Between Trump Terms, Biden Quietly Killed Public Health

We have the receipts.

Maridav

They were in the middle of a flight when it happened.

The decision came down from federal district judge Kathryn Kimball to end America’s mask mandate on public transportation. Flight attendants made gleeful announcements. People started yanking off their masks. Some of them started applauding and snapping selfies. Yes, even liberals.

They didn’t even wait for the plane to land.

People with compromised immune systems and parents with unvaccinated children watched in horror as their fellow citizens both red and blue celebrated the return of their so-called personal freedoms. Most op-ed columnists and talking heads abandoned any discussion of disease after that. Well, now they’re back. Recently, Thom Hartmann penned a piece preemptively blaming the oncoming H5N1 bird flu pandemic on Trump. Brian Tyler Cohen tweeted about it. Even David Wallace-Wells posted a piece shaking his head at the incoming health bosses and trotting out their failures on the pandemic. Suddenly, they care again.

But who’s the bigger failure?

It’s a toss-up.

When a majority of the public actively ignores an airborne disease that causes so much devastation in “mild” cases, to the point that judges can blame fluoride for a noted drop in children’s intellectual development, when people won’t get vaccinated and believe it’s good for them to get sick, when nurses threaten to call the police on immunocompromised patients for wearing a respirator, you have killed public health. That’s what Biden’s administration has done.

That’s what the public allowed.

We have the receipts.

The failure begins all the way back in January 2021, when Biden appointed Jeffrey Zients as the White House Covid-19 response coordinator. What were his qualifications? He possessed no background in medical science at all. He was an investment manager, exactly the kind of influence Biden repudiated during his campaign, a man with a net worth of nearly $90 million. Zients was the ultimate insider, a member of Facebook’s board of directors, and a bureaucrat who held various positions under Obama. He was regarded largely as an “ambassador” to business interests, not a public health expert. According to an essay in The American Prospect, Zients was hired to do the following:

• Downplay the long-term health impacts of Covid.

• Transition America away from masks.

• Oversee a return to the workplace.

Zients only had one pseudo qualification under his belt, as a major investor in healthcare companies. Well, here’s what The Prospect’s investigation tells us about his experience on that front:

Over the span of two decades, the health care companies that Zients controlled, invested in, and helped oversee were forced to pay tens of millions of dollars to settle allegations of Medicare and Medicaid fraud. They have also been accused of surprise-billing practices and even medical malpractice. Taken together, an examination of the companies that made Zients rich paints a picture of a man who seized on medical providers as a way to capitalize on the suffering of sick Americans. In the end, it seems to have all paid off.

Zients was chosen for this very reason. He knew how to turn suffering into profit. Harvard social epidemiologist Justin Feldman chronicled the early days of Biden’s Covid response, revealing how his team had no plans other than getting Americans vaccinated as quickly as possible.

Here’s what Feldman says:

As far as I can tell, from January 2021, the key players in the administration’s pandemic response policy (Jeffrey Zients as well as White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain) planned to phase out any remaining support for public health measures once all adults were eligible for vaccination.

Biden intended to roll out vaccines developed under Operation Warp Speed and then take credit for ending the pandemic. It was supposed to be an easy win. Sure enough, by May 2021 CDC Director Rochelle Walensky was telling vaccinated Americans they could take off their masks, even as reports surfaced that vaccinated people were getting breakthrough infections and there was a new variant (Delta) devastating India. The Biden administration had no plan for an evolving virus, other than denial and wishful thinking, without regret.

