Our vaccination achievements deserve celebration, but Biden’s role in them has been pretty small.
Our vaccination achievements deserve celebration, but Biden’s role in them has been pretty small.
J oe Biden will probably spend the rest of his days bragging about how his administration ended the COVID-19 pandemic. Indeed, the more than 200 million doses administered represent a major accomplishment, and a big reason why the pandemic is less menacing in American daily life as summer approaches.
But the Biden administration’s management of the national vaccination effort was messier and more haphazard than the president or his fans would like to admit, with plenty of missteps, exaggerations, confusion, contradictory advice, and stumbles along the way.
The day Biden took office, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said manufacturers had distributed 35.9 million doses of COVID-19 vaccine and states had administered 16.5 million doses — a rather sluggish start to an unprecedented effort. But the facts weren’t bad enough for the new administration’s preferred narrative of having to start from scratch. Kamala Harris claimed that “we are starting from scratch on something that’s been raging for almost an entire year,” and during a CNN town hall, Biden erroneously claimed that “It’s one thing to have the vaccine, which we didn’t have when we came into office. . . . [But] We got into office and found out . . . there was nothing in the refrigerator, figuratively and literally speaking.”
Biden and Harris made these claims despite Dr. Anthony Fauci’s saying on Biden’s first full day in office: “We certainly are not starting from scratch because there is activity going on in the distribution. . . . I mean, we’re coming in with fresh ideas, but also some ideas that were not bad ideas with the — with the previous administration. You can’t say it was absolutely not usable at all. So, we are continuing, but you’re going to see a real ramping-up of it.”
In the first weeks of his administration, Biden insisted that reaching 100 million doses administered in 100 days would represent a major accomplishment. But the Trump administration started from zero and increased to a rolling average of 913,000 per day; 1.5 million doses were administered on the day before Biden took office. As the New York Times summarized, “Both administrations deserve credit, although neither wants to grant much to the other.”
Shortly after taking office, Biden’s rhetoric on the virus changed. On the campaign trail the previous year, he had insisted, “I’m not going to shut down the economy, I’m not going to shut down the country, I’m going to shut down the virus,” and repeatedly maintained to audiences that he and his team were ready on Day One. But once he was in office, Biden lamented that his abilities were limited, and there was little he could do: “There’s nothing we can do to change the trajectory of the pandemic in the next several months.”
Indeed, Biden and his administration didn’t have complete control over the national vaccination process. They weren’t helped by states’ adopting online-only appointment programs, with complicated and rapidly shifting criteria for who was eligible and when. The system to get appointments in most states was maddening the first few months, with websites crashing, phone lines jammed, and available appointments few and far between. Six weeks into the vaccination process, some sites still weren’t operating seven days a week.
For a stretch in late winter, the Biden administration seemed to specialize in ideas that didn’t really address the problem. In early February, the White House readied a massive ad campaign to encourage vaccination — but thankfully held off, recognizing the absurdity of encouraging Americans to get vaccinated when vaccination sites were slowly working through a massive backlog of appointment requests. By mid-February, the administration was offering states more tents and staffers, but not more doses of vaccine; state governments said that would just give them more sites with the same shortage of doses. At a time when masks were available for free from state governments, county health departments, local governments, retirement homes, and plenty of businesses, Biden proposed and enacted a federally run mask-giveaway program.
A much-touted invocation of the Defense Production Act in February helped prevent future disruptions in the supply chain, but was widely misreported as “speeding vaccinations.” The DPA could not simply be used to make Pfizer or Moderna make more vaccine faster, as the companies were already running the complicated and resource-intensive process as quickly as they could. Some not-well-informed governors such as Minnesota’s Tim Walz contended the DPA could force other companies to make vaccine doses, ignoring that each vaccine requires custom-built equipment to make, and that telling other pharmaceutical companies to make the Pfizer, Moderna, or some other vaccine was like instructing fireworks factories to start manufacturing thermonuclear weapons. A cynic would suspect that the Biden administration didn’t really care about the inaccurate descriptions of what its DPA action would do; it just wanted to be perceived as “doing something.”
Meanwhile, the biggest problem — resolving the logistical issues and figuring out why some states kept seeing their stockpiles of unused doses grow — remained a long and difficult slog. In a five-day span in late February, the CDC’s official statistics indicated the number of in-transit or unused doses jumped by 11 million.
A lingering problem for the Biden administration is that it repeatedly brags about only following “the science” for its policy decisions, but then ignores scientific research that supports policy decisions that would antagonize Democratic constituencies. This was clearest when CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said, “There is increasing data to suggest that schools can safely reopen and that that safe reopening does not suggest that teachers need to be vaccinated in order to reopen safely. . . . While we are implementing the criteria of the Advisory Committee and of the state and local guidances to get vaccination across these eligible communities, I would also say that safe reopening of schools is not — that vaccination of teachers is not a prerequisite for safe reopening of schools.” White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki absurdly claimed that Walensky simply “spoke to this in her personal capacity,” not in her official capacity as CDC director.
Then again, there’s some evidence to support the argument that Walensky is a great doctor but a lousy communicator. On March 29, she came out with a rather eye-opening, dire warning: “I’m going to pause here, I’m going to lose the script, and I’m going to reflect on the recurring feeling I have of impending doom. We have so much to look forward to, so much promise and potential of where we are and so much reason for hope, but right now I’m scared.” Nearly a month later, while there are some significantly problem spots, such as the state of Michigan, “doom” hardly accurately describes the state of the country’s fight against COVID-19.
