this incredible 7,000 word piece digs into every decision the biden admin made regarding covid and the reasons behind them. highly recommend it. some observations:
The Biden administration, I argue, made a strategic decision to prepare for one specific pandemic scenario. In that scenario, high levels of disease and death would continue in early 2021, followed by widespread population immunity from both vaccination and prior infection. This population immunity would lower the death toll to manageable, ignorable levels, like that of seasonal flu. In this scenario, the Biden administration’s pandemic response would focus on vaccination and medical treatment while largely rejecting other public health measures – so-called “non-pharmaceutical intervention” policies ranging from contact tracing to mass testing to temporary closures of non-essential businesses.
Biden’s gamble made sense on a political level, because a more comprehensive public health response would have required new laws and regulations, many of which are costly to business owners and run the risk of energizing the far-right Republican base. Some of these measures would require support from the Senate’s slim and unreliable Democratic majority. Pursuing a comprehensive public health approach would have also involved expending political capital, which ran the risk of displacing Biden’s Build Back Better agenda.
Biden’s advisors chose a narrow path of pharmaceutical intervention because they saw the politics of a comprehensive public health response as a losing proposition. The White House did not want the pandemic to define Biden’s presidency. The virus, however, had other plans.
the far right discussed here isn’t the popular far right that we see on display during jan 6 or charlottesville, but it does overlap to some degree with them. rather, it’s the section of the american gentry that has adopted such wholesale class war as to refuse any and all compromise with labour. the former far right can only engage with the republican party on any level, and decidedly does not control it. the latter has enough power to sway both the democratic and republican party towards its will at times, as they are doing now with the covid response, by exacting a price in political capital from lawmakers during elections. it tends to be much less powerful in european countries and much more powerful in latin american ones, accounting for some of the differences you see in america’s approach to governance.
Biden’s transition team worked closely with the Rockefeller Foundation to develop a coronavirus mitigation plan for schools (it was never implemented)….
The White House has also been lobbied at various points by testing experts who asked the federal government to order more tests, but they were rebuffed. Administration officials did not want to request more money for testing from Congress, and also believed that most people in the parts of the US hit the hardest by covid (largely the South, at that point) would not want to use tests.
US mask manufacturers have lobbied the White House for the entirety of the Biden administration to use federal resources to buy N95s for the general population, and say that they are capable of producing hundreds of millions per month. Their attempts have been ignored.
in a country purely controlled by lobbyists, you would have expected efforts like this to have borne fruit in the form of government spending. instead, lobbying in america fails more often than not when the product would have some sort of societal benefit rather than just being profitable for the lobbyists. american government officials are allergic to anything that might convince americans that their state has any obligation to them and that problems might be solved by society coming together and working them out, rather than by individuals making a profit.
and those two bring me to my third thought: in general, those involved in state management always take the role of enforcer for capitalists in class warfare until forced to do otherwise by popular struggle. however, they are also supposed to mediate among capitalists to ensure long-term positive growth, and situations where they don’t are typically referred to as “failed states”. i would suggest that the reason american politicians are more willing to adhere to political dictates from the aforementioned far right rather than the sections of the business class who want a managed end to covid that also allows them to profit is because many have imbibed the ideological framework of neoliberalism so deeply that they do this reflexively and without thinking. state spending on infrastructure can often generate economic activity that exceeds the original amount spent. mainstream economics holds that this is impossible (”crowding out”). biden was involved a fair bit in the neoliberal turn through the democratic leadership council, so he has those same instincts. this leads him and those he relies on for advice to believe that spending political capital is the same way. even though broad covid measures are popular among americans (as stated in the article, 64% support mask mandates), he believes that the cost he will incur from the far right is greater than any political goodwill generated among the rest of the country. this is of course profoundly incorrect, given the amount of people who want any excuse to vote for him again at all but who are being driven to despair over the complete lack of any real benefits to them from the regime. driven to its conclusion, it will ultimately deprive the democrats of wins in 2022 and 2024.