Coyote Blog

Joe Biden is kind of stuck on COVID.  He campaigned on all the things Trump did wrong in his COVID response, but the only policy step of note that I can see that Biden has done differently is to issue a mask mandate for all federal property where Trump eschewed making NPI mandates at the Federal level, preferring to leave it to state and local governments based on their local conditions.  If this is really the case, expect Biden to be about the last man standing on government mask mandates, at least in the US.  My guess is that he will use continued cases or low vaccine rates in some state as an excuse to say that he can't drop the mandate until everyone in the US is ready  (forgetting how insane this is particularly when a more logical Federalist solution exists for the problem).

Biden is trying to claim credit for vaccination rates but it is hard to think of anything he has actually done to boost these rates since most all vaccines are administered by local folks and the vaccines were developed and funded on Trump's watch.  The only major decision Biden has made, which I actually think was a setback, was to declare that the US would not take a first doses first strategy used so successfully in the UK.  Biden has declared a goal of 100 vaccines in 100 days, but this is pretty much meaningless, the equivalent of a random dude running to the front of a parade and claim to be leading it.  Someone in his shop merely took a chart and of vaccination rates and projected it forward and determined about 100 million looked like they would be done in 100 days and so adopted this as a goal, hoping to retroactively convince people they caused this rather than just predicted it.  I would love someone in the press to ask Biden to name three things his Administration did that measurably accelerated the vaccination pace.

Like many, I find Trump irritating and distasteful and I have trouble saying nice things about him but he got a range of vaccines funded and got the US first in line for doses by pre-paying.  Its hard to think of anyone else who did more to help the crisis.  This helps me forget things like the botched testing development, which was really the FDA's and the CDC's fault but a different leader might have kicked those agencies out of their obstinate blocking role and into a more productive mode.

UPDATE:  I will add that the recent CDC / FDA decision to stop the J&J vaccine due to a 1 in a million non-fatal side effect seems like a terrible decision.  Again, possibly not Biden's decision, but like my criticism of Trump and testing, Biden could exercise some leadership here.  This is the price for fetishizing the CDC and FDA as all-knowing consensus voices of "science" that are not to be doubted, even to the point of having heterodox youtube videos taken down.  Because 1) These guys like Fauci are not scientists per se, but government bureaucrats with science degrees.  And as I have written many many times, government employees have incentives that lead to high risk aversion for acts of commission and low risk aversion for acts of omission.  Which means they put much higher weight on a death from a very easy to count and identify side effect that they could have stopped by stopping the vaccine than they do on deaths that are impossible to count or to see that were caused by the vaccine delay.  And 2) the idea of "scientific consensus" is a chimera and a term only used by non-scientists and a small group of government scientists that want to wield their position as a club to exercise power.  Seriously, how does such a consensus even exist if one side never was allowed to debate?  This is consensus as defined by Stalin or Mao.