Recap of Biden approach to COVID

Feldman

How did we get in a situation where a Democratic president — who ran, in part, against Trump’s horrid pandemic response — is letting the virus rip? How did we get to a point where a key organizer of the Great Barrington Declaration, a right-wing libertarian campaign opposed to public health measures, has stated that Republican and Democratic states alike have adopted policies in line with their philosophy? As hospitals fill up around the country, why are political leaders doing nothing to at least try to ‘flatten the curve’?

The Biden administration, I argue, made a strategic decision to prepare for one specific pandemic scenario. In that scenario, high levels of disease and death would continue in early 2021, followed by widespread population immunity from both vaccination and prior infection. This population immunity would lower the death toll to manageable, ignorable levels, like that of seasonal flu.

Biden’s advisors chose a narrow path of pharmaceutical intervention because they saw the politics of a comprehensive public health response as a losing proposition. The White House did not want the pandemic to define Biden’s presidency. The virus, however, had other plans.

public health’s response to the decline   

From 2014, about the aftermath of the financial crisis, but still relevant 

Short answer, “Serve the 1%”

American institutions are in decline and rife with corruption brought on by a combination of hitting the limits to growth while under the control of neoliberal capitalism[i]. To the extent one deviates from the appearance and demeanor of staid white middle or upper class norms, an encounter with the police in many localities[ii],[iii],[iv] can be dangerous to ones person and pocket[v]. The government’s reaction to the “the most destructive epidemics of elite financial frauds in history”[vi] has been to further enrich[vii] –rather than jail- financiers,[viii] and protection of the banks continues to harm and ruin the lives of millions of citizens.