Joe Biden's COVID Hubris is the Nail in His Re-Elect Coffin

It's an appropriate end for a politician who mused that he "stopped thinking about" COVID as it killed hundreds of thousands of Americans

On June 27, Joe Biden’s gave the debate performance that launched a thousand think pieces.

Biden sounded confused, his responses were garbled, meandering; frankly, he exhibited signs of significant cognitive decline since we’d last seen him on the debate stage in 2020. Everyone from the Democratic-Party-fanboy-hosts of Pod Save America to the Democratic-Party-monster-fundraiser George Clooney were publicly calling on Biden to step down.

But on July 5, 81-year-old Joe Biden was as firm as ever in an interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, insisting he had no plans to withdraw from the race. He stated:

Look, I mean, if the Lord Almighty came down and said, ‘Joe, get outta the race,’ I’d get outta the race. The Lord Almighty’s not comin’ down.

On July 18, Joe Biden tested positive for COVID-19. Despite having symptoms, he’d spent the morning shaking hands with voters and workers before bothering to test during yet another massive surge of the virus; we won’t be getting breathless health updates about the peasants he exposed, nor will those infected be receiving any of the free medical treatment the President received from the comfort of his isolation bed, in his vacation home. The New York Times reported that he looked ill and unsteady as he walked to Air Force One (maskless) and was helped into his limousine, then carted back to his beach house in Rehoboth.

On July 19, Biden tweeted that he was “stuck at home with COVID”; most Americans, of course, have to return to work while ill these days, even when experiencing symptoms. His administration has thoroughly minimized the illness, with his former COVID response coordinator calling masking “fringe", and his CDC encouraging people to end isolation when they’ve been without a fever for one day, a standard that has absolutely no scientific relationship to infectiousness. (Amidst the wall-to-wall minimizing and ever-changing guidance, most employers interpret this most recent update to mean “no isolation”).

Two days later, on July 21, Biden dropped out of his Presidential re-election campaign, sight-unseen, via a tweeted statement. The statement made reference to a pandemic he apparently beat during his time in office. (According to the World Health Organization, COVID-19 is still a pandemic. Individual nations do not have the power to declare nor end pandemics, which are definitionally global.)

He has not appeared publicly since, although he did call into a Harris campaign event briefly via phone. He has completed his fifth day of treatment with Paxlovid, the COVID anti-viral medication that politicians on the Hill pop like candy, and his doctor reports that he is doing well.

His infection and subsequent departure from the trail at a time when his age and fitness had become public flashpoints, however, were certainly the nail in the coffin for his flailing campaign. It was a poetically appropriate end for Biden, who, as hundreds of thousands died on his watch, alternated between ignoring COVID, joking about it, mocking masks, and appearing ignorant of the strict COVID protocols that his staff used to protect him for years while his administration unwound protections for everybody else.

In fact, in order to meet with or be in the room with Joe Biden at all, you had to submit to PCR testing for COVID-19 right up until this past March; it only took four months of life in the "new normal” he’d thrust the rest of us into years ago for Biden to get a taste of his own medicine. Disrupted professional plans and acute illnesses which resolve are, of course, on the milder end of the consequences we’ve collectively had to endure since deciding to try and ignore COVID away, rather than mitigating and eliminating it.

Most Americans have been subjected to at least a handful of forcible infections at the hands of our employers, schools, and healthcare institutions, thanks to minimizing messaging from top, which was propped up by sycophantic media coverage. As bodies continued to pile up and disturbing studies continued to emerge, our mainstream press urged the public to keep calm and carry on with returning to the office and abandoning every mitigation, leading to uncontrolled wave after uncontrolled wave washing over the country.

The official CDC COVID-19 death count is now 1,197,212 Americans, a sure undercount. 400,000 of those deaths occurred under Trump. You’d expect Biden to remember that number since he and Kamala Harris held a memorial event for the dead complete with 400 lights illuminating the reflecting pool the night before his inauguration. That leaves 797,212 dead since he took office. (No memorials for them as of yet.)

