If you thought that fake news would diminish when Joe Biden took office, you were wrong. The propaganda machine jointly constructed by the Democrats and their media flacks has a tough job ahead: making Joe Biden look good. When truth is no consideration, one obvious tactic is claim credit for achievements that he inherited from Donald Trump. And that appears to be the case with distribution of Covid vaccines, starting with the utter lie that Biden inherited no plan for distribution and has to start from scratch.

This mendacious claim makes every dose administered from now on a Biden triumph. This despite the fact that Trump led the breathtakingly unprecedented quick development of vaccines under Operation Warp Speed and has already distributed 36 million doses to states. (Some of the states – naturally, blue states -- have bungled the retail end of the process by obsessing over priorities and political correctness, letting doses expire and become useless.)

The Big Lie about No Plan was kicked off by CNN in an anonymously (of course!) sourced article by their White House correspondent M.J. Lee:

Newly sworn in President Joe Biden and his advisers are inheriting no coronavirus vaccine distribution plan to speak of from the Trump administration, sources tell CNN, posing a significant challenge for the new White House.

The Biden administration has promised to try to turn the Covid-19 pandemic around and drastically speed up the pace of vaccinating Americans against the virus. But in the immediate hours following Biden being sworn into office on Wednesday, sources with direct knowledge of the new administration's Covid-related work told CNN one of the biggest shocks that the Biden team had to digest during the transition period was what they saw as a complete lack of a vaccine distribution strategy under former President Donald Trump, even weeks after multiple vaccines were approved for use in the United States.

The very fact that the vaccines already are being delivered on a large scale makes this claim implausible. Ed Morrissey notes:

At the moment, the nation is inoculating people at a rate of about 1 million per day, the same rate that Biden pledged to meet in his pledge to get 100 million people vaccinated in 100 days. As of yesterday, we have inoculated 16.5 million people (roughly 5% of the American populace) in the six weeks or so that the vaccines have become available, a pace of 2.75 million per week or 400,000 per day on an overall average, with the pace increasing logarithmically along the way. Those doses had to get into all of those arms somehow, so clearly the distribution plan was not “non-existent.”

This Biden team/CNN claim is so obviously fraudulent that even some leftist journalists with integrity are expressing doubt. Fox News:

Politico editor Sam Stein said the assertions in the story were "not true," as a distribution plan was part of the Trump administration's Operation Warp Speed.

"Biden folks are spinning here or trying to lower the bar strategically," he tweeted. "There was, indeed, a plan from Trump. I listened in on govs calls on vaccine distribution. The plan had obvious shortcomings. but to say there’s nothing to rework is not true."

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The Washington Post's Dan Diamond linked to the piece and called it an apparent "gambit to lower expectations," noting that Trump, while "dangerous" on his response to coronavirus, had set up a system that's distributed 36 million doses to the states.

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In the past week,@business says 912,497 vaccine doses were administered per day — or 91% of Biden’s goal of 1M Americans per day. Either the situation on the ground is better than team Biden acknowledges, or Biden’s target is less ambitious than it seems.

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It’s encouraging that this lie was too much for some members of the MSM. But nonetheless, the story got tremendous exposure during the day and no doubt is believed by tens of millions of people.