Biden, and Harris, should she turn up for work, now own the pandemic. When they beat Donald Trump, they won the booby prize: building back better with the Trump-made materials of Operation Warp Speed. Success has many fathers: Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson have done a bang-up job of dictating federal policy and creating what looks like a franchise for a creeping new regime of annual and increasingly mandatory shots. But failure is an orphan — and Biden doesn’t want to be left holding the baby.

More people died in Biden’s first year than in Trump’s last. His signature move, an executive order ordering the compulsory vaccination of federal employees and workers in large corporations, wasn’t worth the paper it was written on. Nothing accrues power to politicians’ hands faster than panic. It is a sign of this administration’s ineptitude that it can’t even sow panic proficiently. The federal government continues to contrive new ways of failing the public. How, two years on, can pharmacies be out of home-testing kits? How can Dr. Jill let us down so badly?

Meanwhile, Biden coughs his mysteriously enduring cough and croaks out his absurdly angry promises to deliver the speedy responses that he promised to deliver two years ago in The Biden Plan — as if anyone would believe him now. His shucking off of responsibility to the states isn’t a bold initiative: it’s a cynical surrender. The states have already taken the lead, and are already imposing a crazy quilt of policies on their publics.