Walensky did the exact opposite of what she and other public health experts promised before assuming positions of power:

In May 2021, Walensky declared without hesitation that “If you are fully vaccinated, you can start doing the things you had stopped doing because of the pandemic,” and that included “indoor and outdoor activities, large or small, without wearing a mask or physically distancing.” She made this statement with no actual data from the real world about vaccine effectiveness. As the research would eventually show in abundance, vaccinated people do spread Covid, and “the impact of vaccination on community transmission of circulating variants… appeared to be not significantly different from the impact among unvaccinated people.” Furthermore, vaccines reduce your risk of Long Covid by roughly 62 percent, but even that mediocre protection wanes over time, requiring boosters once or even twice a year. As the studies show, it’s no trifling matter. It’s a condition characterized by lasting damage to multiple organ systems, and patients have put their pain and quality of life on par with advanced terminal cancer. The mountains of research have prompted many experts to describe the result as “the greatest mass disabling event in human history,” with an oncoming health crisis “so large as to be unfathomable.”

Did the CDC have any clue what they were unleashing?

They did.

An internal slide presentation from the summer of 2021 reveals that the CDC was fully aware of waning vaccine effectiveness and the risk of variants like Delta. The presentation urged officials to “acknowledge the war has changed.” Slides said that “breakthrough cases may reduce public confidence in vaccines.” It even reported that vaccinated patients could still spread the virus almost as much as the unvaccinated, and that they were making up a larger portion of hospitalizations and deaths. Once it became impossible to deny the reality of serious breakthrough infections by late summer, the CDC made a muddled attempt to bring back masks in the fall of 2021, but they didn’t try very hard and eventually gave up.

The CDC would abandon any attempt to protect the public during the winter of 2021-2022, caving to corporate pressure to ease quarantine and testing guidelines. Anthony Fauci didn’t even try to hide the real reason for the decision. It had nothing to do with science or medicine. Instead, he said, “We want to get people back to the jobs,” even if they were unwell.

There was already substantial data on Long Covid and “mild” Covid infections, including the likelihood of asymptomatic spread—you were contagious regardless of how you felt. Here’s the conclusion of a report published in the CDC’s own journal, Emerging and Infectious Diseases:

In summary, it is likely that a substantial proportion of patients surviving COVID-19 will experience long-term symptoms requiring prolonged care, even after mild to moderate disease. These symptoms might negatively affect patients’ quality of life and represent an additional burden for healthcare services and social security.

That was published in March of 2022, meaning the CDC had the information by the end of 2021, if not sooner. It was already clear that anyone’s odds of developing Long Covid from an infection hovered around 1 in 20, a conservative estimate. The main risk from Covid wasn’t death or hospitalization anymore. It was lifelong chronic illness. It was a dramatic increase in anyone’s risk of heart attack and stroke, diabetes, brain damage, and blood clots.

You can read all about Covid here.

A member of the Covid response team (Ezekiel Emanuel) admitted their true reasoning for the casual attitude during a podcast interview with Andy Slavitt, a healthcare advisor from the Obama administration.

Here’s what Ezekiel Emanuel said:

The problem is we don’t know the Long Covid thing. And when I go around, I hear from a lot of people that’s what they’re obsessed by because it’s so frightening. Brain fog, fatigue, shortness of breath on a chronic basis, not being able to get out of bed. No one wants to risk that. That ruins your life… If you said, look your chances are 1 in 20 of getting Long Covid even with three shots… People would like… I’m not taking those odds… That sounds too much like Russian roulette for I think a lot of people… we do have probably several million people at least who have Long Covid.

So, Biden’s Covid response team knew about Long Covid as early as the winter of 2021-2022 and chose to lie about it.

(To his credit, Ezekiel Emanuel himself wasn’t trying to hide anything. He was fairly open, including in a Time magazine piece.)

It gets worse.

In February 2022, a firm named Impact Research circulated a memo advising high-ranking members of the Democratic party to “take the win” on Covid and stop talking about it altogether. The consultants advised politicians to “push for feeling and acting more normal” and to “recognize that people are worn out and feeling real harm from the years-long restrictions and take their side.”

The memo said Democrats should focus more on economic issues and “learning loss” while removing any lingering restrictions. Finally, they concluded that “If we focus on how bad things still are and how much worse they could get, we set Democrats up as failures unable to navigate through this.” They warned Democrats they would “pay dearly for it” in elections if they continued to prioritize health and safety, even if that was the right thing to do by all measures.

