Will they allow their president to declare victory?
Will they allow their president to declare victory?
E arlier this week, the director of NIAID, Dr. Anthony Fauci, said that it was, at this late stage of the COVID-19 pandemic, “too soon” to predict or plan for Christmas gatherings. He also implied that vaccinated parents should be masked around their unvaccinated children.
The next day, he went out and claimed (falsely) that his remarks had been taken out of context. He said into the camera that you should have your festivities with your families. “I will be spending Christmas with my family,” he explained. “I encourage people, particularly the vaccinated people, who are protected, to have a good, normal Christmas with your family.”
Why the change of tune? I suspect, but cannot possibly know, that in between these two television appearances, ones that fell just after the release of a fawning documentary on him, that the good Doctor got a call from the White House. Maybe he got others from Capitol Hill. I suspect, but cannot possibly know, that he was told something like, “If you want Donald Trump as your boss again, keep canceling holidays on television.”
At some point it becomes absolutely necessary for Joe Biden to declare victory over COVID and an end to the ongoing state of exception that exists in government and much of the country.
“I’ll shut down the virus, not the country,” Joe Biden promised in a debate with then-president Donald Trump. And it was Trump’s poor handling of the pandemic that ended his presidency, according to his own pollster, Tony Fabrizio. Joe Biden already half-heartedly tried to declare victory over the virus for July 4. Then the Delta wave came, and vaccine take-up began to slow down. Joe Biden has tried to turn things onto conservative anti-vaxxers. “Our patience is wearing thin,” he said.
While it’s certainly true that conservatives played their own role in politicizing the pandemic, the effect on liberals of this disease polarization is profound. Concern or fear of COVID among the vaccinated and adherence to barely effective mitigation measures such as mask-wearing have become, for some, markers of progressive identity and lines in a culture war.
And it seems that Democrats are in danger of pandering to this overly fearful segment of the population, which demands for mitigation measures that are unnecessary and onerous, or coercive measures that can lead to political disaffection and backlash. The United States is unique in the world for its hungry demand for early-childhood vaccines, probably because the United States is unique in the world for imposing onerous mask-wearing on young children, even outdoors. Demands for vaccine-passport systems begin excluding people now from the daily activities — including their jobs — that they did when the pandemic was much more dangerous.
And of course it is not just the voters, but the public-health officials themselves, who present this problem for Democrats. Public-health bodies would recommend against anything but medium-well and well-done steak. They demand that you absolutely scorch and dry out your Thanksgiving turkey before eating. American public-health officials have a deeply ingrained contempt for the public’s ability to manage risk and such an overly cautious view of what they can say that it may be impossible for the Biden administration to get these same officials to declare the state of exception over. To declare victory over the pandemic, the Biden administration may have to champion the science while ignoring and hiding the experts.
Do Democrats want to face reelection in 2022 leading the only advanced country in the world that still believes in and frequently requires masking children at school? The CDC made this recommendation against the advice of WHO, and many states and localities still follow it as gospel. Because this recommendation was never based on very rigorous science, it is highly unlikely that a scientific recommendation can come in to cause it to change.
But at some point it will be in the Democrats’ interest that it does change. The fact is that the United States, with some partners and help, launched several effective vaccines and that the government presided over the fastest and largest vaccine uptake in U.S. history — faster than the uptake in the face of much deadlier illnesses in the past. This is a resounding success.
The question is: Will the Democratic base allow their president and party to claim that the virus has been shut down? My guess is that they will have trouble doing so. Their energy has shifted to achieving a goal that will remain beyond their grasp: getting some kind of acknowledgement of their intellectual and moral superiority from red America.