The Big GuyBiden
...46th president of the U.S. Former Senator-for-Life from Delaware, an example of the kind of top-notch Washington intellect hacked up by the World's Greatest Deliberative Body. The guy who single-handedly lost Afghanistan...for the COVID pandemic any more than you can blame Donald Trump
...dictatorial for repealing some (but not all) of the diktats of his predecessor, misogynistic because he likes pretty girls, homophobic because he doesn't think gender bending should be mandatory, truly a man for all seasons......
, yet when it comes to fighting the virus, the current prez seems to be doing more wrong things than right — and then spinning facts to deflect criticism.Perhaps that explains some of the recent chaos across the nation, particularly among people trying to get tested for the virus.
On Monday, for example, Biden simply denied a report
No, no! Certainly not!
that his team rejected a plan in October to produce 732 million free, at-home COVID-19 test kits by Christmas. If true, that now seems like a mistake.
According to the Vanity Fair report, the White House told the experts who’d developed the plan that it wouldn’t adopt it. One expert, Dr. Steven Phillips, accused Team Biden of "playing small ball."
The White House’s claim that it didn’t reject the plan was downright lame: "The characterization of ’rejection’ is not an accurate reflection of a productive meeting, and, in fact, we are implementing many measures that were discussed as capacity now allows us to do," a spokesperson said. Plus, for the past few weeks, Biden has been expressing regret for not acting more quickly to make tests more widely available.
Then, just last week, he announced his own plan to make almost as many tests, 500 million, available (that may yet prove insufficient).
So which is it: Did Team Biden merely nix a plan in October and then regret it? Or did it also fib about what it failed to do back then, too?
At the same time, the White House has been active when it shouldn’t be, as when the president issued a federal vaccine mandate for private-sector workers — even though he now says "there’s no federal solution; this gets solved at the state level."
That statement, incidentally, and the current chaos stand out because Biden and fellow Democrats unfairly blamed so much of last year’s COVID deaths on Trump, as if there were a "federal solution" back then. And also because there’ve been more COVID deaths under Biden than Trump, even though Biden vowed to "shut down the virus."
The irony is that the latest COVID "crisis" is now as much the result of hysteria (which Team Biden has only fueled) as anything else. Yes, the number of positive test cases is surging, as the latest variant, Omicron, appears to be more transmissible and so many more people are getting tested.
But daily COVID hospitalizations and deaths are nowhere near what they were a year ago. Vaccines and treatments have made an enormous difference.
Bottom line: Team Biden’s hype, incompetence, hypocrisy and downright lies aren’t instilling confidence. The president and his staff need to take a breath and figure out a calmer, saner course.