This memo contradicted actual polls showing a majority of Americans still supported safety measures and were still worried about Covid. Even in 2024, after years of misinformation, 4 in 10 Americans still believe in taking precautions. You could say the authors of the memo had no clue what they were talking about, and they were substituting their personal grievances for facts about what the public wanted. Anyway, Democrats began manufacturing support and spreading misinformation that suited their own preconceptions about the virus.

In late February 2022, the CDC released a new Covid-19 monitoring system with updated metrics and prettier, soothing colors. Anyone following public health was shocked at the sudden transformation of America’s transmission map from orange and yellow to a bright, festive green. Public health officials condemned this new monitoring system in an op-ed piece in The Guardian. As they wrote:

The resulting shift from a red map to a green one reflected no real reduction in transmission risk. It was a resort to rhetoric: an effort to craft a success story that would explain away hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths and the continued threat the virus poses.

A few days later, Biden delivered his State of the Union address, claiming victory over the virus and telling everyone it was safe to return to work and school. It was safe to eat out again. It was safe to shop.

Meanwhile…

Stories from early 2022 were still reporting that White House staff and visitors had to mask around Biden. In fact, they weren’t even given water at meetings “lest anyone else remove their mask to take a drink.” It was just one of several indications that Biden and his administration offered a message entirely out of sync with their actions, and they expected Americans to swallow it.

While the Biden administration was promoting “back to normal,” Pfizer was celebrating the end of public health measures in earnings calls with shareholders, with chief science officers like Mikael Dolsten describing conditions like viral persistence and Long Covid as “a real growth opportunity for Paxlovid to do very well” in terms of sales. The president of their bio-pharmaceuticals group, Angela Hwang, spoke in positive terms about infections going up as masking and other social distancing practices stopped. “Infections are going to increase,” she said, creating an opportunity for their drugs.

Biden replaced Zients as head of his Covid response team with Ashish Jha, a doctor who had already criticized the reliance on infections as a metric for pandemic response, echoing Trump. Stepping into his new role, Jha began to advocate for policies of mass infection and herd immunity that liberals previously rejected. Jha told everyone they were going to get Covid, so just get over it. Epidemiologists like Katelyn Jetelina spoke out in a piece in The New York Times:

“We’re doing a really terrible job of communicating risk,” said Katelyn Jetelina, an epidemiologist at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston. “I think that’s also why people are throwing their hands up in the air and saying, ‘Screw it.’ They’re desperate for some sort of guidance.”

While they largely downplayed Long Covid in children, Ashish Jha and Rochelle Walensky advised their own children’s schools to spend millions of dollars installing clean air systems. While they were protecting their children in 2022, Biden was telling states and cities to spend our Covid relief money on police. As The New York Times reported, he was “making a forceful push” ahead of midterm elections “to show he is a defender of law enforcement.” As PBS explained, Biden urged governors to prioritize law enforcement even as the Treasury Department released another round of relief funds. That’s exactly what governors did.

According to a bombshell report by The Marshall Project, “billions of dollars flowed to the criminal justice system by the first quarter of 2022, from covering payroll to purchasing new equipment,” as well as “courts, jails, and prisons.” The equipment included tasers, rifles, shooting ranges, and armored vehicles. Governments were very clever in how they framed their purchases. In one case, a town in Alabama said new tasers with longer ranges would help curb the spread of Covid, since “officers will not have to get so close to the perpetrator.” Another city said armored vehicles make the public feel safer during challenging times.

By the middle of 2023, an investigation by Epic uncovered that at least 70 different municipalities were spending even more relief funds on police surveillance equipment, mobile forensic technologies, monitoring stations, and drones. They also bought software to spy on our social media.

