July 23, 2024
Dear Friends and Family,
The Covid-19 pandemic seems like an old bad dream for many of us. But it was a major part of the Democrat policy in the early part of the Biden/Harris administration. So, even though we had an entire series covering it as it was occurring, I decided to include a postmortem segment on it in this series. Included are four renditions of the Biden/Harris administration’s management of the pandemic – two by conservative authors and two by liberal authors. Additionally, it contains both a liberal and conservative view of teachers unions participation in the pandemic.
As we look back on the pandemic some lingering questions still remain:
Happy Learning,
Harley
Dear Friends and Family,
The Covid-19 pandemic seems like an old bad dream for many of us. But it was a major part of the Democrat policy in the early part of the Biden/Harris administration. So, even though we had an entire series covering it as it was occurring, I decided to include a postmortem segment on it in this series. Included are four renditions of the Biden/Harris administration’s management of the pandemic – two by conservative authors and two by liberal authors. Additionally, it contains both a liberal and conservative view of teachers unions participation in the pandemic.
As we look back on the pandemic some lingering questions still remain:
- What was the origin of the Covid-19 virus? Was it a lab leak in Wuhan, China or a natural occurrence and why is the lab leak not being vigorously investigated?
- Why was the prevention and treatment for the virus the same for all people in the country – the young and old, the fit and unfit, and for all ethnicities? How should that be addressed in the future?
- Why did most of the country capitulate to national teachers unions at the behest of our children and what measures are being taken to prevent that in the future?
Happy Learning,
Harley
WHAT IS HAPPENING TO OUR COUNTRY – SEGMENT 6
COVID – 19: -- EXCERPTS
TWO COVID-19 RENDITIONS OF THE BIDEN/HARRIS ADMINISTRATION BY CONSERVATIVES
1) Breaking Biden by Alex Marlow: We now know that Biden didn’t actually have much of a plan to beat the China flu, but he did have an effective campaign strategy to blame the epidemic on Donald Trump and reap the political rewards. Joe knew his opponent was vulnerable on pandemic policy. His first claim was that he would adopt a consistent scientific approach to fighting COVID that relied on experts and was driven by “the science.”
One of the signs that Biden was not going to truly grasp the science of the pandemic was his utter lack of interest in the origins of the virus. It is as though he genuinely does not want to know the answers to what is arguably the biggest question of the century. How on earth did this pandemic happen? Why Biden is uncurious is not too difficult to ascertain: finding out the truth would no doubt further the strain our relationship with China. As we have seen, the Biden’s personal ties to China are deep. If the origin was a lab leak – and it probably was – it would be a compelling reason to strongly rachet up geopolitical pressure on China. If it turned out that China was experimenting with material that could be used for biological warfare, Americans would publicly debate a hot war with another superpower. Heavy stuff. The true explanation for the pandemic would also likely further expose Dr. Fauci, who okayed American funds going to the Wuhan Institute of Virology to fund gain-of-function research.
In the October debate against Trump, Biden made the claim that because 220,000 Americans had died of COVID – 19 under Trump’s presidency, Trump should not remain as president. When Biden took office on January 20, 2021, U.S. deaths from COVID were at 423,945. The number of people who died from coronavirus under Biden from January 20, 2021, to March 10, 2023, when Johns Hopkins stopped counting was 699,891. By his own standards, Biden should have resigned from office at the end of August 2021, and two more times after that, one time for every 220,000 who died on his watch.
The fearmongering and demonizing of under-jabbed Americans were a constant refrain from Biden and the Left. Blanket policies became the norm. Masks for everyone, even children. Vaccines for everyone, even children and the recently infected. The implication was that COVID is an equal threat to a healthy teenager who had recently recovered from the virus and a morbidly obese septuagenarian with hypertension and a weakened immune system.
In July 2021, he falsely claimed in a town hall meeting “You’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations.” Biden and others attacked the unvaccinated, attempting to bully them into getting the shots. The vaccines were oversold to the public by Joe Biden. Biden and many of his COVID messengers/government-funded vaccine salespeople suggested the jabs would prevent infection and provide lasting immunity. Neither of those things was true. When he became president, mandates became the centerpiece of his shut-down-the-virus strategy. There were mandates everywhere: the military, health care workers, universities. Get the jab or lose privileges.
By November 2021, he ramped up the authoritarianism. His Department of Labor announced requirements on COVID-19 vaccines for American workers under the department’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). Companies with more than 100 workers would have to order employees to get the jabs by January 4, 2022, or have employees test negative once a week. All unvaccinated workers would be forced to wear anti-science masks during their work hours. Nearly 17 million American health care employees – many of whom were frontline heroes – were forced to get vaccinated by January 4, 2022, or else lose their jobs. In the middle of a pandemic, and with America facing a perpetual shortage of physicians, Biden applied policies to further limit staffing in the health care field.
