Two COVID-19 vaccine candidates, one from Pfizer and one from Moderna, are before the Food and Drug Administration awaiting emergency approval. If all goes well, the first batch of doses will be administered by the end of the month, or less than a year since development began. This breakneck pace is a staggering achievement for medical science that we should marvel at.

But it's also important to take a moment to point out that the careful testing and approval process that is playing out is a rebuke to the cynical fearmongering that liberals pushed surrounding the vaccine development in the run-up to the election.

In the months ahead of the election, liberals responded to President Donald Trump's declarations that a successful vaccine was imminent to claim that somehow he would pressure scientists into rushing out an unsafe vaccine to help his election prospects.

Though there were many on the left pushing an absurd theory that somehow people would have to choose whether to take a vaccine based solely on Trump's say-so, no one was more irresponsible than Vice President-elect Kamala Harris.

In a September interview with CNN's Dana Bash, Harris was asked whether she would trust a vaccine released before the end of the year and responded, "I think that we have learned since this pandemic started, but really before that, that there's very little that we can trust that comes out of Donald Trump's mouth."

She went on to question whether health experts would get the final say on the safety of the vaccine.

"If past is prologue, that they will not, that will be muzzled, they will be suppressed, they will be sidelined because he's looking at an election coming up in less than 60 days, and he's grasping for whatever he can get to pretend that he has been a leader on this issue, when he has not," Harris said.

She also raised doubts about whether she would take a vaccine. "I will say that I would not trust Donald Trump. And it would have to be a credible source of information that talks about the efficacy and the reliability of whatever he's talking about. I will not take his word for it," Harris said.

As we noted at the time and repeatedly, the warnings about the release of some sort of "Trump vaccine" were just fearmongering meant to scare up votes and downplay legitimate progress on the vaccine front.

The process has been playing out exactly as it is supposed to. Pharmaceutical companies have been testing their vaccines on large groups of 30,000 people. When there have been medical issues detected with participants, the trials have even been paused to investigate whether the issues could be tied to the vaccine.

The FDA also made sure that after the final trials, companies had to wait two months to monitor participants before applying for any emergency use authorization. And now that the vaccines are before the FDA, they will go through a careful process of review by a team of scientists.

Unlike emergency use authorization for some COVID-19 treatments up to this point, the vaccine isn't intended for people who are infected. It will be given to a much larger pool. Hence the caution.

As the administration transitions from Trump to Joe Biden, Democrats will embrace the idea of rapid vaccine distribution and attempt to memory-hole their reckless and baseless fearmongering from the fall. But we should not forget it because it speaks to their cynicism and their character as leaders.

The Washington Examiner

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