National Review
The dishonesty of Biden’s COVID messages
After a campaign in which Joe Biden expressed supreme confidence that he could end or at least substantially reduce the damage caused by the coronavirus pandemic, the way his government handled the pandemic left much to be desired. Go back to last fall. Biden was lecturing on how, although he trusted vaccines in general, he did not trust Donald Trump and was therefore skeptical of coronavirus vaccines in particular. Biden’s running mate, then Senator Kamala Harris, said she would hesitate to get a vaccine that was launched during Trump’s term. When pressed about whether she would do this if Dr. Anthony Fauci and other reputable health officials endorsed, she doubled over: “They will be gagged; they will be suppressed. ”In December, it was clear that vaccines were, in fact, on the verge of FDA approval and that, by the time Biden and Harris took their respective positions in the executive branch, distribution would already be well underway. Biden received the Pfizer vaccine in the middle of the month, and Harris received it shortly before the end of the year. It was only right that the directors of the new administration were protected. But the case of Biden and Harris continues, baseless, undermined confidence in a medical miracle for their own political benefit and then jumped ahead of the sizable line for it. After receiving the vaccine, Biden moved to the White House with a mission to control the pandemic. He announced his lunar plan for national vaccination: administering 100 million vaccines by the hundredth day in office. This was a dishonest public relations ploy. During the week of Biden’s inauguration, the United States administered an average of 983,000 vaccinations a day, meaning that the government was setting a standard for itself that it could already be sure to achieve. Naturally, the public noticed, and almost immediately Biden was forced to increase his target: he would now target an average of 1.5 million vaccinations per day at the end of the first 100 days. We have already achieved this greater goal, and not because of the new efforts of the Biden government. As Jim Geraghty of the National Review reported, the Biden administration’s vaccination plan includes new federal sites, but no more doses of the vaccine. This does not represent an opportunity to expand vaccination efforts – there are already many places where people can be vaccinated – but a bureaucratic barrier that has made things difficult for states, some of whom did not even know that additional doses would not be available on the new sites. . Worse, yesterday’s Morning Jolt noted that there is still a substantial gap between the number of vaccines provided by Pfizer and Moderna and the number of vaccines actually administered: as of this morning, according to the New York Times, Moderna and Pfizer have sent more than 70 million doses for the states, and somehow the states only managed 52.8 million of those doses in people’s arms. The Bloomberg chart has a slightly better figure, showing that the states administered 54.6 million doses, out of approximately the same total. This leaves between 15.4 and 17.2 million doses in transit or on the shelves somewhere. The country is vaccinating about 1.67 million people a day according to the Times data, 1.69 million a day on the Bloomberg chart. Not good. The Biden administration has been equally indifferent in its approach to reopening schools. White House press secretary Jen Psaki announced last week that her goal was to have 51 percent of schools open “at least one day a week”. This goal suffers from the same problem as the vaccination goal: it has already been achieved and exceeded. About 64 percent of school districts were already offering some form of face-to-face instruction when Psaki spoke. The objective, given the enormous costs of virtual education for students, should be to open the remaining 36% and transform partial reopenings into full time. To some extent, Biden achieved Psaki’s incredibly lazy goal during an event at CNN City Hall on Tuesday, saying “I think a lot of them [will be open] five days a week. The goal will be five days a week “, and calling Psaki’s statement an” error “. However, the questions remain: If it was just a mistake, why did it take a week to fix it? And why is the correction so vague as to leave room for forgery? How many, exactly, constitute “many” for the Biden government? Biden’s game of expectations is a symptom of a bigger problem: he never had the plan to deal with the pandemic he said he had. His claim that he did during the campaign season was always a withering act that had more to do with tone and messages than with politics. To cover up the absence of tangible changes brought to the table, the new administration tried to flood the area with objectives already achieved and, later, to proclaim its achievements as achievements. Dishonesty takes many forms, and the Biden government has not been more outspoken than its predecessors, even though its mistakes are sometimes more ingenious.