Joe Biden got nearly everything wrong about the pandemic that a president could possibly get wrong. He was too negative on the vaccines during the campaign, and too positive on them after he was sworn in. He engaged in mask theatrics as a virtue signal but never helped Americans understand the science when they failed. He fell down completely on therapeutics. He left excessive mandates in place far too long at the expense of our health care sector, our military, and our children. He used the pandemic to pass unrelated part of his domestic spending agenda. He failed to protect seniors and their families from horrific nursing home policies. Perhaps worst of all, he has thus far allowed China to get away with the crime of the century all the while demonizing Americans who were skeptical of the lockdowns and the jabs.
Source: Breaking Biden by Alex Marlow (2023)
2) The Biden Malaise by Kimberley Strassel: Biden imposed mask mandates on every inch of land over which the federal government could plausibly claim some control – federal buildings, airlines, airports, interstate travel on buses and trains, even in the middle of national parks. This executive order inspired most blue states and localities to keep their masks mandates in place – to the growing fury of many Americans. The administration kept extending this mandate, well after most jurisdictions were open and functioning normally. Travelers suffered under the travel mask mandate all the way until April 2022, when a federal judge struck it down as an abuse of federal health powers. Biden similarly hounded the nation on Covid vaccines, and then boosters, and then more boosters. In a 2021 address he complained of the small minority of unvaccinated; “What more is there to wait for? What more do you need to see? We’ve made vaccinations free, safe and convenient … We’ve been patient, but our patience is wearing thin. And your refusal has cost all of us.” Wow. How so? This was an exercise in dramatics, not science. Even by this time the CDC had been forced to acknowledge that vaccinations did not prevent Covid transmission.
The administration in September 2021 announced sweeping vaccine mandates for federal workers, larger companies, and health care staff. Thousands of medical workers lost their jobs. These frontline workers had put themselves at risk to save lives at the height of the pandemic, and Biden rewarded them by stripping them of their jobs. The military similarly discharged thousands more service members – people who risk their lives to protect the country – for failing to get the Biden jab. In neither of these scenarios was the administration willing to take into consideration the people who had already caught Covid and had natural immunity or the people who had other legitimate objections to the vaccine.
Source: The Biden Malaise by Kimberley Strassel (2023).
TWO COVID – 19 RENDITIONS OF THE BIDEN/HARRIS ADMINISTRATION BY LIBERALS
1) The Fight of His Life by Chris Whipple; The first step in taming the pandemic would be climbing out of the hole that Trump and his team had dug. It was a hole that seemed to have no bottom. From the moment the virus arrived on U.S. soil, Trump had denied that there was a problem. There was plenty of blame to go around for the tragically inept pandemic response. Health and Human Service (HHS) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) were slow to recognize the threat, and the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) botched the early testing. But Trump made it exponentially worse. Obama’s team had prepared a sixty-nine-page blueprint pandemic playbook. But Trump’s team had ignored it, along with other transition materials. Trump thoroughly fumbled the pandemic, empowering quack scientists who handicapped the nation’s response. There was still hope that professionals at HHS and the CDC would rise to the challenge. The trouble was, few senior officials in the Trump administration knew how to make the bureaucracy work. Most had come to destroy government, not to mobilize it.
On January 21, 2021, the first full day of his presidency, Biden released his 200-page National Strategy for the COVID-19 Response and Pandemic Preparedness. It was an expansion of Ron Klain’s playbook with seven priorities: restoring trust; mounting an effective vaccination campaign; mitigating the spread by expanding masking, testing, and treatment; activating the Defense Production Act; safely reopening schools, businesses, and travel; protecting those most at risk; and taking a global approach to future threats. In his first two days Biden issued twelve executive orders aimed at the pandemic.
The first priority was ordering vaccines. “The rest of the world was trying to buy them,” said Slavitt, “so the fact that they hadn’t procured enough was baffling to us.” Trump had placed a large order from Johnson & Johnson but almost nothing from Pfizer and Moderna. [Note: I had my first vaccination on 1/23/2021 which was Pfizer and the second on 2/15/2021. My wife had her first vaccination on 2/8/2021 which was Moderna and a second on 3/15/2021.]
Suddenly, doctors, scientists, and experts who’d been ignored or overruled were everywhere: Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the CDC, and Dr. Vivek Murthy, the surgeon general.
On July Fourth weekend, Biden threw a party at the White House, “Together, we are beating the virus,” the president declared. But as summer turned to fall. A new and virulent strain of coronavirus had surfaced – dubbed the Delta variant. Infection rates were soaring; businesses were shuttering again, hospital ICU units filling beyond capacity. Not only was Delta far more transmissible; it was a breakthrough virus, causing infections among people who were fully vaccinated. On July 27, the CDC, which in May had said that vaccinated people could forgo masks indoors, did an about-face, advising them to re-mask.
