National review
The Dishonesty of Biden’s COVID Messaging
After a campaign in which Joe Biden expressed the utmost confidence that he could end, or at least significantly contain, the damage caused by the coronavirus pandemic, his government’s handling of the pandemic left much to be desired. Rewind back to last fall. Biden made speeches on the fact that while he generally trusted Donald Trump, he did not trust Donald Trump and was therefore particularly skeptical of the coronavirus vaccines. Biden’s runmate, then-Senator Kamala Harris, said she would be reluctant to take a vaccine that came out during Trump’s tenure. When she was pressured whether she would do this if Dr. Anthony Fauci and other respected health officials would advocate it, she doubled down: “You are being silenced; they are suppressed. “By December, it was clear that the vaccines were indeed close to FDA approval and that sales would be well advanced by the time Biden and Harris took their respective executive positions. Biden received the Pfizer vaccine mid-month and Harris just before the end of the year. It was only right that the principals of in-depth administration should be protected. However, the case remains that Biden and Harris undermined trust in a medical miracle for their own political gain and then to the fore without foundation After receiving the vaccine, Biden moved to the White House with a mandate to bring the pandemic under control and announced his lunar shot schedule for national vaccination: 100 million shots should be given by his 100th day in office This was a dishonest public relations ploy, and in the week after Biden’s inauguration, the US went through administered an average of 983,000 vaccinations per day, which meant the government was setting a benchmark for itself that was already certain to be met. Of course, the public noticed, and almost immediately Biden was forced to raise his goal: he would now aim for an average of 1.5 million vaccinations per day at the end of his first 100 days. We have already achieved this loftier goal, and not because of the novel efforts of the Biden government. As reported by National Review’s Jim Geraghty, the Biden government’s vaccination schedule includes new federal locations, but no longer vaccine doses. This is not an opportunity to step up the vaccination effort – there are already plenty of places where people can be vaccinated – but a bureaucratic obstacle that has made the situation difficult for those states, some of whom did not even know that additional doses were not available would at the new locations. Worse, yesterday’s Morning Jolt noted that there is still a significant gap between the number of vaccines Pfizer and Moderna delivered and the number of vaccines actually administered: According to the New York Times, Moderna and Pfizer have shipped more as of this morning than 70 million doses to the states, and somehow the states only got 52.8 million of those shots into people’s arms. The Bloomberg chart has a slightly better number, showing that states have given 54.6 million doses, roughly the same amount. This means that between 15.4 and 17.2 million cans remain, either during transport or somewhere on the shelves. The country vaccinates about 1.67 million people a day, according to the Times, up 1.69 million a day on the Bloomberg table. Not good. The Biden government has been similarly unconventional when it comes to reopening schools. White House press secretary Jen Psaki announced last week that 51 percent of schools should be open “at least one day a week.” This goal has the same problem as the vaccination goal: it has already been achieved and exceeded. Around 64 percent of school districts were already offering face-to-face tuition when Psaki spoke. Given the huge cost of virtual teaching for students, the goal should be to open the remaining 36 percent and convert some reopenings back into full-time openings. To some extent, during a CNN City Hall event on Tuesday, Biden walked back on Psaki’s amazingly sluggish goal and said, “I think a lot of them [will be open] five days a week. The goal will be five days a week, ”and to call Psaki’s statement a“ mistake ”. However, questions remain: If it was just a mistake, why did it take a week to be corrected? And why is the correction so vague that there is room for fudging? How many exactly are “many” for the Biden administration? Biden’s game of expectation is a symptom of a bigger problem: he never had the plan to deal with the pandemic that he said he did. His campaign-season claim was always a smoke-and-mirror act, more to do with sound and news than politics. In order to cover up the lack of concrete changes that have been brought to the table, the new administration has tried to flood the zone with goals already achieved and to announce their achievement as achievements. Dishonesty takes many forms, and the Biden government has proven itself no more open than its predecessors, though its deceptions are sometimes more elaborate.
