Kamala Harris has told the Los Angeles Times that the Biden administration failed to anticipate the coronavirus variants that plague America and the rest of the world. She stated:
We didn’t see Delta coming. I think most scientists did not — upon whose advice and direction we have relied — didn’t see Delta coming. We didn’t see Omicron coming. And that’s the nature of what this, this awful virus has been, which as it turns out, has mutations and variants.
Is it really surprising that the Wuhan coronavirus has mutations and variants? As I understand it, viruses that cause flu mutate and vary. I think that’s why the flu shot is somewhat different from year to year.
Thus, it seems hard to believe that “most scientists” discounted the possibility that variants of the virus would appear. Perhaps they didn’t consider this likely, but that’s different from failing to anticipate mutations and variants. It’s the job of the president and public health officials to anticipate not just probable deadly outbreaks, but also deadly outbreaks that are reasonably possible.
Moreover, the delta variant emerged before Joe Biden and Kamala Harris took office. It was first identified in India in late 2020. By January 21, 2021, it was unreasonable to discount the real possibility that this variant would plague the U.S. And given the emergence of the delta variant, the possibility of further variants emerging should have been anticipated. (Let’s also remember that Biden declared “independence” from the virus on July 4 of this year. By then, the delta variant had been around for half a year.)
Given the nature of viruses and what was known about the delta variant by January 2001, if the Biden administration and the scientists on whom it relied did not anticipate variants, this was a major blunder. For Harris to admit that she and Biden committed the blunder is a second blunder.
If the administration did anticipate the variants, then it would seem that Harris is (1) lying and (2) doing so against Team Biden’s interests.
There’s a third possibility. Maybe the administration anticipated the very real possibility of variants emerging, but Harris was so far out of the loop that she doesn’t know this.
Regardless of which scenario one chooses, Harris comes off looking terrible.
During the same interview, Harris complained that “misinformation” has played a major role in prolonging the pandemic. She says she underestimated the role that such misinformation would play.
Harris was referring to misinformation that deters people from getting vaccinated. But, as the LA Times report on its interview with the vice president points out, Harris was one of the first to spread this sort of information:
Harris hedged when asked in September 2020 whether she would take a vaccine if it was approved before the election, saying it would be “an issue for all of us” because “I would not trust Donald Trump.”
Having helped create vaccine hesitancy, and knowing that many Blacks were already hesitant to take vaccines due to distrust of the government, Harris should have known that convincing significant segments of the population to get vaccinated would be a problem. But, as with the variants, she was clueless.
It seems like every time that Harris does an interview and much of the time that she appears in public, she makes a fool of herself and reduces her prospects of being elected president.
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