Biden has failed on COVID. This is not a matter of a situation beyond everyone’s control, you can’t say he was a victim of circumstances and caught off guard. Biden was handed a vaccine and all of the tools to mitigate the infection rates. But more people in America have died from COVID under Biden than did under Trump, who started literally with nothing.
Biden fumbled the ball.
Badly.
When COVID became recognized as an epidemic, Donald Trump signed Operation Warp Speed into law. He had a vaccine ready within months, where it used to take years. He cut through all of the red tape and made sure that it was available. He pre-purchased billions of dollars worth of doses, three different world class companies ramped up production.
We were poised to win.
So what are Biden’s failures?
1. Lack of Charisma, Lack of Leadership. With a vaccine IN HIS HANDS ramped up and available, Biden could not lead the American people to take it. Bottom line is that Biden does not have the charisma to convince people to get vaccinated, and he doesn’t have the organizational skills to get the job done.
The Democrats are claiming that the anti-vaxxers are Republicans, but Democrats love to re-write history. The Democrats are the ones who claimed, during the Trump efforts to save lives, that a vaccine produced so quickly was dangerous. It was Donald Trump who cut through the medical bureaucracy to get the vaccine out and save lives.
2. Poor Organization, Laziness. He could have been a lot more proactive and organized in marketing and making the vaccine available. In my case, I got a text from my doctor. I was told that it would be charged to my insurance. What? Not free? I could sign up at Publix, but that was for an appointment, I couldn’t just walk up and get it. What? I have to jump through hoops of bureaucracy to get a crucial vaccine?
The standard marketing practice would be to go where the people are and make it simple. Set up at ballgames, set up mobile vax stations like ice cream trucks. Set up a hotline, vax people in their homes when they ask for it. Be all over the place, all over tv, radio, internet. This would have been much cheaper than keeping the country in lockdown. I know examples of each of these suggestions were done, but a concerted effort on the ground requires a concerted effort at the leadership level. Big fizzle.
All of those Democrats down on Madison Avenue in New York (ostensibly the top marketing people in the world), should have come up with a plan, set targeting, talked about how many touches would be required to get such and such number of people vaccinated, and then planned strategy to identify, reach and persuade the stragglers. This is SCIENCE, every bit as much as the medical science it would have supported (more so, in the case of the advice given by certain medical professionals).
It’s much easier to pretend you are a king and give orders from on high. Unfortunately, that doesn’t work well in America, especially when you step beyond your authority and piss off the people you are trying to help. The Administration didn’t “follow the science.”
The approval for children to be vaccinated should have come 10 months ago. Every child, with his/her parents’ permission, should have had the opportunity to be vaccinated.
Mandatory vaccinations were never necessary, and in fact, mandates galvanized the resistance against it. Not against the vaccine, most people don’t know the science. The resistance was and is to the Biden Administration, their bungling and their flaunting of Constitutional rights.
We needed effort and innovation from the most innovative country in the world. We could have saved hundreds of thousands of people around the world who follow our examples. But we didn’t get Trump’s innovation, we got Biden’s bureaucracy.
3. New treatments are stuck in FDA approvals. Everyone knows by now that COVID is not going away. We are getting better and better at treating it, as is evidenced by the fact that death rates are not rising as fast as infections rates. The vaccine is working to a great extent.
But come to find out, a number of new treatments for people who already have COVID, that might save a great many lives right now, are going through the old bureaucratic processes for FDA approvals. They may not emerge for a year or more.
When people are dying it is time to shortcut the bureaucracy, as Trump did with Operation Warp Speed. For some reason, the Biden Administration seems to think that the vaccine was the end of the problem. Biden should have embraced operation Warp Speed and expanded it by a factor of 10, working on better follow-on vaccines, treatments of people who are sick, and new ways to reach people at risk (without violating their Constitutional rights!).
This is much like my other recent article on COVID. Hindsight is 20/20. The big difference is that in this case, it is not too late. Biden could actually do better starting now.
But while I am less informed and get my information from news sites and Facebook, I expect the most powerful man in the world to be more on the ball. I expect him to have the access and know-how to use all of the resources available. Think what you want about Trump, he is not shy about using resources, and he knows how to use money to make the world move.
I do blame Biden for failing.
Will Biden turn the corner and do better on COVID? Doubt it.