The next day, Walensky made a high-profile statement that was technically not true: “Our data from the CDC today suggests [sic] that vaccinated people do not carry the virus, don’t get sick. . . . And that is not just in the clinical trials, it’s also in real-world data.” With more studies completed since then, we can safely conclude that vaccinated people carry much lower loads of the virus, and rarely get sick, and so the gist of Walensky’s assessment is generally true. It was odd to see a CDC spokesman issue a statement correcting the agency’s own director.
When the CDC offers unclear, slow, or contradictory advice, it’s not clear how much of this is the fault of Biden, how much is the fault of Walensky, and how much is the fault of the agency’s permanent bureaucracy. In early March, a group of doctors accused the CDC of misinterpreting their research and using it to downplay the need to reopen schools, contending that the CDC guidance on reopening schools is an “example of fears influencing and resulting in misinterpretation of science and harmful policy.”
In early April, the CDC updated its guidance with the reassuring news that transmission of COVID-19 by touching surfaces was rare — echoing an assessment that many virologists had made months earlier. By the third week of March, when 44 million Americans were fully vaccinated, the CDC was still working on its travel guidance for vaccinated citizens. Updated advice from the agency always seems to come after public behavior has changed, instead of preceding or prompting it.
If the CDC is excessively risk-averse, the institution isn’t going to get much pushback from Biden. He and his administration always err on the side of caution, sometimes to an absurd degree. The president was fully vaccinated as of January 25, and still wore a mask during a video conference at this week’s climate summit. Biden had asked Americans to wear masks for the first 100 days of his administration, and, as of this writing, there is no word on whether Biden will be okay with your taking off your mask on the 101st day.
Even worse, Biden is quick to demonize those who come to different conclusions. In early March, when Texas governor Greg Abbott ended his state’s mandate requiring masks in public places, Biden denounced and wildly mischaracterized what Abbott had said. “The last thing we need,” Biden said, “is Neanderthal thinking that, in the meantime, everything is fine, take off your mask. Forget it. It still matters.” Six weeks later, Texas’s cases, hospitalizations, and deaths have declined.
While Texas’s reopening has gone okay — along with the openings of most of the red states that were allegedly also reckless — the big surprise of the spring has been an awful outbreak in Michigan. The state’s governor, Gretchen Whitmer, was a serious contender to be Biden’s running mate, but she’s found herself in an unexpected conflict with the administration, as her requests for more doses of the vaccine to be diverted to her state are refused by the White House.
Walensky argued that sending more vaccines would take too long to do much good: “We know that the vaccine will have a delayed response. The answer to that is to really close things down, to go back to our basics, to go back to where we were last spring, last summer, and to shut things down, to flatten the curve, to decrease contact with one another, to test to the extent that we have available, to contact trace.” We are now witnessing the once-unthinkable development of the Biden administration’s accusing Gretchen Whitmer of being too hesitant to embrace far-reaching shutdowns in her state.
There are other problems in the way the Biden administration has handed this gargantuan public-health crisis. Throughout 2020, Biden saw nothing wrong in New York governor Andrew Cuomo’s handling of the pandemic, declaring, “Your governor in New York’s done one hell of a job. I think he’s the gold standard.” Biden has shown no interest in the state’s mismanagement of the virus in nursing homes or coverup of data on the deaths that resulted. (Biden did declare that if Cuomo committed sexual harassment, as eleven women now claim he did, he ought to resign.)
Biden’s team can see why the federal government’s trying to create “vaccine passports” would be a mess, but apparently doesn’t see any reason to object to non-federal entities trying to set up such a scheme.
The COVID-19 pandemic represents one of the greatest challenges to ever face the country, and any administration would have had struggled dealing with it to some extent. Biden deserves credit for prioritizing it, for encouraging Americans to get vaccinated, and for his efforts to get states to use the vaccines they receive as quickly as possible, instead of letting them build up on shelves or get stuck in a complicated transportation and logistics process. Some problems, such as the massive winter storm that hit much of the country earlier in the year, just couldn’t be prevented or helped.
But to the extent that the U.S. vaccination effort has been a success, it hasn’t really been because of the Biden administration’s decisions. Moderna and Pfizer made the breakthroughs and then put together a production effort that has accelerated amazingly, week by week, month by month. Throw in the much smaller and later effort by Johnson & Johnson, and the three companies have delivered more than 282 million vaccine doses to the states. Tens of thousands of medical personnel and volunteers have helped run vaccination sites in just about every community across the country. By the end of February, trained staff from CVS and Walgreens had finished administering both doses of the vaccine at just about every nursing home and long-term care facility in the country. Rivals FedEx and UPS pooled their efforts and divided up the massive number of required deliveries by state. American Airlines, United, and Delta helped ship vaccines by air. This has been a colossal endeavor, involving a lot of public funding and a lot of private-sector knowhow and effort, and it is still not done yet.
There was no “Eureka” moment, just a steady, unglamorous, gradual chipping away at the number of unvaccinated Americans. If Biden takes a victory lap upon his 100th day in office, he ought to share credit with the tens of thousands of other Americans who played roles large and small.