Forget persuasion, just follow The Experts’ advice and force every American to submit to vax mandates.
Forget persuasion, just follow The Experts’ advice and force every American to submit to vax mandates.
T he New York Times released its one-year evaluation of Joe Biden’s pandemic response yesterday, and the report card is decidedly mixed: “The administration has gotten much right, but its response has been hampered by confusing messaging, a lack of focus on testing, fear of political blowback and the coronavirus’s unpredictability,” Times journalists Michael Shear, Sheryl Stolberg, Sharon LaFraniere, and Noah Weiland write.
In the abstract, most Americans would agree that the White House’s pandemic response has been riddled with problems (to put it charitably). FiveThirtyEight has been tracking Biden’s approval rating on the pandemic, which has been precipitously falling since he first took office a year ago. On this date in 2021, Biden’s pandemic response enjoyed the confidence of a happy 69 percent of Americans, with only 30.1 percent disapproving. From there, it’s all been downhill. Earlier this month, disapproval outweighed approval on the White House’s handling of Covid for the first time. As of today, 50.1 percent of Americans say they disapprove, while only 44.1 percent say they approve.
But what, exactly, does the Times think the Biden administration is doing wrong? The writers offer some critiques of the White House’s handling of testing, as well as its chaotic and self-contradictory messaging. (Although notably absent is any acknowledgment of the left-wing political forces, notably the teachers’ unions, behind at least some of the contradictory messaging). But the heart of the paper’s dissatisfaction with Biden is that he should be more draconian in his approach to mandates. Oh, and: He’s not being hard enough on Republicans.
The Times writes that the White House’s response to Covid “has been marked by setbacks in three key areas.” The first is that the White House “was unprepared for the sharp turns” in the pandemic, “did not anticipate the nature and severity of variants, even after clear warning signals from the rest of the world,” and “continued to focus almost single-mindedly on vaccinations even after it became clear that the shots could not always prevent the spread of disease.” The second is that “the administration lacked a sustained focus on testing, not moving to sharply increase the supply of at-home Covid tests until the fall.” And the third is that Biden wasn’t as tough as he should have been with dissident right-wingers — and that he didn’t bring the full force of the federal government to bear on the unvaccinated:
The president tiptoed around an organized Republican revolt over masks, mandates, vaccine passports and even the vaccine itself, as he worried that pushing certain containment measures would only worsen an already intractable cultural and political divide in the country. The nation’s precarious economic health, and the political blowback that Mr. Biden and members of his party could face if it worsened, made him all the more cautious. So rather than forcing Americans to get shots, he spent months struggling to accomplish it through persuasion.
Persuasion rather than force? Quelle horreur!
As for the source of the White House’s reluctance to go all-in on pandemic mandates, the Times points its finger squarely at the Right. Republicans “pounced” — yes, they’re still using that word — on “even more modest initiatives,” the writers complain. As a result, Biden was pressured into doing the unthinkable: He didn’t trust the experts. Alas, “the president believed federal vaccine mandates would backfire,” and he “shut down the idea of requiring domestic airline passengers to be vaccinated,” despite the fact that “Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, Mr. Biden’s chief medical adviser for the pandemic,” supported such measures.
Fauci, never one to miss a media feature, is quoted at length complaining about the White House’s lack of deference to his wisdom and authority. “It wasn’t like, ‘OK, let’s have a Zoom call tonight about the pros and the cons of the mask mandate,’” the good doctor griped to the Times. “‘That didn’t happen.’”
In fact, the public-health bureaucracy writ large is discussed with a sort of sacramental reverence throughout the piece. “Public health experts insisted that pleading with people to get vaccinated was not enough. But most Republican governors fiercely opposed vaccine requirements.” (The nerve!) “A highly respected infectious disease expert, Dr. Walensky had been brought on by Mr. Biden to restore faith in an agency that had been battered by his predecessor.” (Her efforts to restore faith have gone so well that she recently “sought the counsel of a prominent media consultant amid struggles to craft a coherent and consistent message on the coronavirus,” according to the Washington Post). “By the time Omicron emerged in South Africa in late November, Dr. Fauci knew instinctively that it was going to be bad.” (Isn’t it funny that Fauci’s “instincts” only ever seem to go one way?)
In so many ways, the entire piece reads as a long press release for The Experts. Public-health officials are treated as purveyors of Gospel truth, despite their long and well-established track record of dishonesty and political cynicism. When Biden caved to the Fauci-ist wing of the White House and pushed for vaccine mandates, “public health experts said the mandates were appropriate and even long overdue,” the Times beamed approvingly. There is no mention of the fact that it was a betrayal of Biden’s explicit promise to not mandate vaccines, and a betrayal as well of the countless American citizens who believed he would keep his word. In fact, there’s very little mention of the American people at all, except as an abstract and unruly entity to be corralled into submission.