Most ominously, the Delta variant exposed the Achilles’ heel of America’s war against the pandemic: the tens of million of people who refused to be vaccinated. They were like dry tinder in the path of a raging forest fire. Not only were they putting their own lives at risk, but they were also endangering millions of others and jeopardizing the entire U.S. pandemic response. The unvaccinated were overwhelmingly more likely to be hospitalized and die; they were also, even when asymptomatic, spreading the deadly virus to others. Vaccine resistance was endemic in red, southern states – some with Republican governors who pandered to the notion that vaccines were an infringement on their liberty. Nothing baffled Joe Biden more than people refusing vaccines; he couldn’t fathom it. Reasoning with anti-vaxxers was like talking to children.
Biden and his team were surprised at how politically toxic vaccines had become. “When we sat there in December 2020, laying out these plans, we understood that masks had become very political,” said a senior White House aide, “but given that Trump had spent an entire year boasting about Operation Warp Speed and the fact that it was his vaccine, we didn’t see that the vaccine would become so political. And the combination of misinformation, disinformation, and Republicans stirring up vaccine resistance just put us in a box. It was the torrent of disinformation that ultimately led Biden to embrace vaccine mandates. Speaking at the White House, the president didn’t mince words. “We’ve been patient,” he said, his eyes narrowed, gripping the lectern. “But our patience is wearing thin, and your refusal has cost all of us.” Biden’s mandates would be challenged in the courts, and they couldn’t reach all seventy-five to eighty million people who refused to be vaccinated.
The country’s most serious problems stemmed from COVID-19 and its variants. And there was little Biden could do if tens of millions of Americans opted out of a solution. It was becoming, as Biden said, “a pandemic of the unvaccinated.” The country’s health and its economy and well-being were being held hostage by a Republican cult of reality deniers.
Source: The Fight of His Life by Chris Whipple (2023)
2) The Last Politician by Franklin Foer: The promise of the Biden administration was competence. After the shambolic Trump years – where presidential whim guided bureaucracy – the new team would apply calm expertise. It would be akin to a wartime mobilization, Biden promised. And in the first hundred days, the administration would provide one hundred million shots. It wasn’t the most ambitious goal he could set.
Progress showed itself in Biden’s speeches. At first the president promised the nation would have enough vaccine supply to every citizen by July; then he moved that date forward to early May. The program operated so seamlessly that the public took it for granted. Technocracy – roundly maligned – had produced one of the best designed, most important government programs of all time. To celebrate the progress, and to claim a bit of credit for itself, the White House planned an event on July 4. Biden couldn’t resist a bit of crowing. “We are emerging from the darkness,” he said.
Then news came from South Africa. “It’s looking bad.” Our test positivity has increased over just a few days. Seems to be replacing delta, it’s a dominant strain, also reinfection in people who had delta as well. The new variant received an official name: omicron. It had arrived at the worst moment in the calendar, coinciding with the holiday season, a time when much of the nation sat in crammed tubes that flew from city to city so that families could unite and disregard any semblance of social distancing.
On his first day in office, Biden had promised that he would make testing ubiquitous. At this moment of need, it was palpably not. On television, pundits decried the shortage as evidence of rank incompetence. To be fair, the administration had invested significantly in testing. But the Biden administration simply treated testing as a lower priority than vaccines. It believed that an inoculated country wouldn’t need to constantly test itself. An assumption that the virus’s constant mutation invalidated.
The vaccine was the way out of the mess; the administration had bet everything on it and run every play in the public health playbook to persuade the reluctant to accept the vaccine, but the political maladies of modern American life were ruining its chances. It was as if a large chunk of the nation had joined the death cult, oblivious to their own well-being and without any feeling of solidarity for their neighbors. It made him despair, to use a phrase borrowed from Biden, for the soul of America.
Source: The Last Politician by Franklin Foer (2023).
KIDS AND THE TEACHER’S UNIONS
1) The Bidens and the Heads of the Teachers Unions: A Liberal View
As Joe Biden mulled picking his secretary of education, Jill Biden let it be known that she didn’t want the president to nominate an enthusiast for charter schools. In her view, the president had promised to nominate a champion of public education – and she didn’t believe that advocates of charter schools fit that bill. None of the initial candidates that the transition unearthed excited her – or the rest of the president-elect’s advisers, for that matter – so it went in search of a new list, which included one name that she greeted with enthusiasm. Miguel Cardona, superintendent of schools in Connecticut, Biden’s ultimate pick for the job.
