Why isn’t Biden to blame for COVID deaths?

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President Joe Biden attends a virtual briefing on Hurricane Ida in the South Courtyard Auditorium of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building at the White House in Washington, DC on August 30, 2021 (Carlos Barria / Reuters)

The reality is that neither Biden nor Trump deserve to be blamed for the deaths from COVID. Neither had a silver bullet.

One of the most morally outrageous talking points taken up by the left in its efforts to distract from Joe Bidens’ deadly incompetence in Afghanistan is to downplay the deaths of 13 soldiers in Kabul by pointing out that more and more people die from COVID every day.

Of course, if we use the standards set by Democrats during the Trump years, these COVID deaths are also President Biden’s responsibility.

It must be said that comparing the deaths caused by a faceless global pandemic to the deaths of American troops who have been needlessly placed in a perilous situation by an administration that has entrusted the security of Kabul to the Taliban is a special form of cynical partisanship. Afghanistan and COVID are both tragic, but only one is man-made, a preventable massacre that has been perpetrated by enemies and made possible by the incompetence and bad decisions of our governments.

You may recall that Liberal pundits used to use equally ugly comparisons involving 9/11. Paul Krugman once noted that the death toll from COVID-19 was already the equivalent of 60 9/11. MSNBC analyst Malcolm Nance wrote that Trump alone caused the equivalent of 67 9/11 deaths. That was the tone for much of the coverage.

Well-adjusted human beings – those who are not consumed with politics – tend to treat tragic events as separate situations. They respond to a death from meningitis or a car crash with grief, while also responding to a death resulting from first degree murder or drunk driving with anger and grief. Most well-adjusted people also understand that living in a free and modern society comes with some unfortunate inherent risks. We are not talking about the running total of vehicle deaths as we would the Holocaust.

But, again, if the president was personally responsible for the deaths of thousands of Americans in the summer of 2020, why isn’t the president responsible for the thousands of deaths in the summer of 2021?

Biden ran to stop the pandemic. I will not close the country, promised the presidential candidate at the time. I will stop the virus, I will beat this virus, and so on. Biden has blamed Trump personally on numerous occasions, so it is speculated that he believed the former president had the power to stop COVID.

Other than the promise to use his imaginary skill, Biden never informed us of how he would conduct politics differently from Trump. Biden, in fact, had opposed Trump’s travel restrictions to China, calling them xenophobic. And while Biden benefited and attempted to take credit for the Trump-era Warp Speed ​​program, his team initially worked to undermine confidence in these vaccines. Since Bidens’ inauguration, hundreds of thousands of Americans have perished in the pandemic.

Bidens’ handling of COVID may be the last issue he’s not upside down in the polls, so his allies want to change the subject and continue to make Governors Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott look like intentionally put their constituents at risk because they refuse to adopt the authoritarian policies preferred by Democrats. As Charles Cooke points out, despite the perception created by the histrionic media coverage, we still don’t understand why states do better or worse under pandemic conditions.

Yet all of a sudden the governors, rather than the president, are responsible for the spikes. Perhaps the only American politician who can credibly be accused of causing far more deaths than necessary is disgraced New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, whom Biden once called the gold standard of leadership. COVID. New York still holds the dubious distinction of having the second highest percentage of coronavirus deaths in the country. Cuomos, few remaining advocates point out that most of these deaths occurred earlier in the pandemic when we knew less. Okay, what’s Bidens’ excuse then?

It shows to the destructive utopian vanity of the technocrats that some sincerely believe that Americans can be shielded from all the deadly whims of the world if only we instituted more authoritarian control or a progressive political prescription. The reality is that neither Biden nor Trump deserve to be blamed for the deaths from COVID. Neither had a silver bullet. Yet the public constantly expected to live by shifting political standards depending on the president. You can’t have it both ways.

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