Post by Nadica (She/Her) on Aug 15, 2024 0:02:03 GMT
Has COVID-19 Finally Escaped Political Gravity? - Published Aug 14, 2024
There’s a rule on the internet that the answer to a headline that ends in a question mark is always “no.” We’re not breaking that rule today, but we’re bending it: The answer here is: “no, but.”
The United States is in the grips of a COVID-19 summer surge. It’s not as bad as past winter surges, and it’s nothing like the crisis four years ago, when a vaccine had not yet rolled out and the weekly pandemic death toll in America ran in the thousands.
But the surge doesn’t seem to be factoring into any national political rhetoric. That’s obviously partly due to the much lower mortality: The disease was the third-leading cause of death in the United States in 2020 and 2021, fell to fourth in 2022, and in 2023 has slipped to 10th.
Another reason? President Joe Biden’s White House and former President Donald Trump both seem content to take a victory lap … in inevitably different ways.
“I never got the credit that we really deserved on what we did with COVID,” Trump said Monday night in a conversation with Elon Musk, streamed on Musk’s X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. “Many more people died during [Biden’s] administration of COVID than during my administration.” (This isn’t inaccurate, based on federal tallies of deaths among U.S. residents, though it’s fair to note Biden has been in office for a longer COVID-era period than Trump.)
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre offered her version Monday.
“When [Biden] stepped in as president, this country was paralyzed because the economy was falling and because of COVID,” she said. “We are in a different place with this pandemic. It is behind us. And that’s because of this president and what he was able to do.”
COVID-19 and 2024
That doesn’t mean the presidential campaigns aren’t trying to score points related to COVID-19. They are.
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, the Democratic pick for vice president, regularly alludes to Trump’s record on the pandemic in his stump speech.
“He froze in the face of COVID, and our neighbors died because of it,” Walz said in Las Vegas on Aug. 10, in one typical example. “By not addressing COVID, he drove our economy into the ground.”
Decision Points isn’t taking a partisan position when we say that whatever else Trump did, he facilitated the development of COVID-19 vaccines at unprecedented speed. (Disclosure: The scientist who led that operation, Moncef Slaoui, is a friend.)
It’s politically tricky for Trump in that his base doesn’t think highly of the vaccine – and some even booed him in late 2021 when he said he’d received a booster. Biden also had to figure out a plan to overcome Republican wariness about getting vaccinated.
On the Republican side, the Trump campaign sent an email last week that highlighted Walz’s record on COVID-19, including the establishment of a hotline where people could report others for not abiding by social distancing guidelines, along with additional efforts to mitigate the spread of the virus. Another potential line of attack: school closures, which harmed student learning.
We’re Not ‘Post-Pandemic’
You get a lot of, um, “interesting” emails and social media feedback if you use the term “post-pandemic.” Or so I hear.
But let’s be clear:
For many immunocompromised people, there is no true “post-pandemic” reality.
Ditto for those suffering from long COVID – marked by lasting symptoms, sometimes debilitating and sometimes for years, after an initial COVID infection.
That’s even without taking into account the surge. Or the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention characterizing COVID-19 as endemic, meaning it’s going to be around indefinitely.
A Link to Terrorism (No, Really, Hear Me Out)
In some ways, as I predicted in 2021, the pandemic looks a bit like terrorism. After 9/11, fears of terrorism were rampant and politicians constantly invoked extremist violence. Today, there is obviously still terrorism, but it generally affects specific groups – there’s no final “victory” over it, there never was going to be, but it doesn’t fuel widespread fears.
In August 2024, COVID-19 is obviously very much still with us. But it, too, severely affects a far narrower proportion of the population than it did in 2020.
That’s not to play down either phenomenon.
It’s just to say that the pandemic is still with us. But pandemic politics have understandably changed.
There’s a rule on the internet that the answer to a headline that ends in a question mark is always “no.” We’re not breaking that rule today, but we’re bending it: The answer here is: “no, but.”
The United States is in the grips of a COVID-19 summer surge. It’s not as bad as past winter surges, and it’s nothing like the crisis four years ago, when a vaccine had not yet rolled out and the weekly pandemic death toll in America ran in the thousands.
But the surge doesn’t seem to be factoring into any national political rhetoric. That’s obviously partly due to the much lower mortality: The disease was the third-leading cause of death in the United States in 2020 and 2021, fell to fourth in 2022, and in 2023 has slipped to 10th.
Another reason? President Joe Biden’s White House and former President Donald Trump both seem content to take a victory lap … in inevitably different ways.
“I never got the credit that we really deserved on what we did with COVID,” Trump said Monday night in a conversation with Elon Musk, streamed on Musk’s X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. “Many more people died during [Biden’s] administration of COVID than during my administration.” (This isn’t inaccurate, based on federal tallies of deaths among U.S. residents, though it’s fair to note Biden has been in office for a longer COVID-era period than Trump.)
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre offered her version Monday.
“When [Biden] stepped in as president, this country was paralyzed because the economy was falling and because of COVID,” she said. “We are in a different place with this pandemic. It is behind us. And that’s because of this president and what he was able to do.”
COVID-19 and 2024
That doesn’t mean the presidential campaigns aren’t trying to score points related to COVID-19. They are.
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, the Democratic pick for vice president, regularly alludes to Trump’s record on the pandemic in his stump speech.
“He froze in the face of COVID, and our neighbors died because of it,” Walz said in Las Vegas on Aug. 10, in one typical example. “By not addressing COVID, he drove our economy into the ground.”
Decision Points isn’t taking a partisan position when we say that whatever else Trump did, he facilitated the development of COVID-19 vaccines at unprecedented speed. (Disclosure: The scientist who led that operation, Moncef Slaoui, is a friend.)
It’s politically tricky for Trump in that his base doesn’t think highly of the vaccine – and some even booed him in late 2021 when he said he’d received a booster. Biden also had to figure out a plan to overcome Republican wariness about getting vaccinated.
On the Republican side, the Trump campaign sent an email last week that highlighted Walz’s record on COVID-19, including the establishment of a hotline where people could report others for not abiding by social distancing guidelines, along with additional efforts to mitigate the spread of the virus. Another potential line of attack: school closures, which harmed student learning.
We’re Not ‘Post-Pandemic’
You get a lot of, um, “interesting” emails and social media feedback if you use the term “post-pandemic.” Or so I hear.
But let’s be clear:
For many immunocompromised people, there is no true “post-pandemic” reality.
Ditto for those suffering from long COVID – marked by lasting symptoms, sometimes debilitating and sometimes for years, after an initial COVID infection.
That’s even without taking into account the surge. Or the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention characterizing COVID-19 as endemic, meaning it’s going to be around indefinitely.
A Link to Terrorism (No, Really, Hear Me Out)
In some ways, as I predicted in 2021, the pandemic looks a bit like terrorism. After 9/11, fears of terrorism were rampant and politicians constantly invoked extremist violence. Today, there is obviously still terrorism, but it generally affects specific groups – there’s no final “victory” over it, there never was going to be, but it doesn’t fuel widespread fears.
In August 2024, COVID-19 is obviously very much still with us. But it, too, severely affects a far narrower proportion of the population than it did in 2020.
That’s not to play down either phenomenon.
It’s just to say that the pandemic is still with us. But pandemic politics have understandably changed.