But Team Biden, as with most things COVID-related, appears confused about the pandemic death toll under Trump, conflating those who died after he left office with those who died before, recently tweeting that Trump talked about “injecting bleach” while “over a million Americans died.”

Trump, in his own right an anti-science mass-murderer, talked (vaguely, oddly) about bleach in April 2020. We crossed a million Americans dead of COVID in May of 2022, nearly a year and a half after Joe Biden was inaugurated as President of the United States, after the deadly “let it rip” Delta and Omicron reopening waves. According to Team Biden’s confused timeline, Trump somehow talked about bleach while presiding over deaths that happened two years later. It’s the kind of lie that feels worthy of media coverage, if only the media hadn’t spent three plus years sort of vaguely implying no one is dying of COVID anymore.

And of course, despite what the minimizers would have us believe, death is not the only negative outcome of COVID, nor the only reason it’s poor public health policy to let a virus spread unmitigated year-round.

Since 2020, millions have developed Long COVID as disability in the workforce spikes.

Data courtesy FRED, graph by Charles S. Gascon, Samuel Moore

Unmitigated spread leads inevitably to the rapid evolution of new, immune evasive variants, which means less vaccine efficacy for shorter periods of time. This information feels relevant to a strategy that relies heavily on vaccine efficacy!

Hospital systems continue to suffer staff shortages, record wait times, emergency room overwhelm, and general collapse during COVID waves, while reporting on the topic attempts to ignore unprecedented viral illness globally.

Workers are taking a record number of sick days, schools are recording a record number of absences, yet politicians, pundits and reporters continue to double down on the failed vaccine-only strategy that can produce nothing but an endless series of waves, crashing over an ever sicker, weaker, more disabled population. We’re barely on our feet again after JN.1 before the KP.1, KP.2, KP.3, LB.1 quadruple-whammy takes us out at the knees.

Meanwhile, studies (hundreds of them) find evidence of cognitive damage, heart damage, immune system damage, and more, even following mild COVID infections. (Probably worth mentioning, Joe, that COVID can both trigger processes of cognitive decline, and accelerate them, particularly in older adults).

Even as Long COVID research now points to viral persistence, autoimmunity, and endothelial damage, we are, more than ever before, expected to expose ourselves to a variety pack of variants. In fact, refusal to accept forcible exposure is to accept indefinite expulsion from public life, and any attempts to avoid infection will certainly be mocked if not criminalized.

Biden himself is a prime example of the type of person I spoke about in my most recent personal essay. While we’re assured that we’re simply in a “new phase” of the pandemic, where we all have access to a glorious toolbox of mitigations that we can use based on our relative levels of risk, we do not see any such risk calculations reflected in public behaviors. We instead see people in obvious risk categories behaving as if they are not in obvious risk categories, because the public messaging has pushed so thoroughly for denialism over adaptation.

People like Joe Biden.

Why, in year five of a pandemic (as declared by the World Health Organization) did Biden and his team believe that an 81-year-old man should be exposed to a virus that the CDC explicitly states is risky for people over the age of 65 to contract?

Why, in year five of a pandemic, do Biden and his team believe that wearing masks to stop the spread of disease is a “fringe” practice rather than something that protects other people who may not have paid leave, Paxlovid on hand, doctors on call, a plane on the tarmac and a limo on the landing strip?

Why, in year five of a pandemic, did Biden and his team strip away a test requirement to meet with Biden? Was it because after shoving the rest of us into the inescapable whirlwind of forever COVID, it was no longer feasible for Biden to run a Presidential campaign from the last safe place for medically vulnerable people in the country, the Oval Office?

Why didn’t Biden’s team instruct him to wear a mask on the campaign trail? Is it because instead of normalizing disease mitigation, they encouraged an environment of utter denialism that harms and kills seniors like Joe every single day?

The truth is that to the DC machine, Joe was, just like the rest of us, ultimately disposable. He served his purpose by serving capital; his maskless face as an elderly man in public was the ultimate propaganda for the disappearance of the virus that ended his career as surely as he claimed to have ended it. He gave his career, his body and his mind to advance the interests of the ruling class, to the detriment of us all. They say life’s a beach, Joe. I guess it is for you, now.