Biden and COVID: A C-minus to be Generous

 

A week or two ago, I could see COVID test kits on at least some pharmacy shelves.  In some places they were sold out, in some they were locked up and controlled, and in some places still plentiful. Currently they are sold out at stores, though still available online.  I felt mixed about this. Present on the shelves meant people were not buying enough.  Sold out meant not enough were being made.  Other countries have test kits everywhere.  Why can't we?

Vanity Fair and the Washington Post are running stories on the Biden Administration's abject failure to make tests cheap and plentiful, as they are in many other countries.  Biden's excuse -- the omicron wave was not foreseeable.  Maybe not, but the problem was obvious well before the omicron wave began.  It should have been obvious when Israel and the United Kingdom, ahead of us in vaccinations, began having a secondary wave of breakthrough infections.  It should certainly have been apparent when the delta wave began this summer.  I am no expert, but I have been beating this drum since August.  Public health experts have been making the argument from the start of the Administration.  And now Biden says he wishes he had acted two months ago. No, you should have acted at least six months ago.  I can excuse thinking that a vaccine that appeared 90% effective would be sufficient.  But by June it was apparent from evidence in Israel that immunity began to wane after about six months, and the delta variant was on the march.  At that point, it should have been apparent that vaccines alone would not be sufficient and you should have started looking at other options.

Vanity Fair outlines some of the bureaucratic obstacles to a better testing regimen:

Difficulties include a regulatory gauntlet intent on vetting devices for exquisite sensitivity, rather than public-health utility; a medical fiefdom in which doctors tend to view patient test results as theirs alone to convey; and a policy suspicion, however inchoate, that too many rapid tests might somehow signal to wary Americans that they could test their way through the pandemic and skip vaccinations altogether. These are obstacles.  They are not excuses.  The whole point of effective leadership is to cut through this sort of red tape.  A good start would be to free the tests from the FDA by reclassifying them as public health, rather than medical.  If that didn't release enough tests onto the market, invoke the Defense Production Act.  If that was still not enough, go on the same wartime footing for tests as for vaccines. 

And while the recent focus has been on tests there are other measures that Biden could have taken as well -- measures such as expanding production and distribution of N-95 masks, offering financial support for quarantines, improving ventilation, or ensuring that vaccination is international and world-wide.  That last is particularly important. Done right, it just might have prevented the delta and omicron variants from developing at all.

A few things I will say in Biden's defense.  First, the failure to get India and South Africa vaccinated in time to stop delta and omicron was the whole world's fault and not ours alone.  Second, omicron will probably swamp any possible testing response, no matter how good.  And, finally, regardless of what Biden did, it would no doubt become a culture war issue and meet with aggressive right-wing attempts to block it.  More on that in my next post.