November 18, 2020

Ivanka Trump Praises Her Dad for Vaccine Research Started Under Obama

Joe Raedle/Getty

The coronavirus is a rapidly developing news story, so some of the content in this article might be out of date. Check out our most recent coverage of the coronavirus crisis, and subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily newsletter.

On Monday morning, shortly after the biotech company Moderna announced promising news about the efficacy of its COVID vaccine, Ivanka Trump went on Twitter to blow some minds:

Let’s pick up the pieces of our brains and recall what was literally happening back in January. Early in the month, intelligence and health officials were becoming increasingly alarmed by a novel coronavirus spreading in China. Yet at the time, as officials later told the Washington Post, “Trump’s advisers struggled to get him to take the virus seriously.” Trump received his first in-depth briefing on the virus from Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar on January 18. (During the call, the president reportedly was more interested in discussing when a ban on flavored vaping products would end.) The first COVID-19 case in the United States was reported on January 20. Asked about the coronavirus publicly for the first time two days later, Trump declared, “We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China.”

While there is now ample evidence that Trump knowingly downplayed the seriousness of the coming pandemic from the start, Ivanka would have us believe that behind the scenes, her father was taking it super seriously and being astoundingly proactive. So proactive, in fact, that he joined up with a much-hyped yet unproven biotechnology company to kickstart a COVID vaccine one week before the virus had hit American soil and four months before he would announce Project Warp Speed. Trump’s children have ascribed many unlikely qualities to him, but clairvoyance is a new one.

So what exactly was Ivanka talking about? It turns out that Moderna did get started on its COVID vaccine on January 13, two days after China released the virus’ genetic sequence. A document filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission explains that on that date, the company’s researchers “finalized the sequence for the SARS-CoV-2 vaccine” and it “mobilized toward clinical manufacture.” That step was taken in collaboration with the Vaccine Research Center, which is under the National Institutes for Health (NIH). Even if Trump wasn’t personally involved, can’t he take credit for his administration’s role in this moment?

It’s not that simple. Moderna’s partnership with the feds to develop messenger RNA technology, which its coronavirus vaccine is based on, began long before the novel coronavirus flared up. The Pentagon funded the company’s mRNA research in 2013, and the federal government gave it $125 million to develop a mRNA-based Zika vaccine in 2016. Its COVID-related work on January 13 appears to have been completed under an already existing research agreement with the NIH, according to a review by the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen.

In short, Trump didn’t swoop in to launch the Moderna-NIH COVID vaccine partnership. Rather, his administration piggybacked on an ongoing collaboration whose initial agreements were signed in—checking the fine print—November 2015. Maybe Ivanka should have added, “Thanks, Obama.”

WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

payment methods

WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate