The President must have the power to decide who gets and doesn’t get the vaccine. Why be President if you can’t do something this simple? You reward your friends and punish or humiliate the disloyal.
There wouldn’t even be a vaccine if it weren’t for Trump’s genius and foresight. Project Warp Speed was his idea. Developing a vaccine was his idea. Recognizing this reality, his Press Secretary has even started to call it “The Trump Vaccine.” Our President even gave it a name…”The Chinese Virus.” Much better than Pompeo’s “Wuhan virus.”
As it stands now, however, the FDA approves a COVID vaccine and then prioritizes distribution based upon the recommendations of its vaccine panel. Recently, there was an aborted effort to trump the CDC and take care of Trumps crowd first when an announcement out of the White House declared that “all senior officials across all three branches of government will receive vaccinations pursuant to continuity of government protocols…” Following a spate of unanimously horrible press, the White House priorities were reversed and Jared and Ivanka will now have to wait until front-line health workers and people in nursing homes and long-term care facilities are vaccinated according to CDC’s plan.
Unfortunately, the President’s advisors let him down by not giving him an airtight legal strategy and a proposed Executive Order to implement his priorities, so he had no choice but to backtrack to the final version of the CDC plan …BUT IT DOESN’T HAVE TO BE THIS WAY!
What follows below is a strategy which will assure that the patriots who love America, get the vaccine before those who would tear our Country down. But first, here is how a real Trump/MAGA distribution plan would roll out:
Gets the vaccine first:
(a) The President’s extended family and friends, but not those who have written lying books about him, (b) Roger Stone, (c) Norm Shinkle, Republican Canvas Board person from Michigan who tried to stop the vote, (d) Creditors of the Trump organization, (e)Jeffrey Epstein’s girlfriend, (f) Russian Oligarchs living in the U.S,(g) anyone who voted for Trump and who has pledged money to the Trump Super Pac for the next 4 years, (h) Anyone who can prove that they have attended an MAGA rally, (i) members of Congress who pledge to never accept that Biden won, (j) Giuliani and all members of the legal “elite strike force team.,”(k) All Proud Boys.
Never gets the vaccine: (a) Mitt Romney, a Clinton or any Obama, (b)The Lincoln Project advisors or its contributors, (c) Michael Cohen or his family or anyone who has written an unflattering book about Trump and booksellers who sold such books, (d) Lawyers who stopped representing Trump in the winnable election fraud cases, (e) The Supreme Court and any judge who got it wrong and failed to invalidate the fraudulent election, (f) Anyone associated with CNN or MSNBC, especially Rachel Maddow or Anderson Cooper, (g) The Georgia Secretary of State and all Biden electors, (h) Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer and most Democrats.
The Legal Strategy:
Once Trump establishes his distribution priorities (see suggestions above) he issues an immediately effective Executive Order to CDC (which is an Agency he totally controls) ordering that he alone will set the priorities and CDC must implement them. To be doubly safe he could fire the present head of the CDC and appoint Rudy Giuliani, but that could be overkill.
Next, he has whoever is the acting Attorney General publish an Emergency Regulation which will continue beyond his term if for some hard-to-believe reason he remains cheated out of victory. Although the Biden Administration, if it ever gets into power, can rescind the Executive Order it would take many months to repeal a published Regulation. By the time all this can happen, much of the vaccine will be distributed to loyal supporters. Another side benefit is that without the vaccine, the Deep State or other mask-wearing non patriots will be exposed to the virus and many will have died before the Regulation is repealed.
An additional layer of strategy is to use The Defense Production Act, to require suppliers to enter into a five year contract to only distribute the vaccine in accordance with the current President’s priorities by directing the Secretary of Homeland Security under the Federal Emergency Management Agency to appropriate the number of vaccines that are required to meet the President’s priorities. That might buy 5 more years. Roosevelt did something like this in WWII with factories so they could make tanks.
There is lots of precedent and legal authority to support this approach. It is also fair. Wars and emergencies are up to the President to deal with. He has already issued an executive order under the Public Health Service Act and the National Emergencies Act that the COVID-19 outbreak constitutes a national emergency and “a medical war” and was declared: “I have an Article II, where I have the right to do whatever I want as president.” Thus, we have a war and a public health emergency and full power to deal with them. No Court could rule against the President.
Establishing vaccine priorities of course will treat some people differently than others. That’s OK and in these trying times, equal protection must be scarified. After all, allocating vaccines according to what the President thinks is right is no more unfair than banning TIKTOK or killing an Iranian General. It is also fairer and a far less extreme exercise of a President’s power than the Emancipation Proclamation that freed slaves in The Confederacy but not in northern States or Roosevelt’s WWII internment of Japanese-American citizens or President Wilson’s Executive Order which forbade any persons of Chinese descent from entering the Panama Canal.
In fact, this is all reminiscent of the mindless debate over the unlimited and unquestionable power to pardon or commute sentences. Trump has all the power he needs and demonstrated this by commuting Rod Blagojevich’s sentence. After all, Alexander Hamilton noted in the Federalist Papers that it’s better to give this power to the president — “a single man of prudence and good sense” — than to a legislative body like Congress.
