In a stunning reversal, President Joe Biden surrenders to the spread over the next few months and promises only to do what’s already been done. Of course, the media barely noticed, they’d rather print the new administration’s obvious hackery, without evidence as they say. Come on, give me a break, man!
On Friday, President Joe Biden finally admitted the obvious, “There is nothing we can do to change the trajectory of the pandemic in the next several months.”
Needless to say, this is in sharp contrast to his promises prior to taking office. Just a few months ago, he declared confidently “Trump should take responsibility. If you elect me, I will be the COVID killer.” On October 15, he tweeted, “We’re eight months into this pandemic, and Donald Trump doesn’t have a plan to get this virus under control. I do.” Less than two weeks ago, he said in a prime time address “Together, we’ll change the course of the pandemic.”
The plan, way back then, was to unleash “science” and “truth” to bring an end to coronavirus. Today, apparently, even science and truth can’t stop the spread of a highly infectious disease by government fiat. One wonders what we’ve been doing with the lockdowns, masking, and other restrictions. Who knew?
This stunning reversal was barely noticed by the mainstream media. Maeve Reston offered this scintillating analysis on CNN.com, “President Joe Biden tempered his ever-present optimism with a dose of realism about the potent staying power of this deadly pandemic and the fact that the nation’s vaccine distribution system is a long way from becoming an efficient machine.”
Ms. Reston continued, “For many Americans who feel trapped in a never-ending season of grief, isolation and disappointment, the start of a new year, a new administration and a new Congress seemed to offer hope — however naive it was — that there would be some flip of a switch that could speed up the nation’s lurching process for getting shots into arms.”
“However naive it was,” perhaps no better statement sums up the willful blindness on display. Of course, left unsaid was who, in fact, was naive? The people that voted for Biden? The mainstream media that parroted the idea that he has some master plan to save us all? Biden himself? All of the above?
The LA Times is still in the naive column, apparently, running an editorial just a couple of days ago: “Finally a president with a COVID plan.” NBC News, equally naive, reports that “Experts praise Biden’s Covid-19 plan, but warn that undoing Trump era mistakes will take time.” Dr. David Battinelli, chief medical officer and senior vice president at Northwell Health, told them in an email: “The plan put forward by President Biden and his team of experts is spot on. It is based on the recommendations of leading scientific and health care experts and should have been the plan all along.”
The experts were responding to a 198-page strategy, apparently boiled down to seven key points, three of which are more salient and worthy of note than others. Increasing testing, this despite new WHO guidelines released just last week claiming PCR testing was unreliable and is no longer enough to identify a case on its own. The use of the already well-used Defense Production Act to increase supply of protective equipment, a step taken over 6 months ago, and billions of dollars plus technical aid for vaccine distribution.
“State officials and public health experts have begged for these three actions in particular,” Polly Price, a professor of law and public health at Emory University said in an email, without, of course noting, that all of this has already been done, multiple times.
Mere naivety, however, cannot explain how CNN was caught earlier this week peddling a complete lie by the Biden administration. The network declared confidently that “Newly sworn in President Joe Biden and his advisers are inheriting no coronavirus vaccine distribution plan to speak of from the Trump administration, sources tell CNN, posing a significant challenge for the new White House.”
“There is nothing for us to rework. We are going to have to build everything from scratch,” one source informed them. They reported further, “Another source described the moment that it became clear the Biden administration would have to essentially start from ‘square one’ because there simply was no plan as: ‘Wow, just further affirmation of complete incompetence.’”
“Incompetence” might be a term better suited to CNN itself. The story was so ludicrous, the sources so obviously Biden political hacks, even The Daily Beast and The Washington Post couldn’t believe it. The Daily Beast’s Sam Stein noted, “There was, indeed, a plan from Trump. I listened in on govs calls on vaccine distribution. The plan had obvious shortcomings, but to say there’s nothing to rework is not true.”
