When President Biden was diagnosed with COVID, suddenly The Washington Post motto shifted from “Democracy Dies In Darkness” to “We’re Walking On Sunshine.” The positive spin was aerobic.
Post columnist Leana Wen stood out with a piece on Thursday headlined “Biden’s covid diagnosis is a teaching moment for the country.” She began: “President Biden’s Covid-19 diagnosis is an opportunity for his administration to demonstrate the success of his leadership on the pandemic and what living with the coronavirus looks like.”
The fact that Biden contracted the coronavirus should not be surprising at all….given the number of public events he has attended and his proclivity for hugging and shaking hands. His symptoms so far are mild, and they will likely stay that way.
So Biden has been a “success” on the pandemic even though more Americans have died during Biden’s presidency than during Trump’s! Dr. Wen never mentioned the vaccines that they imply as Biden’s success were developed and rolled out under Trump.
She just wrote “Biden should use his illness as an opportunity to inform the public that Covid-19 is a manageable disease for almost everyone, so long as they use the tools available to them.”
The Post also ignored any mention of vaccine development under Trump in this article by Joel Achenbach and Lenny Bernstein: “President Biden, double-boosted, is in a good position to fight covid.“
The second U.S. president infected by the coronavirus is in a much more favorable position to fight covid-19 than the first.
When President Donald Trump was sickened in October 2020 — before the rollout of vaccines — he experienced covid symptoms severe enough to send him to the hospital as doctors scrambled to administer an array of medicines for a patient whose oxygen level had dropped to dangerous levels.
But President Biden, who tested positive for the coronavirus Thursday, has been fully vaccinated and twice-boosted, as recommended for people his age, and has an excellent chance of avoiding the most severe outcomes from covid, according to doctors interviewed Thursday.
Then came fervently liberal Philip Bump, with “Biden’s covid diagnosis shows the benefits of avoiding infection.” Like Wen, Bump said the positive test was inevitable because he meets all these people and travels all over.
When Donald Trump was president, his favored approach (manifested in advisers like radiologist Scott Atlas) was to simply return to normal as much as possible, allowing rampant infection to build population immunity. But that meant millions of people contracting the virus before vaccines and before effective therapeutics — so it meant hundreds of thousands of deaths.
Avoiding contracting the virus for as long as possible, as Biden did, means having the best chance at a quick and full recovery.
Bump has a newsletter titled “How To Read This Chart,” and he ran charts showing how much fewer deaths are occurring under the new Covid variants. But he wasn’t going to show anybody a chart that matches Trump’s “hundreds of thousands of deaths” with Biden’s “MORE hundreds of thousands of deaths.”
As we know, every death under Trump was on Trump (and his advisers). Every death under Biden has nothing to do with Biden and his “successful leadership of the pandemic.”
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