According to the New York Times, new coronavirus cases topped 488,000 on Wednesday — a daily record and another milestone marking the abject failure of Joe Biden’s administration to fulfill its promise to defeat COVID-19.
“I’m never going to raise the white flag and surrender. We’re going to beat this virus. We’re going to get it under control, I promise you,” Biden said a few days prior to the election.
Biden is singing a different tune today, admitting that there’s “no federal solution” to solving the pandemic. It sure looks like a “white flag” to an awful lot of people as the president careens from one “plan” to the next to combat the pandemic.
He had a plan to get the virus under control in his first 100 days. It failed. He said if we spent $1.9 trillion on the American Rescue Plan we’d be well on our way back to normalcy. We still aren’t close. He developed a “Six-Step Plan” that failed. And his latest plan to get the virus under control is already failing because someone forgot to tell the president before he promised 500 million quick result COVID tests that they hadn’t even been ordered yet.
Are you detecting a pattern here? Total failure. And Biden’s biggest political problem is that he can’t blame Donald Trump for his failure any longer. Joe Biden owns this pandemic now. He’s been in office nearly a year and things have gone from bad to worse.
Related: Here’s What Biden’s Failure to Order Enough COVID Tests Could Mean for You
Biden’s original plan looks almost quaint in retrospect.
- “[T]o massively surge a nationwide campaign and guarantee regular, reliable, and free access to testing”
- “Double the number of drive-through testing sites and increase the numbers until there are no more lines”
- “Build a national contact tracing workforce, starting by hiring at least 100,000 Americans and equipping sorely under-resourced public health departments with the resources they need to spot and stop outbreaks”
Biden’s latest plan to deal with “sorely under-resourced public health departments” was to mandate vaccination. So many health care workers have quit or been fired that Biden was forced to turn to the military to assist understaffed hospitals — understaffed by choice.
Biden has failed to deliver any of this. Omicron has caught him pants-down yet again on testing. There are spectacular lines at drive-in testing sites. And while there is no sign of Biden’s contact-tracing militia, there is plentiful evidence that public health departments remain flatfooted.
It is also clear from all over the world that outbreaks cannot be stopped, unless you lock everyone in their homes. This is impossible in the US, even in the wildest dreams of that demonic elf Dr. Fauci. Perhaps this is why Biden was in such a hurry to declare “Mission accomplished” last July, just as Delta was warming up. That attempt to wriggle out of a problem by declaring it solved went about as well for Biden as it did for George W. Bush.
How incompetent is Biden’s response to the pandemic?
His signature move, an executive order ordering the compulsory vaccination of federal employees and workers in large corporations, wasn’t worth the paper it was written on. Nothing accrues power to politicians’ hands faster than panic. It is a sign of this administration’s ineptitude that it can’t even sow panic proficiently. The federal government continues to contrive new ways of failing the public. How, two years on, can pharmacies be out of home-testing kits? How can Dr. Jill let us down so badly?
When you “can’t even sow panic proficiently” you’ve achieved a level of incompetence rarely seen in politics.
Fortunately, the American people don’t need a slavish media devoted to improving the political position of Joe Biden to tell them what they can see with their own eyes. Usually, at this point, presidents start giving the ax to prominent figures associated with the problem. Firing Dr. Fauci would get Biden a standing ovation, but then what?
In order to get out in front of the political problem of the pandemic, Biden is going to have to do something he doesn’t want to do. He has to take responsibility for his failures. He’s going to have to admit that his political opponents have been right about most issues associated with the pandemic and change course 180 degrees.
It won’t happen, of course. And because Biden is incapable of that kind of mea culpa, he and his party are very likely to suffer a disastrous defeat during the mid-term elections.
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