On January 21, Jill Biden invited the heads of the two largest teachers’ unions – Randi Weingarten of the American Federation of Teachers and Becky Pringle of the National Education Association — to the White House. A chunk of the country would have liked to see Dr. Biden dress them down. In upper-middle-class neighborhoods – and among newspaper columnists and television hosts – there was a sense that the unions were acting in a spirit of selfishness. According to their critique, teachers were, in fact, essential workers. But unlike warehouse workers and nurses, the teachers allowed their anxieties to get in the way of doing their jobs. Instead of allaying the worries of their members, the unions were indulging them for the sake of cultivating a spirit of militancy.
As she sat with the heads of the union, Jill Biden didn’t even nod in the direction of the tensions. Instead of pressing the union chiefs, she paid tribute to them, reserving her highest praise for Weingarten. Although the Right regarded her as a villain, Jill Biden praised her as the “type of general who is never far from the front lines.”
Biden wanted to ease the unions into accepting his goals, avoiding that sort of confrontation that might explode in a strike. He was never going to force teachers to return to school. His plan was to give them time and space to get comfortable with the idea, to smother them in the love of Jill Biden. It was a policy that tracked with his approach to all the other culture war skirmishes of the pandemic. He largely sidestepped these fights. For the sake of avoiding conflict, especially conflict with an ally, the Biden administration trimmed its goal of returning kids to school to a fraction of what had been promised on the campaign trail. He was, in effect, conceding that for thousands of students, the rest of the school year would be lost to the pandemic. It was the price of peace.
Source: The Last Politician by Franklin Foer (2023).
2) Unions versus Kids: A Conservative View
Joe Biden is just the latest Democratic president to take orders from teachers’ union bosses. That fealty has most harmed disadvantaged kids, who would benefit from the charter schools and voucher that unions oppose. Yet it was under Biden that circumstances finally combined to show how utterly destructive the union-Democrat agenda could be for kids everywhere.
As the nation now knows, the “scientists” and the public-health elite understood the virus about as well as the talking heads, and the country endured years of confusing directives. Yet the liberal establishment managed to divide the country in an entirely new way: “good” blue states that locked down, kept kids out of school and demanded masks vs. “bad” GOP states that opened up and went back to liberty.
This was the state of affairs when Biden took office, and it was the nation’s kids who bore the cruel brunt of the politicking. All the science showed that Covid was a minimal risk to children, and the CDC had said in the summer of 2020 that reopening school for in-person learning was a step toward improving overall public health. This was just one of many reasons GOP states had got children back in the classroom.
Yet the teachers’ union had fiercely resisted any talk of reopening in 2020 and even into 2021. Members liked their paid vacations. They wanted politicians to: “issue a moratorium on evictions/foreclosures,” a “moratorium on new charter or voucher programs and standardized testing,” and a “massive infusion of federal money to support the reopening, funded by taxing billionaires and Wall Street.” The unions were using their monopoly power to hold kids hostage to unrelated political demands. And they were only too happy to not get what they wanted; they could continue to get paid to do nothing.
In early February Biden’s CDC director Rochelle Walensky made the mistake of speaking truth – and giving them hope. She announced in early February that “there is increasing data to suggest that schools can safely reopen, and that safe reopening does not suggest that teachers need to be vaccinated.” The unions lost their minds. A chastened Walensky later released new “data-driven” recommendations for school reopening, and they read like a union document. It was one big excuse for continued lockdowns, thirty-eight pages on physical distancing masking, color-coded zones, new ventilation systems, building cleaning, contact tracking. Teachers’ unions fist pumped. As well they should have, since, as it turned out, it was a union document. In a scandalous May revelation, Freedom of Information documents showed the CDC had closely consulted with AFT in writing its final guidance. The union was allowed to review a draft and make recommendations, and the CDC – the paragon of “science” – adopted at least two of the political body’s demands almost verbatim. The goal all along was to give district federal dollars to hike teacher salaries. Only after this bill was signed did union leaders tentatively suggest that schools might open.
This came too late. The country managed to erase nearly two decades of progress, as the test recorded a record drop from the last one in 2019. Math scores showed the biggest decline since the testing program began. Reading was a little better. Nationwide NAEP found that only 33% of fourth graders and 31% of eighth graders were reading at or above grade proficiency. And the loss spanned the gamut – wealthy, low-income, boys, girls, every racial and ethnic group. But hey – at least the teachers got a nice, long holiday.
Source: The Biden Malaise by Kimberley Strassel (2023)
THE PANDEMIC PINNACLE OF POWER
We can only hope the national teachers’ unions will never again accede to the level of power they wielded during the Biden/Harris administration portion of the pandemic.
