It wasn’t quite the same walk-back as when President Joe Biden appeared to contradict strategic ambiguity by unambiguously saying the United States would defend Taiwan from a Chinese attack, but the White House had to go into clean-up mode after he made some surprising comments about the pandemic.
Biden declared the pandemic “over” in a rare interview with 60 Minutes, triggering a backlash from public health officials in his orbit, including Dr. Anthony Fauci. “Four hundred deaths per day is not an acceptable number,” Fauci told the Atlantic. The White House weighed in when press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre did an interview of her own on Morning Joe.
The president was enchanted by the post-COVID-19 openness around him, his top spokeswoman said. “Just to step back for a second, what we saw during that interview, that 60 Minutes interview when he made those comments: He was walking through the Detroit Car Show, the halls of the Detroit Car Show, and he was looking around,” the press secretary began. “We have to remember the last time that they had held that event was three years ago. … So, we are in a different time. He’s been very consistent about that.”
Jean-Pierre then pivoted to a core White House argument: Biden’s team brought the country to this different time. “The reason why is we are now prepared. We are now ready,” she said. “We know how to deal with this pandemic. It is now more manageable. It is not as disruptive as it’s been in the prior years, and it is because of what this president has done on Day 1. If you think about where we were when he walked in, 3,000 people were dying a day. That has come down 90%. We think about how schools were closed; now, schools are open. Think about businesses were closed. Now, businesses are open, and it is because of the work that this administration has done.”
The dueling interviews illustrate a dilemma for the White House. The distribution of the COVID-19 vaccines is a clear-cut Biden administration success story. It’s still one of the few issues where the president’s job approval rating is above water, with FiveThirtyEight’s polling average showing 48.9% approve of his handling of the virus to 42.9% who disapprove (former President Donald Trump’s last numbers on this were 38.9% approve to 57.1% disapprove).
A desire for a different approach to COVID-19 helped put Biden in the White House in the first place. In 2020, he won voters whose top issue was the coronavirus by 66 points, according to exit polls. Voters who thought containing the pandemic was more important than reopening the economy went for Biden by 60 points.
But COVID-19 has receded in the public consciousness, and most people are ready for a return to normal life. Biden’s approval rating even on this issue is below 50% in most polls and powered by Democrats still approving by more than 80%. Biden, who at 79 survived a bout with the virus without even taking time off (though he followed the CDC’s quarantine guidelines), is reading the room correctly.
At the same time, the administration still wants to use pandemic emergency powers on a wide range of issues. The Pentagon is defending its vaccine policies against a small but persistent number of mandate dissenters. Biden’s student loan debt forgiveness plan relies on the pandemic for its core legal justification. And the remaining COVID-19-concerned voters tend to lean Democratic.
Biden is vulnerable to the charge that the pandemic is over when it suits him but still raging when it provides his administration with the pretext to exercise power. The economy, inflation, crime, immigration, and abortion have all superseded COVID-19 as a voting issue in midterm election polling. A late August Morning Consult poll found that only 34% of “very liberal” adults considered the virus a great threat to their personal health, down 13 points from March.
In that context, Biden’s full quote is in line with public opinion. “The pandemic is over,” he said. “We still have a problem with COVID. We’re still doing a lot of work on it. It’s — but the pandemic is over. If you notice, no one’s wearing masks. Everybody seems to be in pretty good shape. And so I think it’s changing. And I think this is a perfect example of it.”
The question many still have is whether this is in line with his administration’s policies.