For years, the Biden administration engaged in doublespeak, upgrading their own air quality, enforcing testing requirements at events, and even publicly endorsing clean indoor air, while more quietly encouraging states and cities to spend the money allocated for these improvements on anything else. Jha personally oversaw the privatization of these tools, saying that “my hope is… you’re going to see the commercialization of almost all of these products.” In 2024, these products remain unaffordable or unavailable for most of us. With federal programs expiring this year, a single course of Paxlovid now costs roughly $1,400 even with insurance. That’s assuming you can even get your doctor to prescribe it, and that the pharmacy will actually fill the prescription. Many of them won’t. All of this has happened while celebrities and influencers brag about traveling or touring with Covid, and taking drugs that many of us can’t access or afford. Just one Far-UVC light filtration system can cost several thousand dollars.

Biden also weakened clean air guidance. As Harvard’s Jason Feldman explains, Biden watered down his own agency’s regulations.

Feldman points out:

The agency had proposed requirements for masking, testing, and paid quarantine and isolation, among other provisions, but had become the target of various business groups. Instead, the administration went forward with a narrower rule restricted to health care workers.

As Bruce Rolfsen writes in Bloomberg Law, OSHA tried to pass strong protections, but after interference from Biden’s White House they released final guidance that only applied “in the healthcare sector” and was “supplemented by voluntary guidance for other industries.” An article in the BMJ provides further detail on OSHA’s original intention to protect all workers by providing paid leave, upgrades to ventilation, and access to protective equipment.

Biden overrode them.

As the BMJ authors conclude, “these failures were appalling and led to tens of thousands of deaths,” largely due to “poor communication of existing evidence.” During the same year, at least 28 states, including many liberal ones, passed liability shields to block legal action against businesses for exposing workers to Covid. It was actually the California Supreme Court that killed Covid lawsuits, ruling that employers weren’t liable for “take-home” Covid.

In other words, if you got Covid from work and gave it to a family member, and it killed or disabled them, then it was your fault.

The 2021 Delta surge, which happened under Biden’s watch and after he declined to back his own safety administration, saw an immense wave of death and trauma. It was a direct consequence of dropping mask requirements and failing to protect workers, insisting on vaccines alone:

CDC via Hugh Wouldathunkit

So while it’s convenient to blame Trump or his court picks, Biden and his allies continuously obeyed in advance. They continuously accepted the erosion of public health without a fight. They continuously put safety on the chopping block while devoting their full attention to funding wars and trying to spin public perception of economic problems.

We’re not done yet.

The winter of 2022-2023 saw the first signs of what experts warned us about, that Covid was causing immune system disruption and damage in adults and children, and it was going to make a regular cold season far worse, especially for adolescents. In November 2022, the American Academy of Pediatrics sent a letter to Biden “begging” him to declare a national emergency on respiratory viruses, freeing up federal resources to help overwhelmed healthcare workers.

He didn’t even respond.

That winter also saw the spread of misinformation about a concept known as “immunity debt,” a carefully crafted lie that downplayed and dismissed the surge of illness in children as a consequence of pandemic “lockdowns.” News networks pushed this piece of misinformation relentlessly, even as some responsible journalists and hundreds of immunologists pushed back on it, trying to explain that the idea rested on a false understanding of scientific facts. Even The Financial Times debunked it, with several comments from immunologists:

The discussion swirling around immunity debt shows how easy it is for a plausible-sounding theory to circulate as misinformation. In this case, misinformation risks promoting the unfounded assertion that infections are clinically beneficial to children, as well as feeding the revisionist narrative that Covid measures did more harm than good.

An entire year later, the CDC finally released a report confirming what pediatricians and informed parents tried to warn everyone about, that the winter of 2022-2023 delivered record-breaking numbers of hospitalizations for children, including those under five. It took another year for studies on Covid’s immune system damage to thoroughly debunk the concept of immunity debt.

By then, it was too late.

On that note, it’s worth pointing out the FDA’s staggering failure in approving vaccines for children under five, something I remember well. While Walensky’s CDC ignored the fact that vaccinated brunch liberals were out spreading Covid, the FDA took an additional 18 months to approve vaccines for children under five, finally giving us a green light in June 2022.

