WASHINGTON — Dr. Rochelle Walensky was stunned. Working from her home outside Boston on a Friday night in late July, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had just learned from members of her staff that vaccinated Americans were spreading the coronavirus.Vaccines had been the core of President Biden’s pandemic strategy from the moment he took office. But as Dr. Walensky was briefed about a cluster of breakthrough cases in Provincetown, Mass., the reality sank in. The Delta variant, which had ravaged other parts of the world, was taking hold in the United States. And being vaccinated would not, it turned out, prevent people from becoming infected with the variant or transmitting it.It was a “heart sink” moment, Dr. Walensky recalled in a recent interview. The discovery called into question the Biden administration’s almost single-minded focus on vaccination as the path out of the pandemic. And it made Mr. Biden’s July 4 message that the nation had moved “closer than ever to declaring our independence from a deadly virus” sound naïve.Mr. Biden took office last January with a 200-page coronavirus response strategy, promising a “full-scale wartime effort” rooted in science and competence. The C.D.C.’s July discovery marked the point at which the virus began ruthlessly exposing the challenges it would present to his management of the pandemic.Image
About 17 million children between the ages of 12 and 15 became eligible for the vaccine in May.Credit...Christopher Capozziello for The New York TimesMr. Biden and his team have gotten much right, including getting at least one dose of a vaccine into nearly 85 percent of Americans 12 and older and rolling out live-saving treatments. Those achievements have put the United States in a far better place to combat the virus than it was a year ago, with most schools and businesses open and the death rate lower because the vaccine significantly reduces the chance of illness or death, even from the highly contagious Omicron variant.But an examination of Mr. Biden’s first year of fighting the virus — based on interviews with scores of current and former administration officials, public health experts and governors — shows how his effort to confront “one of the most formidable enemies America has ever faced,” as he recently described it, has been marked by setbacks in three key areas:The White House bet the pandemic would follow a straight line, and was unprepared for the sharp turns it took. The administration did not anticipate the nature and severity of variants, even after clear warning signals from the rest of the world. And it continued to focus almost single-mindedly on vaccinations even after it became clear that the shots could not always prevent the spread of disease.The administration lacked a sustained focus on testing, not moving to sharply increase the supply of at-home Covid tests until the fall, with Delta tearing through the country and Omicron on its way. The lack of foresight left Americans struggling to find tests that could quickly determine if they were infected.The president tiptoed around an organized Republican revolt over masks, mandates, vaccine passports and even the vaccine itself, as he worried that pushing certain containment measures would only worsen an already intractable cultural and political divide in the country. The nation’s precarious economic health, and the political blowback that Mr. Biden and members of his party could face if it worsened, made him all the more cautious. So rather than forcing Americans to get shots, he spent months struggling to accomplish it through persuasion.Mr. Biden took over the task of distributing vaccines from former President Donald J. Trump, and by all accounts he brought order to a rollout that had beenBy: Michael D. Shear, Sheryl Gay Stolberg, Sharon LaFraniere and Noah Weiland
Title: Biden’s Pandemic Fight: Inside the Setbacks of the First Year
Sourced From: www.nytimes.com/2022/01/23/us/politics/biden-covid-strategy.html
Published Date: Sun, 23 Jan 2022 20:47:42 +0000
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