.
So we're trying to give them all this credit for something when he
still hasn't finished the job yet. And you know why he doesn't finish the job yet?
Because he's sitting around watching Fox News and weigh in and everything else and he's mad about,
everything he sees in front of him, he's complaining on Twitter.
So when you're not doing the job. Things like this happen. Maybe there's miscommunication. Maybe
there's people working within operation warp, see the thought one thing was gonna go one way,
but it's not because there's no leadership. And then when someone does probably stand up and lead,
they probably get reprimanded for because they may do something that
Trump didn't want them to do or someone who's right under Trump wanted him to do.
It's just whenever you have the what's the saying that you and Jake always say that
this rots from the head down. It can't be any shorter than this.
Nobody knows why it's happened this way, but I do know that the leadership does not know what
they're doing, so things like this do happen and you kind of can't get an answer to it.
>> Also like there have been issues with the administration, various parts of the
administration not communicating with one another. And so that could be one of the explanations. But
what I also found interesting in some of Azar's statements was that he really felt the need to
criticize Pfizer for refusing to be part of Operation warp speed.
Now, to be sure, the federal government did agree to buying millions of doses of
the virus and that is part of Operation warp speed. But what I'm specifically talking about
is when Congress appropriated money for the vaccine development, Pfizer was one
of the companies that did not take the money for the research and development.
And so Azar seem to blame Pfizer's decision in that for why they're allegedly having
manufacturing problems. And again later of course, they backed away from that message and said that
no it's actually something completely different. We are storing the vaccine
and it's part of the plan. It's always been part of the plan.
I'm wondering how much of this, I don't know and this is 100% speculation, so please take it with
a grain of salt. I'm just floating the idea because I just have a gut feeling about it.
How much of this is retaliatory toward Pfizer, right because Pfizer is the company that was,
it's a pharmaceutical company that came out first with promising news of vaccine.
And they came out with that news after the election took place. And remember, Donald Trump
was absolutely convinced that Pfizer intentionally did that, that they develop the vaccine. They knew
that they had a successful vaccine. But they intentionally withheld that information from
the American public before the election to hurt Donald Trump's chances of winning re-election.
And so how much of this could possibly be, somewhat retaliatory, a way to make Pfizer look
bad. It's just that Trump is such a vindictive, thin skinned person that I don't put it past him.
I mean, we have over 300,000 Americans dead from this pandemic and he really could not care less.
So I don't know for sure what's going on. I don't think anyone knows and it's awful that we even
need to speculate about this, but I think the big theme here is just this federal government
unwillingness to take this pandemic seriously, and do what they need to
do to organize the right people and to have the right like strategy in place to make sure
as few people die as possible, but they don't seem to care about that.
>> Yeah, in terms of Trump's vindictiveness,
it's funny because my mind doesn't even go there because that seems so extreme that they couldn't
possibly do that, right? But then you think no, this is the Trump administration. Of course,
that's definitely a possibility that this is happening because of their vindictive nature.
And yeah, you mentioned how this vaccine wasn't even part of Warp Speed. It was
actually partly funded by Germany. And maybe there's a, it's funny because they've been
trying to take credit for these vaccines when ultimately it's not because of the American,
the fantastic American healthcare system, which of course I'm not being serious there
but it's because of the funding from Germany into this vaccine is the reason why Americans
now have this and of course vindictiveness absolutely could play a part in this.
>> We've always said, my last thought on this is, we've always talked about the incompetence of this
administration and people wanna talk about how you're just gonna be mean and talk about Trump,
just to talk about Trump and you don't like him and all that. Yeah, so sure.
But there's something behind every time he does something like this, we wouldn't have to
speculate that he's maybe being vindictive if you will hasn't been vindictive for the majority of
his Presidency. So, there's reason why you don't act to certain way, that you don't go outside the
bounds of a normal political process, and just do things your way because I'm the anti-politician.
Well, sometimes you have to do things a certain way because you're the leader of the entire
government, of a federal government. So maybe, of the Executive office. Maybe you
should do something where people can trust you. So when these things happen, maybe then
mistakes do happen, we find out that people in charge of things all the time, make mistakes.
But if you go around bullying and yelling and barking at people all the time, no one wants
to give you the benefit of the doubt. When you go behind people's backs and make sure you do
things just to benefit yourself, no one is gonna believe you anymore. So you can't complain about
people not trusting the process if the process on every other issue has been completely upside down,
and by the last thing, super last thing, I'm Jake Hager.
Where are you gonna have some problems with confidence in the vaccine just because
we already have problems with people having confidence in vaccines anywhere.
So when you continue to have hiccups and screw ups like this,
it just definitely doesn't help with getting the rollout going and what's gonna happen next.
>> Yeah, no, I think you make a great point and it also doesn't help that you have people like
Tucker Carlson, essentially arguing that the promotion of this vaccine is sketchy and maybe,
basically implying that people should be sceptical
about this vaccine. It's just so unbelievably irresponsible,
especially at a time when we have record numbers of Americans dying on a daily basis.
3500 people a day at this point, it's beyond shameful and these people just do not care.