It seems ironic that the President now claims there is “no federal solution” to fight Covid just days after he released a federal solution… to fight Covid. Granted, Biden’s late-December push to fund rapid testing development seems like a wash already given that none of the results will be seen until late January, at best.
Truthfully, with Biden at the helm of the government health bureaucracy, there doesn’t really appear to be any federal solution to fight Covid other than trying to force a Covid-19 vaccination on every man, woman, and child. So far, with plenty of breakthrough infections among the vaccinated, that doesn’t appear to be a true “solution” in the sense that it’s not stopping the spread.
Biden’s comments regarding federal versus state solutions came in the context of speaking with governors earlier this week:
On Monday, Biden said that there wasn’t a solution by the federal government to end the nearly two-year-old pandemic in response to Arkansas Republican Governor Asa Hutchinson warning the president against letting “federal solutions stand in the way of state solutions.”
“There is no federal solution. This gets solved at the state level,” Biden responded, before mentioning another Republican governor.
“I’m looking at [New Hampshire] Gov. [Chris] Sununu on the board here. He talks about that a lot,” Biden said. “And it ultimately gets down to where the rubber meets the road and that’s where the patient is in need of help, or preventing the need for help.”
That seems like an abrupt change for the Biden-Harris administration. Especially since Biden, as a candidate, spent the entire campaign bludgeoning President Trump over the federal Covid response. Biden had such grand plans to “shut down the virus” rather than the country. So far, and more importantly at this clutch omicron/delta moment, Biden has failed spectacularly at bringing about any successful or groundbreaking federal response.
Biden tried to re-state his position on Tuesday by walking back the “no federal solution” talk and making it more of a pep talk for governors:
My Administration has the back of every governor fighting COVID-19 in their state. Last week, I rolled out a federal plan to tackle Omicron by adding vaccination and booster capacity, hospital equipment, staff, and more.
We’re going to get through this by working together.
— President Biden (@POTUS) December 28, 2021
In a sense, this is Biden admitting defeat that the federal government cannot mandate its way out of a pandemic. It’s also Biden admitting defeat that he hasn’t brought anything new to the table since his inauguration. The innovations, beyond smacking everyone in the face with vaccines, have all been at the state level, despite Biden getting in the way.
There’s no overstating how much of a boon this is for people like Gov. Ron DeSantis, one of Biden’s potential foes in 2024. For Biden to openly admit that states can do a better job fighting Covid than the federal government is to admit his campaign plan was built on a hill of lies.
This all begs the question, however, why Biden has continued pushing federal solutions to a problem that can only be solved by states. When did Biden come to this conclusion? His executive order vaccine mandates continue to be struck down and could be wiped away entirely within a couple of weeks by the Supreme Court.
The ironic part here, not mentioned, is that there clearly is a role for the federal government to play. That role is not to play dictator by forcing everyone to get vaccinated or risk losing their jobs. It’s to keep the economy open and provide tools like ubiquitous at-home testing to empower individuals and households. It’s to fund innovative treatments, like Paxlovid, and other anti-viral agents that have extremely high success rates of averting severe illness after a positive Covid test.
In short, this is a “reset” of Biden’s Covid war. One that he clearly wasn’t prepared to fight beyond his Trump-bashing rhetoric during the campaign. More Covid deaths occurred in 2021 than compared to 2020, which means whatever Biden has been doing hasn’t been working any better or worse than the previous administration.
If only Biden had been working closely with governors from the beginning rather than fighting with them, we’d be in a better position than we are now. Covid-19 was supposed to be one of Biden’s strong points. Right now, it’s looking like another unmitigated disaster at the hands of the incompetent Biden-Harris administration.
