We’ll never forget that Joe Biden repeatedly promised that, if elected, he’d “shut down the virus.” But last summer, he also celebrated our “independence from COVID-19.”
There’s also been a noticeable shift in rhetoric from the Biden administration. For example, CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky recently admitted that the overwhelming majority of COVID deaths occurred among those with four or more comorbidities.
But the surge in COVID cases combined with Biden’s failure to order more tests, as well as his disastrous decision to put all his chips on vaccinations instead of also pushing therapeutics, is coming back to bite him. Experts and former Biden officials are now admitting things have “gone backwards” and that the Biden administration needs an “urgent strategy reset.”
“The White House’s stay-the-course strategy on Covid is increasingly colliding with the realities of a roaring pandemic that is forcing schools and businesses to close,” reports NBC News. “A half dozen former health policymakers, including some members of Biden’s transition team, told NBC News the Biden administration needs an urgent reset on its Covid strategy or the White House could rapidly lose credibility with the public.”
I’m pretty sure the administration has already lost credibility with the public, but the point is otherwise still valid.
Obama’s Health and Human Services secretary Kathleen Sebelius noted that Biden ran on the promise of competent leadership in the fight against COVID, yet “lives are still pretty chaotic and kind of messy and when they thought they were getting out of this they are back in it.”
Sebelius also acknowledged that the Biden administration is not being forthright about how bad things are going. “There has to be an admission at the federal level [about] what is not going well now and frankly, we have a testing mess,” she said.
Related: 5 Ways Joe Biden Made the COVID Pandemic Worse
The administration has also been plagued by a series of mixed messages from health officials.
“In terms of the communication and the trust in the CDC, it feels like we have gone backwards,” said Leana Wen, a former Baltimore health commissioner.
Ezekiel Emanuel, former Biden transition team member and health policy advisor in the Obama administration, thinks it’s a communication problem.
“There’s agreement that the messaging has to be better and that it would be important to be simpler for people and more targeted towards what people need and action guided,” Emanual said. “I think we just need a clear message so people know what the ‘to do’ is.”
The problem with the Biden administration is not communication—it’s the lack of results. Biden promised to shut down the virus and prematurely declared independence from COVID. As Kathleen Sebelius noted, that was the entire point of Biden’s candidacy. He was supposed to be the competent alternative to Trump, yet ultimately, Biden has proven Trump to be the competent one.
Trump got us the vaccines in record time. Without those vaccines, Biden had nothing. His entire strategy was dependent on those vaccines eradicating the disease in short order. Therapeutics were ignored and the Biden administration was blindsided by the COVID variants, which the vaccines were less effective against. Even Biden’s allies can’t even deny that his COVID strategy failed.