“Government officials did set up a system that’s distributed 36M doses to states,” Dan Diamond of the Washington Post confirmed. “Either the situation on the ground is better than team Biden acknowledges, or Biden’s target is less ambitious than it seems.”
Perhaps, CNN could’ve listened to the famed Doctor Anthony Fauci, somehow quoted and simultaneously ignored in their own article. He, whose words were once treated as gospel, said “We’re certainly not starting from scratch, because there is activity going on in the distribution.” The CNN journalist’s response? Fauci is a “holdover from the Trump administration.”
Or perhaps CNN simply could’ve believed their lying eyes: 36 million doses have been distributed already, and 20 million have been administered to actual people. We’re now administering approximately a million vaccinations per day, sometimes more.
How does any of this occur without a plan? The CDC even provides a simple infographic to illustrate the process, identifying all the places where the vaccine will be made available: Hospitals, Large Clinics Outpatient, Pharmacies, Long Term Care Facilities, Doctor’s Offices, Indian Health Services, Public Health Clinics, Mobile Units, Homebound, Other Federal Entity Sites.
The truth was never the point, however. The goal was only to get a few obviously false quotes out into the internet ether. The same sentiment about the lack of a vaccine plan were dutifully picked up by NBC and the LA Times for example, even though it was fraudulent. “What we’re inheriting is so much worse than we could have imagined,” Jeffrey Zients, Biden’s Covid-19 coordinator, said Thursday on a call with reporters, transcribed and repeated without evidence.
To be precise, the Trump Administration had wanted 20 million people to be vaccinated before the end of last year. They were three weeks late, fair enough to point that out. Still, it’s a situation that Ms. Reston described as, “On Saturday, the US finally hit that elusive target that the Trump administration had set for the end of last year.”
Finally? CNN then proceeds to describe a few challenges with a never before happened in the history of the world event, even forgetting that the vaccine was developed on a timeframe they said was impossible, as a “puzzling gap between expectations and reality.”
The phrase might be better applied to Joe Biden: His big plan is to administer a million doses of the vaccine a day. NBC News reports this as “his ambitious goal.” The only problem is that’s what we’re already doing, even before Biden officially got into office. How ambitious is it to do what’s already been done?
Not to be outdone himself, however, Biden refused to even acknowledge that more could be done. Last week, a reporter asked him “Shouldn’t you set the bar higher? Isn’t that basically where the US is at right now?” Biden laughed in response. “When I announced it you all said it’s not possible. Come on, give me a break, man.”
Yes, in the Biden world it’s not possible to do what’s already being done: Come on, give me a break man.
Fortunately, not everyone has become as supine as CNN, NBC, the LA Times, and others, at least not yet. “I love that he set a goal, but a million doses a day?” Dr. Paul A. Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and a member of a federal vaccine advisory board, told the New York Times. “I think we can do better. We are going to have to if we really want to get on top of this virus by, say, summer.” The Hill quotes Professor Eric Topol at Scripps Research as calling the plan “totally inadequate.” He explained that “100 million shots means 50 million people” because the two currently approved vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna require two separate shots.
Totally inadequate is perhaps best used to describe the media’s response to Biden’s complete turnabout on stopping the virus and obvious political games with the vaccine roll out. For an administration that regularly accused their predecessor of playing politics with people’s lives, obscuring the truth, and denying the science, this is political hackery at its worst while life and death hangs in the balance.
Deaths attributed to the virus are at a daily average of 3,037 people, almost a hundred thousand people a month are dying. Projected deaths are now expected to easily top 400,000, or much higher. The case positivity rate remains over 9%, though thankfully that’s down from highs of over 13% just a couple of weeks ago.
Of course, it’s unfair to expect miracles, even if Biden himself promised them repeatedly. Instead, we can at least expect something resembling the same standards of reporting that we’ve had on the virus for most of the last year. “Come on, give me a break, man” wouldn’t cut it for Trump and shouldn’t cut it now.
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