In case you’re wondering, it’s now incredibly difficult to find Covid boosters for children in many cities and states. When the CDC cites low vaccine rates, they don’t mention that the vaccines simply aren’t available.

We’re still not done yet.

During the “Barbenheimer” summer of 2023, The New York Times published a piece of blatant propaganda touting a “positive milestone” as excess deaths, a crucial metric, magically dropped down below prepandemic levels. There was just one little problem here. The CDC achieved this “milestone” not through science and communication but by manipulating their own data. As many of us pointed out, the CDC announced a change to their methodology for calculating excess deaths earlier that year. Here’s the most important part:

On March 15, 2023, the methodology for estimating excess deaths was updated to account for the fact that approximately 160 weeks of data during the pandemic were being excluded in the algorithm (so that expected values were not inflated due to substantially elevated mortality during the pandemic), resulting in unstable estimates of expected weekly numbers of deaths in some cases. To account for this limitation and provide more stable estimated expected numbers for recent time periods, the Farrington surveillance algorithms (1) were first applied to data through 2020 and used to predict the expected weekly number of deaths through 2020. To estimate the expected number of deaths for 2021, weekly counts of death above the 95% prediction interval in 2020 were replaced with imputed values, assuming that deaths (on average) in 2020 reflected the expected numbers and variability predicted by the Farrington algorithm.

The CDC started including the significantly elevated mortality from 2020-2023 in their new mortality baseline. In other words, they upped their expectations. So, they cheated their way to a low mortality rate by predicting that more people would die, and of course that’s true because mild Covid has documented links to increased risk of stroke, heart disease, organ damage, immune system dysfunction, neurological disorders, and cancer. Journalists at liberal platforms presented this statistical gimmick as a clear sign that Covid was over. This is exactly what you would do if you wanted obscure data without raising eyebrows.

They made it complicated…

We have undoctored excess mortality from Our World in Data through 2024. As you can see, it never went down to prepandemic levels.

Andre Damon has done an excellent job chronicling the dismantling of the systems and tools put in place to track and monitor infections. Evan Blake and Benjamin Mateus have also covered the administration’s failures, focusing on the orchestrated degradation of wastewater monitoring and the devastating surge of disease thanks to Covid’s widely documented impact on our immune systems.

Still not done…

You might remember a ban on federal mask mandates proposed by JD Vance, our new vice president. It wouldn’t have passed without the help of 10 Democrats including Tammy Baldwin, Michael Bennet, Sherrod Brown, Tim Kaine, Mark Kelly, Jon Tester, Joe Manchin, and Amy Klobuchar. Joe Biden signed that bill into law without much protest, to “avoid a government shutdown.”

Vance gloated that the “era of public health panic is over.”

Now let’s talk about the free Covid tests the administration has been sending out, many of them expired or nearly expired. The tests vary widely in terms of accuracy in the first place. One study found that rapid test reliability can drop to 27 percent for variants since Omicron. So thanks to Biden’s health agencies, nearly 3 in 4 Americans who think they’re sick will get a false negative result, think they don’t have Covid, and then go out and infect someone. It’s no wonder so many Americans think they “just have the flu.” They might sound like idiots, but that’s because they’ve been lied to over and over again for going on four years. If they don’t bother to test anymore, it’s because the tests are shit. Even if they don’t know the statistics, they probably grasp that on an intuitive level. So, is it really their fault?

No, it’s not.

Under Biden, the FDA and NIH have largely ignored a long list of possible treatments for Long Covid and viral persistence that impact at least 20 million Americans. The list includes monoclonal antibodies that have been scrapped for emergency treatment but show a great deal of promise for working in combination with antivirals to treat post-Covid conditions. Currently, it’s sitting on shelves. The FDA has been taking its sweet time to approve Xocova (ensitrelvir), an antiviral that works better than Paxlovid, and it’s widely available in Japan. China approved HIV antivirals for Long Covid years ago, while the U.S. has done nothing. Healthcare experts and advocates have urged for clinical trials and emergency use authorization for these repurposed drugs for years, without much success.

