This tone was struck early, even before Biden assumed office. First, the transition team distanced itself from one of its scientific advisors who, in a New York Times op-ed, called for a national shutdown of four to six weeks. Later, after internal debate, Biden’s transition team decided not to warn the public against attending social gatherings during the 2020 holiday season, even as few were vaccinated and hospital beds were quickly filling. When Biden assumed office in January, he warned the public that, There’s nothing we can do to change the trajectory of the pandemic in the next several months.
For his top pandemic policy advisor, Biden appointed Jeffrey Zients, a wealthy campaign donor with a background in private equity and management consulting, not public health. Zients has been known as the “ambassador to the business community” under the Obama administration.
Who remained unvaccinated by late 2021? While the media often highlights the notable partisan divide in vaccination rates, it’s also notable that half of unvaccinated adults didn’t vote for Trump — many did not vote at all. The unvaccinated are largely low-income, uninsured, pregnant, incarcerated, and children (including those under 5, for whom vaccination has not been authorized). While vaccination rates are high for people ages 65 and up, those in their late 70s and older have lower vaccination rates than younger seniors, suggesting a lack of autonomy (i.e. needing to rely on others to access health care) may play a role. And while racial gaps in vaccination rates have narrowed considerably, huge inequalities in covid death rates remain. By my own calculations, age-adjusted covid mortality rates in the US between August 1, 2021 and December 4, 2021 were 30% higher for Black and Latino people, 100% higher for American Indians/Alaska Natives, and 340% higher for Pacific Islanders compared to non-Hispanic whites.
Finally, the Biden administration has exaggerated the proportion of hospitalizations and deaths attributed to the unvaccinated. For instance, Fauci claimed in July, 2021 that only 1% of covid deaths were among vaccinated people, but CDC’s data for the previous week showed the actual figure was 17%. By December, 2021 when Zients assured vaccinated Americans that they had “done the right thing” and “will get through this”, the share of vaccinated deaths had increased to 28%. Vaccines continue to provide powerful risk reduction for severe illness, but they are not a panacea. Amid high viral transmission levels, more than a thousand vaccinated people will continue to die each week (particularly those who are older, immunocompromised, or otherwise high-risk). But framing vaccination as a way to opt out of the pandemic, and understanding the unvaccinated to be political enemies, has helped absolve the administration of its responsibilities.
Justin FeldmanBy January 20th, 2021, Biden’s inauguration day, the US had reported more than 410.000 Covid deaths, with a daily average of about 3100. One year later, the death toll more than doubled to over 860.000 (not even accounting for the likely higher figures because of poorly reported death causes) on a daily average of 2100 – in a nutshell, all you need to know about the Biden’s administration pandemic response.
It was obviously a tough job to begin with because of the partisan political divide. As I remarked before, it’s unclear if the US would have fared better at the start of the pandemic with Hillary Clinton as President, and now we have some empirical confirmation that a Democratic President could fail almost just as badly as a Republican one. As the article linked above examines in great detail, Biden’s pandemic response was too focused on vaccines as the single technological ‘silver bullet’ to the point of ignoring or obscuring scientific data, his central priority to pass his economic bills and keep the economy humming, disconnected from the harsh reality on the ground. His one good decision, pushing for the greater availability of boosters, was squarely undermined by the resistance of a sizable portion of the population, and his attempts to incentivize vaccine uptake were too timid, easily overturned by courts.
The media narrative and the rest of the Democratic party has mostly supported this minimal, vaccines-or-bust approach. There are countless experts eager to predict the inevitable end of the pandemic, no matter how many times they are proven wrong by subsequent events. The US discourse around the pandemic has absurdly circled back to the beginning: it will all go away in a matter of months, it’s just like the flu (for the vaccinated), we don’t need to wear masks, we can’t shut down the economy to stop infections, we’ll reach herd immunity sooner with more people getting infected (with the added twist of shaming people for exercising caution), and so on – except this time around these misleading statements seem broadly accepted, coming from a Democratic administration, instead of Trump.
I love how people who want to wear masks are derided as “living in fear” by people who want to carry guns
— Ed Solomon (@ed_solomon) February 2, 2022
The recent Omicron wave brought major disruption, with flights cancelled and stores closing because too many workers were infected and isolating. Basically, instead of adopting short-term targeted lockdowns, which would be more predictable and protect people from infections and sickness, the US choose the more chaotic and painful route, with no central guidance or planning, forcing people to return to work while still contagious. Unless this institutionalized negligence changes – and there’s no indication that it would – similar surges of infections and economic disruption will continue to flare, perhaps several times a year, battering a tired population and weakening the economy. The US continues to be stuck in reactive mode, with no proactive plans or strategy – almost as if they’re simply hoping that the next variant will be milder still, which is far from guaranteed. A dangerous game of Russian roulette with the lives and wellbeing of millions…
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