Biden said America “had the upper hand” on Covid – so has Delta changed the game? | Joe Biden

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It wasn’t supposed to be this way.

A month ago, Joe Biden appeared to have the coronavirus pandemic at his fingertips. With tens of millions of Americans receiving the vaccination, cases, hospitalizations, and deaths have been declining dramatically.

Not so fast. In the past week alone, the highly contagious delta variant has fueled a 43% rise in daily Covid-19 cases and driven deaths by 39%. Republicans, such as Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, have proven themselves fully prepared to take the politicization of face masks to new extreme levels.

Biden faces once again the fact that he is trying to rule a country that is deeply polarized in politics, media and even science. The mission of the President of the United States and his team of experts to tame the pandemic and heal the divisions clashed with the Delta variant and the DeSantis variant.

“They may have underestimated the degree to which vaccine hesitation would become a GOP position,” said Laurie Jarrett, award-winning science writer and author of The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance. “They were imagining that they were dealing with fearful people individually, they had fears based on crazy things they had read on the internet, and they were afraid of having autism.

“What they didn’t imagine was that there would be this willful Republican stance from the GOP opposing all the things Biden might have about Covid. It’s not just vaccines, it’s masks, it’s social distancing, now it’s going to be vaccine passports. I’m just waiting for the guns to come out.”

Donald Trump’s disastrous response to the pandemic has left hundreds of thousands of people dead and exposed America’s political divisions, but the rapid development of his vaccine has given the country a second chance. Biden has dramatically speeded up vaccine distribution, hitting target after target and cutting cases to 10,000 per day.

While anxious to avoid declaring “mission accomplished,” the president held an Independence Day celebration at the White House on July 4 and claimed “we have gained the upper hand” and “together we beat the virus.” But he was reaping easy flowing fruits: people craving vaccines, often in Democratic voting districts.

Vaccinations have slowed dramatically and Biden has failed to meet his goal of having 70% of all adults at least once by July 4. Meanwhile, the Delta species, which had caused a spectacular eruption in India, reached the shores of the United States and began cutting a patch through the unvaccinated.

New cases are now averaging more than 70,000 per day, up from last summer’s peak. Over the past week, Florida and Texas have recorded about a third of new cases and more than a third of new cases in hospitals nationwide, the White House’s Covid-19 response team told reporters Thursday.

Seven states account for about half of the new cases and hospitalizations in the past week, even though they make up less than a quarter of the US population. They are Florida, Texas, Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi – most of them have low vaccination rates and all of them voted for Trump in last year’s presidential election.

Polls show fanatics who insist they will never get the vaccine, with some expressing fears that the vaccine will insert a microchip into their bodies or cause infertility. These irrational fears now threaten Biden’s entire “wartime effort” against the virus.

People wait after receiving a Covid-19 vaccine at the FTX Arena in Miami on Thursday. Opinion polls show that a group of people say they will never get vaccinated. Photo: Chandan Khanna/AFP/Getty Images

Garrett added, “The White House has really struggled to come up with a strategy for dealing with the 20, 25%, staunchly anti-vaccine faction. I don’t think they came close to imagining a strategy for that.”

“It’s not for lack of trying. They’ve read my whole cookbook of recipes, confronting vaccine resistance and rejection, and I think they’re at a loss, just as we do with everything else that happens politically in the United States now.”

In the unvaccinated pandemic, Florida hit a record high, reaching 12,500 on Thursday, with more than 2,500 in intensive care. The state averages about 18,000 newly confirmed infections per day, up from less than 2,000 a month ago. But DeSantis has only shown defiance, banning mandates for masks in schools and dismissing the new restrictions as threats to “liberties.”

When Biden this week asked Republican governors to “get out of the way” from efforts to contain the virus, DeSantis replied: “Why aren’t you doing your job? Why don’t you secure those borders? And until you do, I don’t want to hear a flashlight from you on Covid, thank you.” .

For good measure, the feisty governor, who will be re-elected next year and widely seen as a 2024 presidential candidate, added: “This is a man who ran for office saying he would stop the spread of the virus. And what did he do? He imported more viruses from all over the world than While there is a wide open southern border.”

The border between the United States and Mexico is not wide open. On Thursday, after taking an electric car on a tour of the White House grounds, Biden was asked to respond to Governor DeSantis. He said: Who is the ruler?

So far, the White House has sought to downplay any perception of conflict between Biden and Republican governors in hopes of getting rid of the political sting from responding to the pandemic and rallying the nation into a moment of crisis. But it’s no coincidence that states like Florida and Texas, both coronavirus hotspots, have positioned themselves as bastions of Republican resistance to Biden.

Jarrett noted: “The Florida Republican Party is very clearly ecstatic with the way DeSantis is playing its cards. So it is not in their interest to suddenly decide that the survival of the people of Florida due to Covid is more important than being elected President of the United States.”

Historians and voters have always been likely to judge Biden’s presidency on how he handled the biggest public health crisis in a century. His impressive early momentum on the issue has stalled. In a new Quinnipiac University poll, the percentage of people who agreed with his response to the crisis was 53%, down 12 points from May.

But Monica McDermott, a professor of political science at Fordham University in New York, said: “I actually think the Biden administration handled it surprisingly well, given how much mistrust was there so early on about the vaccine, and how much there was no startup under the paper. All that Biden faced when he took office was against his ability to do a good job on this, and I think he did as much as he could under the circumstances.

Now, the administration might have been able to tackle disinformation and conspiracy theories more directly earlier. That would be the only thing I think they might have missed. I don’t know if that will make a difference, but these are so firmly entrenched at this point that I don’t know how you’re going to crowd them out.”

Leslie Dash, who was the global coordinator for Ebola at the Department of Health under Barack Obama, defended Biden and the Centers for Disease Control’s decision in May to advise that fully vaccinated people can go home without being masked — since a review of areas where The delta variable is spread out.

“The directive is summonses to governance and scientific changes, and there have been a lot of reasons to try to get the country back to normal,” Dutch said. “When they did that, it was the right thing to do but the science changes and then you have to go back. And you learn new things about these diseases. We learned a lot of new things about Ebola, unfortunately, because people had Ebola.”

Biden, who has come down the aisle often during his 36 years in the Senate, ran for president as a bipartisan messenger and continues to work with Republicans on infrastructure spending. But as legal battles over mask mandates rage in cities and states across the country, stark and deadly divisions could shake his belief in that principle.

Dash, who is now president of Protect Our Care, a health care lobby, noted: “Every person running for president in the Republican Party believes the way forward is to be as Trumpist as possible, and follow the ground rules, which are: Reject the experts. , double your ability when under attack, and play deep in the base. Because everyone, for their politics, wants it.

Biden actually tried to build a bigger tent while they chose to go deeper into the base and that’s what Trump has always done. But in this case, it means putting their people in mortal danger because they never show any desire to act in a more reasonable manner. Instead, DeSantis is going deeper and attacking more.”

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