This is what the death of public health looks like.

Now the public believes it’s good for you to get sick, that it’s necessary to train your immune system, and that the vulnerable should live in exile while everyone else welcomes “normal” at their own expense. They don’t understand how their immune system actually works, what role vaccines play, or why the Covid ones don’t offer the best protection. They don’t have access to good tools or even accurate data. By allowing this misinformation to circulate, on major news platforms no less, by echoing it in their speeches, Biden’s public health agencies created fertile ground for conspiracy theories. All of that explains why Americans don’t care anymore. They’re deeply confused, conflicted, and they’ve given up.

As this timeline shows, the Biden administration began undermining its authority and misleading the public from the moment they entered office, long before federal courts forced their hand in April 2022. The receipts show Biden and his team setting themselves up for failure while letting Republicans do the dirty work and take the blame, which only enhanced their power.

What have been the consequences of this administration’s decisions? Well, up to 25 percent of children who catch Covid go on to develop Long Covid now. One recent study has estimated that 5.8 million children in the U.S. currently suffer from the condition. As a pediatrician at NYU has said, “This is a public health crisis for children,” adding that we’re going to see the “long-term impacts of experiencing long covid in childhood for decades to come.”

Over the last four years, politicians have mounted pitiful efforts to fund Long Covid Research, the last one being the Long Covid Research Moonshot Act, which promised $1 billion a year. The Kamala Harris campaign spent more than that on podcast sets and Oprah cameos (they’re still asking for money). When facing a direct question about Long Covid, Harris chose to talk about credit scores.

It was sad.

Even after the November election, a critical CDC committee decided to go ahead and vote against recommending N95 masks in healthcare settings, deciding instead to officially equate them with surgical masks, despite years of scientific evidence that N95 respirators provide superior protection.

The CDC could’ve led the charge on truth. As biosecurity expert Philip Alvelda states, they instead chose to destroy it. They “silenced their technical staff, forbidding them from speaking publicly with the stated threat of otherwise losing their jobs and pensions.” An agency that threatens its own employees with termination and the loss of benefits for telling the truth is not an agency that cares about public health, its citizens, or basic human decency.

To rub salt in the wound, Mandy Cohen decided to go on mainstream news the same week her own agency voted against N95 masks, to warn everyone about RFK Jr, saying “the sharing of misinformation from a place of power is concerning.” Well, Mandy would know all about that.

CDC Photoshop Fail

Yes, that’s the CDC tweeting a photoshopped image of a doctor declining to wear a mask for a vulnerable patient. The patient is wearing her mask upside down. It’s not a real N95, but an earloop mask with the label “N95” pasted on the side. What was that about misinformation, Mandy?

You can place a lot of responsibility for our failed pandemic response on courts and judges for blocking some of Biden’s plans, but that only tells half the story. It doesn’t explain the lies about vaccine effectiveness. It doesn’t explain Biden wearing a mask inconsistently over the last four years, even when testing positive for Covid. It doesn’t explain why he greeted visitors “with hugs and kisses,” knowing he had Covid. It doesn’t explain why he urged states to spend their pandemic relief money on police. It doesn’t explain the Impact Research memo. It doesn’t explain the lack of funding or urgency on better vaccines and treatments.

These were choices.

As Laura Weiss recently wrote in The New Republic, “The Democrats’ current Covid-19 prevention playbook barely differs from that of Republicans, even though the World Health Organization has said… we are still in a pandemic.”

What’s my point? Am I just piling on a defeated administration? No. See, we can’t afford to spend the next four years repeating all the same mistakes, accusing our opponents of ignoring science and politicizing health while saying nothing as our own “side” does the same thing or worse. That’s not how you support public health. That’s not how you fight a pandemic, or fascism.

We can’t change anything until we understand what happened.

This is what happened.

Okay, we’re done.