An administration that skews the facts in order to paint the pandemic in the best political light is the last thing we need right now.
An administration that skews the facts in order to paint the pandemic in the best political light is the last thing we need right now.
I n the spring and summer of 2020, Donald Trump’s critics complained bitterly that his administration was actively “politicizing” the COVID-19 pandemic. Many on the left, especially those at mainstream media outlets such as MSNBC and CNN, believed that Trump was spinning statistics and numbers to make the pandemic appear more under control than it actually was.
To be fair, some of these criticisms were accurate. In hindsight, we now know, for instance, that the Trump White House, did, in fact, pressure various government scientific organizations such as the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to elicit friendlier public appraisals of the government’s pandemic response.
Those who voted for Democrats in 2020 hoped that the election of Joe Biden would herald a new era of honesty and transparency in the government’s handling of COVID. So far, however, it hasn’t.
Clearly this administration’s politicization of COVID is much different than the Trump administration’s politicization of the virus in 2020, when the pandemic was at its peak. Trump’s team was in full panic mode that spring, and that resulted in hasty, ill-conceived statements and actions by the president and his staff. The Biden team has had less panic, and obviously a more stable situation. But politics is still politics, and whenever COVID has erupted as a major threat to Biden’s fortunes, the Biden administration has prioritized perception over sound public policy.
From the very beginning of the Biden administration, it was clear that the White House team feared failing to keep its critical election-year promise to end the COVID pandemic. Every decision was based not in science, but in this fear of failure. In April, after two months of sustained public statements on the safety of the COVID vaccines, the FDA unnecessarily “paused” use of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine because of the suspected threat of blood clots, a known — but rare and manageable — side effect. This undermined faith in all of the vaccines, just at the moment when we needed to increase confidence in their safety and efficacy.
Arrogance helped compound the Biden team’s mistakes. At the beginning of June, Biden announced “The Summer of Freedom,” a one-month focus on ending the pandemic, primarily by increasing vaccination rates. Then, on July 6, Biden declared victory: “This is one of the greatest achievements in American history, and you, the American people, made it happen,” Biden said. “We are emerging from one of the darkest years in our nation’s history into a summer of hope and joy.” On stage with the president were Dr. Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the head of the CDC, and Jeff Zients, the administration’s COVID-response coordinator. All three in their own ways echoed Biden’s claims that the pandemic was largely over, at least for those who’d been vaccinated. Zients even went so far as to suggest that Americans should readily visit more open festivals and parties as the summer went along, because our long nightmare was at an end.
This was the administration’s “Mission Accomplished” moment, and it turned out to be incredibly premature: By mid-summer, the Delta variant was storming across the country, with death rates reaching record highs in many places.
Less than two weeks after Zients encouraged Americans to enjoy their Summer of Freedom, more than a thousand COVID-19 cases (including among vaccinated patients) erupted following Bear Week celebrations in Provincetown, Mass. Rain had forced many parties indoors, compounding the spread. The Provincetown super-spreader event put the fear of God into the Biden administration. Most worrisome was the fact that many vaccinated people were coming down with COVID cases. In a moment of panic, the administration made another mistake: Dr. Walensky and the CDC stated that Provincetown had proved that the vaccinated could spread the Delta strain as easily as the unvaccinated, and therefore, even the vaccinated would have to return to pre-vaccine-era mitigation techniques, including universal masking.
These conclusions were, it turned out, wrong. As more data came in, it became clear that although the Delta variant was more contagious than the original virus, vaccinated persons transmitted the virus far less often than the unvaccinated. The vaccines were doing their job, but the CDC messaging said otherwise, once again diminishing public faith in the administration’s vaccination push. In fact, the events of Provincetown had reaffirmed the Biden administration’s long-standing contention that vaccinations were the path to ending the pandemic as quickly and painlessly as possible. But the administration, spooked by rising case numbers, kept undermining its own message. Biden himself had said vaccination was the way to stop having to mask and social distance; now his own medical experts were saying that was incorrect. Whom was the public to believe?
The government failures didn’t end there. From the start, Biden’s team was for obvious reasons reluctant to employ any of the Trump administration’s harsh policies along the border in the fight against COVID. Throughout 2021, as the Border Patrol showed more and more leniency to people who illegally crossed into the U.S., to the point that illegal immigrants were allowed to cross the border and, after being apprehended, sometimes even released without ever being tested for COVID or having to prove they’d been vaccinated.
In late November, the Biden administration said that it was considering mandating that everyone entering the country legally — including American citizens — be tested one day before boarding flights, regardless of their vaccination status or the country from which they arrived. It was also considering a requirement that all travelers get retested within three to five days after arrival. And it was even debating requiring all travelers to self-quarantine for seven days no matter their test results, with possible fines and penalties for those who didn’t adhere to the rules. Naturally, none of these requirements would be placed on illegal border-crossers.
More egregious still have been the president’s ham-fisted attempts to impose sweeping vaccine mandates on federal workers and private businesses by executive order. On September 9, 2021, in what was described as a national-emergency address, Biden said that he would sign an executive order putting in place wide-ranging vaccine mandates, including plans for a new rule requiring employers with 100 or more employees to mandate that their workers be vaccinated or undergo weekly testing. This was to be enforced by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). The president also signed executive orders stipulating that most federal employees and federal contractors, as well as most health-care workers across the country, be vaccinated against COVID-19.
These orders were described as an “emergency action” at a time when thousands were still dying daily in the country, mostly in the Deep South. Yet it would take until November 4 — after nearly two months in which tens of thousands of Americans had died and the Delta-variant surge had largely receded — for the actual vaccination-mandate rules to be published. And the release of the rules wasn’t the end of the fiasco: Weeks later, on November 29, the White House decided to delay the mandates until after the holidays, adding upward of six more weeks until they went into effect.
The reality is that the White House knew its supposed “emergency” measures were more political theater than anything else. Biden — who had months before claimed a final victory over COVID, only for the Delta surge to make clear that he had lost control of the virus — was short on real options at a moment when he needed to appear to be taking effective action, so he’d announced the mandates. The administration then proceeded to drag its feet for a few months, during which time the mandates became a source of division throughout the country and the subject of multiple court challenges that have put their future in doubt.
All of these Biden administration failures have real-life consequences. Every incident in which the government acts out of fear, rather than “following the science,” undermines the public’s faith in our most important scientific and medical institutions. Every time the government acts as if the vaccines are not enough to make a return to normal life safe, it puts another dagger in the public’s belief in those very same vaccines.
Whether the Biden administration’s COVID response has been, as policy, better or worse than the Trump administration’s really isn’t the issue. For a country that was hoping to move on from the tragedy of 2020, this year has been a disappointment across the board. The United States has surpassed 800,000 deaths since the pandemic started, and new waves of the virus appear on the horizon. Right now, as we continue to struggle for a return to normalcy, an administration that skews the facts in order to paint the situation in the best political light is the last thing we need. Full transparency and honesty would serve the White House, and the public, much better.