House Oversight Committee Republicans conducted their own investigation. In a report released a year later, they determined that Biden’s CDC “overrode routine practice to allow a radical teachers union that donated millions of dollars to Democrat campaigns to bypass scientific norms and rewrite official agency guidance,” which “effectively kept thousands of schools shuttered across the country, locking millions of children out of their classrooms”. The report revealed, “The Biden Administration abandoned medical science and replaced it with political science to reward one of their largest donors harming millions of children in the process. They bypassed the science to put union bosses ahead of children.”
A Harvard study looking at the consequences of remote learning during the pandemic found that, because of early closures and pandemic disruptions, even students who attended school in person throughout most of the 2020-21 school year had a 20% learning loss in math during the pandemic. The loss was 50% for students in remote learning environments. The New York Times called it a “generational loss.”
Source: The Puppeteers by Jason Chaffetz (2023).
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
COVID – 19: -- EXCERPTS
TWO COVID-19 RENDITIONS OF THE BIDEN/HARRIS ADMINISTRATION BY CONSERVATIVES
1) Breaking Biden by Alex Marlow: We now know that Biden didn’t actually have much of a plan to beat the China flu, but he did have an effective campaign strategy to blame the epidemic on Donald Trump and reap the political rewards. Joe knew his opponent was vulnerable on pandemic policy. His first claim was that he would adopt a consistent scientific approach to fighting COVID that relied on experts and was driven by “the science.”
One of the signs that Biden was not going to truly grasp the science of the pandemic was his utter lack of interest in the origins of the virus. It is as though he genuinely does not want to know the answers to what is arguably the biggest question of the century. How on earth did this pandemic happen? Why Biden is uncurious is not too difficult to ascertain: finding out the truth would no doubt further the strain our relationship with China. As we have seen, the Biden’s personal ties to China are deep. If the origin was a lab leak – and it probably was – it would be a compelling reason to strongly rachet up geopolitical pressure on China. If it turned out that China was experimenting with material that could be used for biological warfare, Americans would publicly debate a hot war with another superpower. Heavy stuff. The true explanation for the pandemic would also likely further expose Dr. Fauci, who okayed American funds going to the Wuhan Institute of Virology to fund gain-of-function research.
In the October debate against Trump, Biden made the claim that because 220,000 Americans had died of COVID – 19 under Trump’s presidency, Trump should not remain as president. When Biden took office on January 20, 2021, U.S. deaths from COVID were at 423,945. The number of people who died from coronavirus under Biden from January 20, 2021, to March 10, 2023, when Johns Hopkins stopped counting was 699,891. By his own standards, Biden should have resigned from office at the end of August 2021, and two more times after that, one time for every 220,000 who died on his watch.
The fearmongering and demonizing of under-jabbed Americans were a constant refrain from Biden and the Left. Blanket policies became the norm. Masks for everyone, even children. Vaccines for everyone, even children and the recently infected. The implication was that COVID is an equal threat to a healthy teenager who had recently recovered from the virus and a morbidly obese septuagenarian with hypertension and a weakened immune system.
In July 2021, he falsely claimed in a town hall meeting “You’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations.” Biden and others attacked the unvaccinated, attempting to bully them into getting the shots. The vaccines were oversold to the public by Joe Biden. Biden and many of his COVID messengers/government-funded vaccine salespeople suggested the jabs would prevent infection and provide lasting immunity. Neither of those things was true. When he became president, mandates became the centerpiece of his shut-down-the-virus strategy. There were mandates everywhere: the military, health care workers, universities. Get the jab or lose privileges.
By November 2021, he ramped up the authoritarianism. His Department of Labor announced requirements on COVID-19 vaccines for American workers under the department’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). Companies with more than 100 workers would have to order employees to get the jabs by January 4, 2022, or have employees test negative once a week. All unvaccinated workers would be forced to wear anti-science masks during their work hours. Nearly 17 million American health care employees – many of whom were frontline heroes – were forced to get vaccinated by January 4, 2022, or else lose their jobs. In the middle of a pandemic, and with America facing a perpetual shortage of physicians, Biden applied policies to further limit staffing in the health care field.
Joe Biden got nearly everything wrong about the pandemic that a president could possibly get wrong. He was too negative on the vaccines during the campaign, and too positive on them after he was sworn in. He engaged in mask theatrics as a virtue signal but never helped Americans understand the science when they failed. He fell down completely on therapeutics. He left excessive mandates in place far too long at the expense of our health care sector, our military, and our children. He used the pandemic to pass unrelated part of his domestic spending agenda. He failed to protect seniors and their families from horrific nursing home policies. Perhaps worst of all, he has thus far allowed China to get away with the crime of the century all the while demonizing Americans who were skeptical of the lockdowns and the jabs.
