Any reasonable person would think that Old Joe Biden’s COVID diagnosis, coming after he was vaccinated, twice boosted, and (almost) always masked, was evidence that the Left’s entire COVID narrative was false. But the concept of disconfirming evidence doesn’t even exist on the Left; no matter what happens, the narrative must be preserved. CNN medical analyst Leana Wen took to the pages of the Washington Post Thursday to shore up several of the Left’s sagging narratives, pretending for the length of an entire column both that Biden has been a successful president and that his COVID agenda has been a resounding success.
Wen, the Shanghai-born former Planned Parenthood chief who last December wished that Old Joe “would go further to restrict the activities of the unvaccinated because they are the ones who are still spreading Covid and prolonging the pandemic for all of us,” was quick to see a silver lining in her superannuated hero’s bout with the Wuhan sniffles: “President Biden’s covid-19 diagnosis is an opportunity for his administration to demonstrate the success of his leadership on the pandemic and what living with the coronavirus looks like.”
Wait, what? The “success of his leadership on the pandemic”? How is Wen measuring success here? There have been more COVID deaths during the Biden administration than under Trump, and despite Biden’s shameless credit-stealing, the vaccines and vaccine distribution plan were developed during the Trump administration as well. That’s an increasingly dubious distinction, to be sure: as more evidence piles up of how ineffective and dangerous they are, expect Biden and his handlers to start talking about “Trump’s vaccines.” But Biden promised to “shut down the virus.” He didn’t. Not even close. So exactly what would Wen have us believe constitutes “the success of his leadership on the pandemic”?
In fact, the biggest sign that Biden’s leadership on the pandemic has been a resounding failure is his own COVID diagnosis. This is, after all, the man who, one day short of a year before he came down with COVID himself, declared: “You’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations.” Yet Biden, vaccinated and boosted, got COVID. If that’s success in the eyes of Leana Wen, I’d hate to see what she regards as failure.
But now Wen is anxious to toss off Biden’s China flu as inevitable, and trivial in its import: “The fact that Biden contracted the coronavirus should not be surprising at all.” Really? Not even to Old Joe himself? So is Wen telling us that he never believed the guff about the effectiveness of the vaccines that he has been peddling to the American people all this time? That would be par for the course for the corrupt old liar Biden, but here again, it hardly constitutes any success of his “leadership.”
Related: More Americans Have Died from COVID Under Biden Than Under Trump
Wen goes on to point out that everyone near Old Joe has already gotten the lockdown bug: “People around him have been getting infected for months, including Vice President Harris, multiple Cabinet secretaries, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.). Frankly, I’m surprised Biden had held off infection for so long, given the number of public events he has attended and his proclivity for hugging and shaking hands.” Yeah, and sniffing hair. Anyway, in reeling off this list of names, Wen is apparently working from the school of thought that the vaccine only works if everyone around the vaccinated person is vaccinated as well — oh, no, wait, all these people were vaccinated, too. Success!
Above all, Wen doesn’t want us to worry about our intrepid commander-in-chief: “His symptoms so far are mild, and they will likely stay that way. His age is a risk factor, but he is vaccinated and twice-boosted, meaning he is very well protected against severe illness.” This is the familiar bait and switch: Biden told us that “you’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations,” but now the line that vaccinated Leftists who have gotten COVID give us is pure superstition: yes, they got the virus, but it would have been so much worse, you see, without the vaccine. How do they know this? There is no possible way for them to do so: it’s just like saying, “My COVID would be much worse if I hadn’t sacrificed a lamb to Zeus.” But today we call that “trusting the science.”
Wen, trusting the science as always, thinks Biden “should use his illness as an opportunity to inform the public that covid-19 is a manageable disease for almost everyone, so long as they use the tools available to them.” Wait a minute. The entire world was shut down for what is a “manageable disease for almost everyone”? This kind of thing shows why Leftists have such a taste for rewriting history in order to suit present-day sensibilities: if no record exists of what they said before, their lies and self-contradictions won’t ever come back to haunt them.
And so now we have the “success” of Joe Biden’s “leadership.” That one belongs in the Left’s Hall of Whoppers right next to “You’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations.”
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