Former President Donald Trump said that if not for his COVID-19 vaccine effort, Operation Warp Speed, 100 million people might have died from the bug, saying he’s “very proud” of his efforts to get Americans jabbed.
“I think if we didn’t come up during the Trump administration with the vaccine, you could have 100 million people dead, just like you had in 1917,” Trump said in an interview on Fox News that aired Saturday night.
“You take the Spanish Flu, 100 million people, up to 100 million people, died. I think we’d be in that territory.”
More than 616,000 United States residents have died from COVID-19, according to a Johns Hopkins University tracker. The country’s population is 332,601,658, according to the Census Bureau.
Trump’s administration purchased 200 million doses of Pfizer’s vaccine and 200 million doses of the Moderna shot.
“The vaccines turn out to be a tremendous thing,” he said in the interview with Dan Bongino. “It’s something I’m very proud of.”
But Trump also said he doesn’t favor mandatory COVID-19 jabs.
“I really believe in somebody’s choice, somebody’s freedom,” said the former president. “I’m a big fan of our freedoms, and people have to make that choice for themselves.”
In the appearance, the former commander-in-chief also stressed the importance of in-person learning for students, warning that children losing time in classrooms since March 2020 will “scar” them.
“You know, it’s turned out computers are wonderful and all of that,” he said on Fox News. “But one thing we’ve learned through college and school, undergraduate, everything, is that being in the school is much better than looking at a computer screen.”
“The schools have to open. These young people are losing a big part of their life and they’re not going to recover from it,” he added. “What they’re going through socially, I mean, they are not dealing with people. … It’s going to leave a scar on their lives. It’s going to leave a psychological scar.”Â
