Biden and Covid

If one could name the single reason why President Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump in 2020, it would have to be Trump’s disastrous handling of the opening phase of the COVID-19 pandemic.

To the extent that Trump had a policy to address COVID-19, it included heavy reliance on developing vaccines (“Operation Warp Speed”), a denigration of non-pharmaceutical interventions like social distancing and mask-wearing, and an insistence on getting economic activity “back to normal”. Of course, Trump and his followers surrounded these policies with a web of “know-nothingism” and a promotion of quack remedies for COVID-19.

In contrast, Biden insisted that he would “follow the science” and protect public health.So after almost two years under the Biden administration, where are we in the COVID-19 pandemic?

On August 15, the public health advocacy group Peoples CDC explained the current situation this way:

We are experiencing sustained and uncontrolled COVID spread, a worsening Long COVID crisis, and a deteriorating US healthcare system.

What’s more, The CDC itself predicts deaths will “remain stable or have an uncertain trend” in the coming weeks.

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Despite this, the CDC published a horrifying set of new, relaxed guidelines last week, which places even more responsibility onto individuals than ever before and ignores all COVID-related outcomes they classify as “not severe” (including Long COVID).

These updated guidelines underscore the CDC’s refusal to control or prevent disease, and send a clear message that they believe 400+ deaths per day are acceptable.

When public health advocates confront the administration with these criticisms, the administration invariably falls back on two tropes: one, to insist that “we have the tools” to combat COVID and that ultimate responsibility lies with individuals to avail themselves of them; two, that ordinary people are “done with COVID” and therefore won’t listen to or follow public health guidance. Neither of these arguments holds together when you look at them more seriously.

On the question of “tools,” it’s clear that the administration has been scaling back its response to COVID-19 almost from the time in March 2021, when it pushed through the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan. Last September, the administration let lapse—and didn’t even make much attempt to extend—federal income support programs that helped workers who were laid off, or who had to stay home, because of COVID.

When a Trump-appointed federal judge in Mayruled against the federal government mandate for passengers to wear masks on public transit and flights, the administration only meekly challenged it. In fact, it was clear at the time that the administration itself was moving toward the same conclusion.

At the same time, the Biden-controlled CDC has shown itself to issue guidelines—with little scientific evidence to back them up—that changed the definition of COVID-19 risk so that local governments could drop most mitigations, that cut the recommended quarantine for sick workers from 10 days to five (a decision noted at the time to be a sop to the airline industry), and that said that people who had the two-dose initial vaccination could drop their masks.

The inescapable conclusion is that these recommendations have less to do with “the science” as they do with the administration’s real prime directive: to get Americans back to work, and to get profits flowing again.

It would be one thing if the administration coupled this “back to normal” policy with strong mandates for upgraded building ventilation systems, or with strong protections for workers’ health and safety, or with policies for paid sick leave. But it abandoned an Occupational Safety and Health Administration regulation on COVID safety in the workplace, and it dropped paid sick leave as it whittled down its “Build Back Better” plan into the “Inflation Reduction Act” that passed in August. And that campaign pledge to create a 100,000-strong community health corps to help with vaccinating the underserved and with other measures? That’s disappeared.

And by the way, Biden COVID director Dr. Ashish Jha—who made a name for himself in 2020 as a television commentator slamming Trump’s policies—has already said that the administration plans to end government support for vaccines, testing and treatment. “My hope is that in 2023, you’re going to see the commercialization of almost all of these products. Some of that is actually going to begin this fall, in the days and weeks ahead. You’re going to see commercialization of some of these things,” Jha recently told the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation.

Big business did not fork over millions in campaign funds to Biden and the Democrats to underwrite a program that would hurt the business bottom line. All things being equal, big business has traditionally preferred Republicans, whose open pro-business stances aren’t usually balanced against appeals to labor or the poor. But the current Republican Party—saddled with responsibility for unpopular policies, mired in corruption, and having demonstrated its incompetence in managing the affairs of state—ran its course as a vehicle for winning support for big business’s agenda. In the language that every pundit now uses, the Republican “brand” was damaged. And business knew in 2020, that it was time to pull that bad brand off the shelf.

In the end, what business has won for its money is, under Biden, a COVID policy that resembles Trump’s in many ways. Biden may not spout conspiracy theory nonsense or promote quack remedies for COVID-19, but his policies have boiled down to a heavy reliance on vaccination, a winding down of non-pharmaceutical interventions (like wearing masks), and an insistence on getting economic activity “back to normal”.

In the place of government-led public health measures, and requirements that employers provide safe workplaces, we have a reversion to the idea that protecting oneself from COVID-19 is an individual responsibility. And for making this approach to the pandemic the conventional wisdom, business has the Democrats to thank.

The administration’s justification is that “the public” just won’t put up with further COVID-19 mitigations after more than two years of disruption. But, outside of the far right that made organizing against COVID-19 mitigation one of its key political interventions,there is little evidence that “the public” is unwilling to follow public health guidance. The public opposed the ending of mask requirements on transit, and continue to support vaccine and public mask mandates to limit the spread of COVID-19.

Recent polls show that while Biden continues to be unpopular, the public gives him the highest marks (58 percent support)on his handling of COVID-19. Perhaps this is just a reflection of Biden exceeding the very low standards that Trump set. Or the fact that after almost three years of catastrophe, “excess deaths” due to COVID-19 are finally dropping after peaking in Biden’s first year in office. (However, even this trend may not hold, if a major outbreak of COVID-19 takes place this winter and the health system doesn’t have the resources to implement mass vaccination.)

But we should entertain another explanation for the disconnect between the perception of Biden’s success in defeating COVID-19 and what many astute observers have, instead, called the administration’s and Congress’s “capitulation” to COVID-19.And that is the success that the administration and its supporters have had in shifting—and ratcheting downward—public expectations about what the government can and should do in the face of a crisis requiring a concerted public health response.

Biden and his supporters in the administration, the Democratic Party and its satellites (including the national leadership of leading teachers unions), and liberal opinion makers have carried on a concerted campaign to put the pandemic behind us. The message is that Biden is doing the best that he can, and that demanding the administration do more—or even to fulfill its campaign promises—is just unrealistic, or carping from the sidelines.

In 1996, Peter Edelman, an official in the Clinton administration, resigned in protest over President Clinton’s signing of a bill ending the federal right to income support for poor families (what Clinton called “ending welfare as we know it”). In the following year, Edelman wrote a controversial article called “The Worst Thing Bill Clinton Has Done,” in which he also criticized Democrats and liberals for their acquiescence to Clinton’s attack on the poor. Edelman wrote that the liberals “would have shouted their opposition from the rooftops if a Republican President had done this.”

Twenty-five years later, we are seeing a similar scenario unfold as a Democratic administration normalizes theCOVID-19 policies it called “unconscionable” when the Republicans were in charge.