Many of these health policy-makers play for the same team the President does, and several served on his transition team. However, they’ve reached a breaking point with an administration that seems too incompetent and too disorganized to get any sort of handle on the exploding omicron caseload around the country.
The result? Empty supermarket shelves, continued supply chain problems, school districts closing, and Covid tests in short supply thanks directly to Biden’s failed promises of making at-home tests widely available.
It truly is remarkable for a candidate who ran a campaign on ending the pandemic to be stumbling this badly. It used to be Biden’s one big winning issue. Now, though, voters of all stripes are seeing the Biden Covid plan for what it is: Too little, too late, and completely void of competent managing and messaging. There is no “there” there.
The confusion is palpable at every level, with continued rhetoric about the “pandemic of the unvaccinated” causing even more disgust among the millions of vaccinated Americans sick with the Covid and unable to work or find tests:
He calls it the “pandemic of the unvaccinated,” but that has only confused boosted Americans home sick with the omicron variant.
And the administration hasn’t changed its guidance to urge high-filtration masks despite calls from the medical community, while recent isolation guidance has only added to the uncertainty.
The White House’s stay-the-course strategy on Covid is increasingly colliding with the realities of a roaring pandemic that is forcing schools and businesses to close.
A half dozen former health policy makers, including some members of Biden’s transition team, told NBC News that the Biden administration needs an urgent reset on its Covid strategy or the White House could rapidly lose credibility with the public.
This is NBC news writing the above-referenced story, not Fox News or some other right-leaning outfit. This is the mainstream media sounding an alarm to their guy in the White House that they won’t be able to keep covering for him too much longer.
The story continues, with brutal assessments from various health policy experts calling the White House incompetent and dishonest:
“Biden was elected president, in large part, based on a message of ‘I’m competent, I’m capable, I will tell you the truth and I will get a handle on Covid in a way my predecessor could not and refused to do,’ and that continues to be the No. 1 issue for most people,” said Kathleen Sebelius, who served as Health and Human Services secretary in the Obama administration.
She added, “I do think it’s about competence and capability and telling the truth and using all of the tools that are at the president’s disposal.”
…
“In terms of the communication and the trust in the CDC, it feels like we have gone backwards,” said Leana Wen, a former Baltimore health commissioner.
Wen said some of the decisions and the fallout reminded her of the early days of the pandemic response under the Trump administration.
This was simply never supposed to happen for Biden. He was supposed to ride in, on the vaccination horse, and watch the medical magic put an end to the pandemic. That didn’t happen because the vaccines were over-sold as a way to stop the spread of infection, not just severe illness. The White House has been stuck on this vaccine-absolutist strategy for months now despite ample evidence that it’s not the way out.
On the political front, Biden could be better off acknowledging the virus is here to stay, despite his repeated promises as a candidate that he would “shut down the virus,” said Paul Maslin, a Democratic pollster.
“Is Covid ever going to be the great success Biden or his people or any Democrats had hoped it would be? The answer’s no,” Maslin said. “He’s lost the opportunity of making it a great success. But there are definitely going to be plenty of other things he’s going to be judged by.”
The problem for Biden is that he locked himself in a corner, and backtracking even the slightest bit would mean acknowledging that his previous statements were false. On testing, Biden pledged over and over again to procure and distribute more rapid tests, he failed to do so.
Members of Biden’s own party are turning against his Covid-19 response, a change of events many pollsters and analysts wouldn’t have seen coming. There’s always one broken promise too many before the straw breaks the camel’s back. We may have reached that point.
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