Dr. Fauci Defends VP Kamala Harris’ ‘Starting From Scratch’ Comments — Because She Was Not Wrong

White House Covid honcho Dr. Anthony Fauci defended Vice President Kamala Harris over her remarks about the coronavirus vaccine distribution plan, which were widely and falsely reported as contradicting earlier statements by Fauci.

On Tuesday morning’s edition of CNN Newsroom With Poppy Harlow and Jim Sciutto, Sciutto wrapped up his interview with Fauci by asking “Kamala Harris spoke to HBO Axios over the weekend, and… she used this phrase again, ‘We’re starting from scratch, and I wonder if you agree with that, did the vaccination plan come January 20th of this year, that you were starting from the beginning there, or there was something in place that just needed improvements?”

“What I think the vice president is referring to is that the actual plan of getting the vaccine doses into people’s arms was really rather vague,” Fauci said. “I mean it was not a well-coordinated plan.”

He added that while getting the vaccines made and shipped “was okay,” he believes “what the vice president was referring to is, what is the process of actually getting these doses into people? That’s something that we had to get much better organized, now with getting the community vaccine centers, getting the pharmacies involved, getting mobile units involved, so that’s what I believe she was referring to.”

At issue was VP Harris’ comment to Axios’ Mike Allen, in which she said that “in many ways we are starting from scratch on something that’s been raging for almost an entire year.”

This remark was posited as a contradiction of a remark that Fauci made on the first full day of the new administration, a premise that was pushed in a now-deleted tweet by Axios.

But despite the superficially similar use of the term “from scratch,” what VP Harris said was exactly as Fauci described to Sciutto, and not at all in conflict with Fauci’s earlier quote.

In that Axios interview, Harris complained that “there was no stockpile” of vaccines, a reference to the outgoing Trump administration’s promises of vaccine doses to health officials from a reserve stockpile that turned out not to exist.

“So we’re looking at this, there was no national strategy or plan for vaccinations, we were leaving it to the states and local leaders to try to figure it out, and so in many ways, we are starting from scratch on something that’s been raging for almost an entire year,” Harris said.

That analysis is backed up by a much-derided Politifact article and tweet that judged the claim “mostly false” despite confirming the facts that Fauci cited to Sciutto, and which included this jaw-dropping quote from an expert: “It is all in what you mean by ‘plan… If you mean a tactical guidebook on how to do vaccination from A to Z, no, there is no federal plan.”

Politifact also wrote that the “Trump administration’s approach to distributing the vaccine was to give it to locations chosen by the states and to let them take it from there. There are many criticisms of this process, including that it took too long to give states money to implement their plans and a lack of communication from the top about how the rollout would work. But that was the plan they drew up.”

That’s literally exactly what the vice president said.

But did she contradict Dr. Fauci, who did, after all, use the words “we certainly are not starting from scratch” during a Jan. 21 briefing?

As Axios’ decision to delete their tweet might suggest, no, she did not. Fauci was asked if the Biden administration was going to scrap what the Trump administration had begun to do — the exact question from NBC News’ Kristen Welker was “Is the Biden administration starting from scratch with the vaccine distribution effort, or are you picking up where the Trump administration left off?”

Fauci responded, “No, I mean, we certainly are not starting from scratch because there is activity going on in the distribution.”

But he then described exactly the steps that VP Harris described as lacking, and said of the Trump administration’s effort “You can’t say it was absolutely not usable at all.”

Even while attempting to be diplomatic about the Trump administration for which he worked, the best he could do was point out that their vaccine effort included “activity” on distribution, and that it exceeded the “absolutely not usable at all” bar — neither of which contradict what the vice president said.

But the rush to twist this into a controversy is yet another indication that many in the political media are having a rocky withdrawal from their Trump addiction, and looking for any excuse they can find to generate some heat.

Watch above via CNN.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.