ANTI-VAXXERS, NOT BIDEN, OWN DELTA

Fully vaccinated and maskless, many of us were basking in what we thought was COVID’s summer endgame. Then along came delta, an ill-timed pandemic redux. Suddenly, there was déjà vu all over the place.

Along with skyrocketing infections, came thunderous news reports of President Biden falling asleep at the coronavirus switch.  After all, the guy was elected on the promise of cleaning up Trump’s horrendous COVID mess.  Biden was credited for taming the virus, so he must now be blamed for its sequel.  Or so it would seem from reports like these:

• “Biden Stumbles on Delta”. (Bloomberg News)

• “This (delta) leaves the president in a pickle.” (New York Times)

• “Biden’s Struggles on Delta Overshadow Infrastructure Victory”. (World News Network)

• “For President Joe Biden, who pledged a ‘return to normal’ on July 4, (delta) is a tacit admission that competence alone won’t vanquish the coronavirus.” (Politico)

My admiration and respect for these and other major news outlets comes with a cautionary warning: Always read the whole report.  Relying on only headlines or story tops can grossly distort the full picture. In this instance, looking solely at these blurbs, it would be easy for a casual news consumer to conjure an image of Biden personally cranking out this new viral strain from his own Wuhan-like lab, deep in the bowels of his Wilmington, Delaware basement. 

Read a little further, however, and a demonstrably different picture surfaces: This highly contagious delta variant emerged in India last December. It inundated that country and Great Britain before making its way to the United states a few months ago.  It quickly blew up our descending trajectory of new infections, going from an average of 13,500 a day in June to 92,000 as of August 3. Some models forecast more than 200,000 new cases a day by this fall.  The delta variant now accounts for 85 percent of new infections.  Most of them are in people who have not been vaccinated. 

So how does any of that put Joe Biden in a pickle?  Where exactly was his stumble?  Much of this honeymoon-is-over reporting was predicated on the President’s July 4 “declaration of independence” from COVID. At that point, 67 percent of adults had at least one vaccine shot, and pandemic cases were down in all 50 states for the first time.  The media wrap on Biden was simply that he said things were getting better, but then they got worse.

Sure, the president congratulated the country back in July for getting vaccinated and helping to turn the corner on this virus.  But here’s what else he said then: “Now, I can’t promise that will continue this way. We know there will be advances and setbacks, and we know that there are many flare-ups that could occur. But if the unvaccinated get vaccinated, they will protect themselves and other unvaccinated people around them. If they do not, states with low vaccination rates may see those rates go up – may see this progress reversed.”  

And that is precisely what happened.  The areas hit hardest by delta are those with the highest rates of unvaccinated residents.  This demographic through-line also aligns those concentrations of anti-vaxxers with counties Trump carried in 2020.  Sure, there are multiple reasons behind vaccine reluctance.  But the spiteful Trumpian politics of refusing the shots Biden is pushing is a big part of this picture.  That makes the news media’s flippant narrative all the more insidious.  Blaming Biden for a delta flare up caused by 93 million unvaccinated Americans has to be putting at least a small smile on the grievance-obsessed face of Donald Trump.  

The sad irony is that some journalists feel the need to demonstrate their fairness and balance by attaching a negative spin to a political leader who has received considerable positive coverage. This phenomena, which is neither fair nor balanced, is even more pronounced in this post-Trump era.  The former president did and said mostly off-the-wall bizarre stuff, resulting in negative stories that Trump called “fake news.”  Then comes Joe Biden, who as the anti-Trump, presents as a bastion of competence and composure, resulting in generally positive news coverage.  Yet, some reporters have this weird balance itch that needs to be scratched. So when Biden’s July 4 reference to the light at the end of the COVID tunnel turned out to be a train called delta, they just had to take him to task.

Meanwhile, Biden remained calm and competent. He and his team assessed the delta data and made major changes in their strategy to conquer this pandemic.  The communication from this White House has been clear and concise: The only way out of this mess is vaccination.  So he is requiring some 11 million federal employees and contractors to either get vaccinated or face adverse employment consequences. Same goes for the military.  

This move, as intended, triggered mandatory vaccination programs in a number of other state and municipal governments, along with a growing list of large companies, including Google, Facebook, Anthem, BlackRock, Cisco, Delta Airlines, Door Dash, Equinox, Ford, Goldman Sachs, Lyft and Microsoft. Theaters and other entertainment and cultural venues have instituted mandatory vaccination policies for customers and employees.

All this happened at the same time headlines had Biden “stumbling” his way into a “pickle” over a dramatic rise in new COVID cases. Yet,  CNN reports, that the number of newly vaccinated people in the eight states with the highest delta caseloads has increased on an average of 171 percent each day over the past three weeks. 

Results like that don’t come from a stumble.  They come from a leader who assesses the rapidly evolving terrain of this pandemic and then responds with appropriate strategic adjustments. Earlier this year, Biden was adamant about avoiding mandatory vaccinations. He not only wanted to dodge the political fallout from such a move, he believed that the overwhelming majority of Americans would vaccinate out of self-interest.  When the carrot approach left 30 percent of the country unvaccinated, and delta began its rampage, the president set politics aside and turned immediately to the stick of making inoculation mandatory wherever possible. 

When the final chapter of this pandemic is written, my bet is on Politico being wrong: Joe Biden’s competence will, indeed, have vanquished this virus.