mRNA vaccine makers are scrambling to navigate an 'existential threat'

You cannot convince someone of anything if their identity is defined by it being wrong.

He deserves credit for Project WarpSpeed, which developed COVID vaccines in record time. He should be telling everybody how wonderful the vaccines are.

Instead, he was more dedicated to insisting that COVID was never serious in the first place. So he's willing to throw his own most significant accomplishment under the bus.

He's also perfectly capable of contradicting himself if he thinks he can get credit, so he may well turn around and say he knew that mRNA vaccines were the goodliest vaccines all along and all of this is due to him. But he has surrounded himself with anti-vax conspiracy theorists and I suspect they will dominate his plans.