Source: Breaking Biden by Alex Marlow (2023)
2) The Biden Malaise by Kimberley Strassel: Biden imposed mask mandates on every inch of land over which the federal government could plausibly claim some control – federal buildings, airlines, airports, interstate travel on buses and trains, even in the middle of national parks. This executive order inspired most blue states and localities to keep their masks mandates in place – to the growing fury of many Americans. The administration kept extending this mandate, well after most jurisdictions were open and functioning normally. Travelers suffered under the travel mask mandate all the way until April 2022, when a federal judge struck it down as an abuse of federal health powers. Biden similarly hounded the nation on Covid vaccines, and then boosters, and then more boosters. In a 2021 address he complained of the small minority of unvaccinated; “What more is there to wait for? What more do you need to see? We’ve made vaccinations free, safe and convenient … We’ve been patient, but our patience is wearing thin. And your refusal has cost all of us.” Wow. How so? This was an exercise in dramatics, not science. Even by this time the CDC had been forced to acknowledge that vaccinations did not prevent Covid transmission.
The administration in September 2021 announced sweeping vaccine mandates for federal workers, larger companies, and health care staff. Thousands of medical workers lost their jobs. These frontline workers had put themselves at risk to save lives at the height of the pandemic, and Biden rewarded them by stripping them of their jobs. The military similarly discharged thousands more service members – people who risk their lives to protect the country – for failing to get the Biden jab. In neither of these scenarios was the administration willing to take into consideration the people who had already caught Covid and had natural immunity or the people who had other legitimate objections to the vaccine.
Source: The Biden Malaise by Kimberley Strassel (2023).
TWO COVID – 19 RENDITIONS OF THE BIDEN/HARRIS ADMINISTRATION BY LIBERALS
1) The Fight of His Life by Chris Whipple; The first step in taming the pandemic would be climbing out of the hole that Trump and his team had dug. It was a hole that seemed to have no bottom. From the moment the virus arrived on U.S. soil, Trump had denied that there was a problem. There was plenty of blame to go around for the tragically inept pandemic response. Health and Human Service (HHS) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) were slow to recognize the threat, and the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) botched the early testing. But Trump made it exponentially worse. Obama’s team had prepared a sixty-nine-page blueprint pandemic playbook. But Trump’s team had ignored it, along with other transition materials. Trump thoroughly fumbled the pandemic, empowering quack scientists who handicapped the nation’s response. There was still hope that professionals at HHS and the CDC would rise to the challenge. The trouble was, few senior officials in the Trump administration knew how to make the bureaucracy work. Most had come to destroy government, not to mobilize it.
On January 21, 2021, the first full day of his presidency, Biden released his 200-page National Strategy for the COVID-19 Response and Pandemic Preparedness. It was an expansion of Ron Klain’s playbook with seven priorities: restoring trust; mounting an effective vaccination campaign; mitigating the spread by expanding masking, testing, and treatment; activating the Defense Production Act; safely reopening schools, businesses, and travel; protecting those most at risk; and taking a global approach to future threats. In his first two days Biden issued twelve executive orders aimed at the pandemic.
The first priority was ordering vaccines. “The rest of the world was trying to buy them,” said Slavitt, “so the fact that they hadn’t procured enough was baffling to us.” Trump had placed a large order from Johnson & Johnson but almost nothing from Pfizer and Moderna. [Note: I had my first vaccination on 1/23/2021 which was Pfizer and the second on 2/15/2021. My wife had her first vaccination on 2/8/2021 which was Moderna and a second on 3/15/2021.]
Suddenly, doctors, scientists, and experts who’d been ignored or overruled were everywhere: Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the CDC, and Dr. Vivek Murthy, the surgeon general.
On July Fourth weekend, Biden threw a party at the White House, “Together, we are beating the virus,” the president declared. But as summer turned to fall. A new and virulent strain of coronavirus had surfaced – dubbed the Delta variant. Infection rates were soaring; businesses were shuttering again, hospital ICU units filling beyond capacity. Not only was Delta far more transmissible; it was a breakthrough virus, causing infections among people who were fully vaccinated. On July 27, the CDC, which in May had said that vaccinated people could forgo masks indoors, did an about-face, advising them to re-mask.
Most ominously, the Delta variant exposed the Achilles’ heel of America’s war against the pandemic: the tens of million of people who refused to be vaccinated. They were like dry tinder in the path of a raging forest fire. Not only were they putting their own lives at risk, but they were also endangering millions of others and jeopardizing the entire U.S. pandemic response. The unvaccinated were overwhelmingly more likely to be hospitalized and die; they were also, even when asymptomatic, spreading the deadly virus to others. Vaccine resistance was endemic in red, southern states – some with Republican governors who pandered to the notion that vaccines were an infringement on their liberty. Nothing baffled Joe Biden more than people refusing vaccines; he couldn’t fathom it. Reasoning with anti-vaxxers was like talking to children.
