Once Delta arrived in earnest, for instance, there was no national attempt to do something truly radical to reach the unvaccinated. (Paying out large vaccine bonuses was the wild idea that I and others floated at the time.) Instead it was back to masking and full speed ahead with a federal vaccine mandate that’s been litigated ever since — the former imposing dubious Covid theater on heavily-vaccinated blue states, the latter further solidifying the Covid culture war.
Similarly, the administration hasn’t shown all that much creativity or urgency around the distribution and approval of therapeutic treatments — both the ones we have, monoclonal antibodies especially, and the ones we might have soon, like the promising Paxlovid pill from Pfizer. As winter nears the White House is promising “strike teams” (presumably like those deployed by Ron DeSantis in Florida over the summer) to help with antibody treatment. But amid the summer wave, American hospitals nationwide had used only about half of the monoclonal antibody supply distributed to them — a failure of public-health organization that if it had happened under Trump would have been laid instantly at his administration’s feet.
And here a contrast is worth noting: Trump’s rhetoric during the pandemic was an utter disaster and his White House made all manner of mistakes, but the Trump team did some big things well outside the usual Republican comfort zone — the economic rescue package and (above all) Operation Warp Speed. Whereas when Covid failed to weaken as expected, the Biden team was more cautious, predictable and slow.
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