FUNNY HOW THAT HAPPENED ONCE THE BAD ORANGE MAN LEFT OFFICE: The Heroes of the Pandemic Become Its Villains.

Look, there’s so much of this virus that we think we understand, that we think we can predict, that’s just a little beyond our explanation,” Joe Biden’s COVID-response adviser Andy Slavitt recently confessed. “This is a virus that continues to surprise us.”

That’s some welcome contrition from Slavitt, but it’s also belated to the point of uselessness. The president’s COVID counselor spent the better part of the last year insisting from a position of authority that the virus was, in fact, behaving in fairly predictable ways. And he had implied that the nation’s Republican governors, by and large, were ignoring those patterns while their Democratic counterparts prudently deferred to empiricism.

The tables have since turned in some fairly remarkable ways. Slavitt was among the many highly visible critics of Republican pandemic policy to repeat the claim that “Florida Gov. DeSantis misled the public on COVID crisis” by concealing relevant data and spreading misinformation. That charge against DeSantis was never as substantiated as as is the present case against a figure he portrayed as a hero of the pandemic, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. The idea that “Cuomo killed people in nursing homes” through the pursuit of careless policies was, in Slavitt’s estimation, a ghoulish “right-wing meme.” Now, it’s the allegation of the state’s attorney general.

As Glenn noted last May, “Trump’s wrecking a whole generation of Democratic governors who might otherwise have been presidential or vice-presidential timber, simply by letting them run things as they see fit.”