Biden and his team were surprised at how politically toxic vaccines had become. “When we sat there in December 2020, laying out these plans, we understood that masks had become very political,” said a senior White House aide, “but given that Trump had spent an entire year boasting about Operation Warp Speed and the fact that it was his vaccine, we didn’t see that the vaccine would become so political. And the combination of misinformation, disinformation, and Republicans stirring up vaccine resistance just put us in a box. It was the torrent of disinformation that ultimately led Biden to embrace vaccine mandates. Speaking at the White House, the president didn’t mince words. “We’ve been patient,” he said, his eyes narrowed, gripping the lectern. “But our patience is wearing thin, and your refusal has cost all of us.” Biden’s mandates would be challenged in the courts, and they couldn’t reach all seventy-five to eighty million people who refused to be vaccinated.
The country’s most serious problems stemmed from COVID-19 and its variants. And there was little Biden could do if tens of millions of Americans opted out of a solution. It was becoming, as Biden said, “a pandemic of the unvaccinated.” The country’s health and its economy and well-being were being held hostage by a Republican cult of reality deniers.
Source: The Fight of His Life by Chris Whipple (2023)
2) The Last Politician by Franklin Foer: The promise of the Biden administration was competence. After the shambolic Trump years – where presidential whim guided bureaucracy – the new team would apply calm expertise. It would be akin to a wartime mobilization, Biden promised. And in the first hundred days, the administration would provide one hundred million shots. It wasn’t the most ambitious goal he could set.
Progress showed itself in Biden’s speeches. At first the president promised the nation would have enough vaccine supply to every citizen by July; then he moved that date forward to early May. The program operated so seamlessly that the public took it for granted. Technocracy – roundly maligned – had produced one of the best designed, most important government programs of all time. To celebrate the progress, and to claim a bit of credit for itself, the White House planned an event on July 4. Biden couldn’t resist a bit of crowing. “We are emerging from the darkness,” he said.
Then news came from South Africa. “It’s looking bad.” Our test positivity has increased over just a few days. Seems to be replacing delta, it’s a dominant strain, also reinfection in people who had delta as well. The new variant received an official name: omicron. It had arrived at the worst moment in the calendar, coinciding with the holiday season, a time when much of the nation sat in crammed tubes that flew from city to city so that families could unite and disregard any semblance of social distancing.
On his first day in office, Biden had promised that he would make testing ubiquitous. At this moment of need, it was palpably not. On television, pundits decried the shortage as evidence of rank incompetence. To be fair, the administration had invested significantly in testing. But the Biden administration simply treated testing as a lower priority than vaccines. It believed that an inoculated country wouldn’t need to constantly test itself. An assumption that the virus’s constant mutation invalidated.
The vaccine was the way out of the mess; the administration had bet everything on it and run every play in the public health playbook to persuade the reluctant to accept the vaccine, but the political maladies of modern American life were ruining its chances. It was as if a large chunk of the nation had joined the death cult, oblivious to their own well-being and without any feeling of solidarity for their neighbors. It made him despair, to use a phrase borrowed from Biden, for the soul of America.
Source: The Last Politician by Franklin Foer (2023).
KIDS AND THE TEACHER’S UNIONS
1) The Bidens and the Heads of the Teachers Unions: A Liberal View
As Joe Biden mulled picking his secretary of education, Jill Biden let it be known that she didn’t want the president to nominate an enthusiast for charter schools. In her view, the president had promised to nominate a champion of public education – and she didn’t believe that advocates of charter schools fit that bill. None of the initial candidates that the transition unearthed excited her – or the rest of the president-elect’s advisers, for that matter – so it went in search of a new list, which included one name that she greeted with enthusiasm. Miguel Cardona, superintendent of schools in Connecticut, Biden’s ultimate pick for the job.
On January 21, Jill Biden invited the heads of the two largest teachers’ unions – Randi Weingarten of the American Federation of Teachers and Becky Pringle of the National Education Association — to the White House. A chunk of the country would have liked to see Dr. Biden dress them down. In upper-middle-class neighborhoods – and among newspaper columnists and television hosts – there was a sense that the unions were acting in a spirit of selfishness. According to their critique, teachers were, in fact, essential workers. But unlike warehouse workers and nurses, the teachers allowed their anxieties to get in the way of doing their jobs. Instead of allaying the worries of their members, the unions were indulging them for the sake of cultivating a spirit of militancy.
As she sat with the heads of the union, Jill Biden didn’t even nod in the direction of the tensions. Instead of pressing the union chiefs, she paid tribute to them, reserving her highest praise for Weingarten. Although the Right regarded her as a villain, Jill Biden praised her as the “type of general who is never far from the front lines.”
