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Biden’s Pandemic Death Toll: It’s Our Own Fault

With the Omicron variant of the novel coronavirus now the latest fashion accessory among the mask-lockdown-vaccine mandate crowd, President Joe Biden unveiled on Thursday his latest plan to keep us healthy. But we’ve seen this before. While running against President Donald Trump, he promised to “shut down the virus.” He failed.

But that’s not his fault, says the Whites House press secretary. We have only ourselves to blame. We haven’t been the pliant subjects Biden was relying on us to be. We’ve disappointed our Dear Leader.

Multiple times during the 2020 campaign Biden swore that if the country would elect him, he would end the pandemic. Yet it remains. Through Jan. 20 of this year, there were 425,000 deaths attributed to COVID-19, according to Centers for Disease Control data. The total now stands at 783,000 deaths, meaning that 358,000 have lost their lives to the disease under Biden.

Yes, more died while Trump was in office, each passing a sad occasion. But vaccinations didn’t begin until there was a little more than a month left of his presidency. Biden was the beneficiary of coming into office with a vaccination campaign already underway. And still death comes.

We won’t blame Biden for the fatalities. We understand that no one man or institution can shut down the coronavirus. But he should be dinged for his outright lie when he promised the country he’d end the pandemic. Either he knew he couldn’t do it, and intentionally misled voters, or he is dense enough to have believed his own words.

Neither possibilities reflect well on him.

On Monday, responding to the Omicron variant of the COVID virus, Biden said: “A year ago America was floundering against the first variant of Covid,” implying once again that he was responsible for America’s rapid response to the pandemic, including the rollout of the vaccines.

This, of course, is utterly false.

As Peter Loftus of the Wall Street Journal reported a year ago this week, “Defying the predictions of people like Joe Biden and Anthony Fauci, the pharmaceutical industry, with a huge assist from the Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed, … just pulled off an enormous scientific triumph.”

That’s hardly “floundering.” But now we’re expected to forget that and blame ourselves for the Wuhan bug’s fatal spread, not the Biden administration, despite its failed policies of lockdowns, masking and compulsory vaccinations.

“We need the American people to do more — who are not vaccinated — to help us continue to fight the virus,” press secretary Jen Psaki said Wednesday when asked about Biden’s promise to shut down the virus, not the economy.

“Approximately 20% of the population or more people than are currently vaccinated” need “to go get vaccinated and go get boosted.”

That sounds nothing like “I’m going to shut down the virus.” Sounds more like someone trying to reason away the lie they’d just been caught in.

Imagine if Trump had made such a promise that couldn’t be kept. The press would have devoured him, same as every Democrat who stepped in front of a camera or microphone.

But he didn’t. Biden did. And the country is much worse off because enough voters believed him.

— Written by the I&I Editorial Board

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I & I Editorial Board

The Issues and Insights Editorial Board has decades of experience in journalism, commentary and public policy.

4 comments

  • Joe Biden is not a virologist nor an epidemiologist. He is a four decade denizen of the Beltway, a glad-hander who massages facts and manipulates truth to his own ends. His ignorance of the science is magnified by the rapidly mutating coronavirus that bedevils the globe. His rosy predictions deceive us and may be the political quicksand that sinks his future prospects. He is at base a chronic politician seeking plaudits, not an enlightened leader endeavoring to learn and educate.

  • First of all, you have to remember that even the CDC itself has publicly stated only 6% of the “death toll” number is directly related to COVID. This scary virus is actually no worse than a bad flu season.

    • Very true. There’s a big difference between people who died With Covid-19 and people who died From Covid-19. Naturally the fear-mongers prefer the first statistic. I might add, when it comes to vaccine effectiveness, they also prefer to talk about Relative Risk Reduction (RRR) of 94.0% utilized in reporting of vaccine effectiveness instead of the Absolute Risk Reduction (ARR) of less than 1.0%. Not to mention the hugely inflated case numbers resulting from the high percentage of false positives produced by the discredited PCR tests.

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