So Biden Has Covid

The White House announced today that Joe Biden has tested positive for covid. There is nothing surprising or particularly newsworthy about this, apart from the fact that, given his age and degree of frailty, Biden is in a relatively high risk group. Given the number of White House employees who have contracted covid over the past year and a half, if anything it is a bit remarkable that it took Biden this long to catch the bug.

While not really newsworthy, this is an appropriate occasion to remember that during the 2020 presidential campaign, Biden took advantage of covid hysteria and misinformation from the CDC to lay the entire epidemic at President Trump’s door. In a presidential debate, he blamed President Trump for every American covid death:

“Anyone who is responsible for that many deaths should not remain as President of the United States of America.” At the time the U.S. had recorded 220,000 Covid deaths.

Biden also campaigned on promises to stop the covid virus: “I will shut down the virus,” “I will beat this virus.”

Since Biden became president, more than 750,000 Americans have died from (or with) covid, per the CDC. If you take Biden’s election rhetoric seriously, he bears responsibility for those 750,000 deaths. And maybe we should take it seriously, because without covid and the ensuing panic, and without Biden’s wild covid claims and promises, he would not have been elected president.

Of course, all of this is now forgotten. The press has done nothing to hold Biden accountable either for his campaign excesses, or for his performance with regard to the virus–unlike Donald Trump, whose actions with regard to covid were relentlessly and critically scrutinized, right up to the moment when Biden won the election, at which point it was “mission accomplished” and all accountability ceased.

So it is fitting for Biden’s own contracting of the disease to provide a coda to a shameless story of political opportunism and press malpractice.

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