Biden wanted to ease the unions into accepting his goals, avoiding that sort of confrontation that might explode in a strike. He was never going to force teachers to return to school. His plan was to give them time and space to get comfortable with the idea, to smother them in the love of Jill Biden. It was a policy that tracked with his approach to all the other culture war skirmishes of the pandemic. He largely sidestepped these fights. For the sake of avoiding conflict, especially conflict with an ally, the Biden administration trimmed its goal of returning kids to school to a fraction of what had been promised on the campaign trail. He was, in effect, conceding that for thousands of students, the rest of the school year would be lost to the pandemic. It was the price of peace.
Source: The Last Politician by Franklin Foer (2023).
2) Unions versus Kids: A Conservative View
Joe Biden is just the latest Democratic president to take orders from teachers’ union bosses. That fealty has most harmed disadvantaged kids, who would benefit from the charter schools and voucher that unions oppose. Yet it was under Biden that circumstances finally combined to show how utterly destructive the union-Democrat agenda could be for kids everywhere.
As the nation now knows, the “scientists” and the public-health elite understood the virus about as well as the talking heads, and the country endured years of confusing directives. Yet the liberal establishment managed to divide the country in an entirely new way: “good” blue states that locked down, kept kids out of school and demanded masks vs. “bad” GOP states that opened up and went back to liberty.
This was the state of affairs when Biden took office, and it was the nation’s kids who bore the cruel brunt of the politicking. All the science showed that Covid was a minimal risk to children, and the CDC had said in the summer of 2020 that reopening school for in-person learning was a step toward improving overall public health. This was just one of many reasons GOP states had got children back in the classroom.
Yet the teachers’ union had fiercely resisted any talk of reopening in 2020 and even into 2021. Members liked their paid vacations. They wanted politicians to: “issue a moratorium on evictions/foreclosures,” a “moratorium on new charter or voucher programs and standardized testing,” and a “massive infusion of federal money to support the reopening, funded by taxing billionaires and Wall Street.” The unions were using their monopoly power to hold kids hostage to unrelated political demands. And they were only too happy to not get what they wanted; they could continue to get paid to do nothing.
In early February Biden’s CDC director Rochelle Walensky made the mistake of speaking truth – and giving them hope. She announced in early February that “there is increasing data to suggest that schools can safely reopen, and that safe reopening does not suggest that teachers need to be vaccinated.” The unions lost their minds. A chastened Walensky later released new “data-driven” recommendations for school reopening, and they read like a union document. It was one big excuse for continued lockdowns, thirty-eight pages on physical distancing masking, color-coded zones, new ventilation systems, building cleaning, contact tracking. Teachers’ unions fist pumped. As well they should have, since, as it turned out, it was a union document. In a scandalous May revelation, Freedom of Information documents showed the CDC had closely consulted with AFT in writing its final guidance. The union was allowed to review a draft and make recommendations, and the CDC – the paragon of “science” – adopted at least two of the political body’s demands almost verbatim. The goal all along was to give district federal dollars to hike teacher salaries. Only after this bill was signed did union leaders tentatively suggest that schools might open.
This came too late. The country managed to erase nearly two decades of progress, as the test recorded a record drop from the last one in 2019. Math scores showed the biggest decline since the testing program began. Reading was a little better. Nationwide NAEP found that only 33% of fourth graders and 31% of eighth graders were reading at or above grade proficiency. And the loss spanned the gamut – wealthy, low-income, boys, girls, every racial and ethnic group. But hey – at least the teachers got a nice, long holiday.
Source: The Biden Malaise by Kimberley Strassel (2023)
THE PANDEMIC PINNACLE OF POWER
We can only hope the national teachers’ unions will never again accede to the level of power they wielded during the Biden/Harris administration portion of the pandemic.
House Oversight Committee Republicans conducted their own investigation. In a report released a year later, they determined that Biden’s CDC “overrode routine practice to allow a radical teachers union that donated millions of dollars to Democrat campaigns to bypass scientific norms and rewrite official agency guidance,” which “effectively kept thousands of schools shuttered across the country, locking millions of children out of their classrooms”. The report revealed, “The Biden Administration abandoned medical science and replaced it with political science to reward one of their largest donors harming millions of children in the process. They bypassed the science to put union bosses ahead of children.”
A Harvard study looking at the consequences of remote learning during the pandemic found that, because of early closures and pandemic disruptions, even students who attended school in person throughout most of the 2020-21 school year had a 20% learning loss in math during the pandemic. The loss was 50% for students in remote learning environments. The New York Times called it a “generational loss.”
Source: The Puppeteers by Jason Chaffetz (2023).
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
| country_6l_covid_-_19_--_segment_6.pdf |