If you want to know why President Joe Biden’s COVID-19 messaging is failing, the first place you should look is to the southern border.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas admitted that the roughly 15,000 migrants who had been squatting under the bridge in Del Rio, Texas, were not tested for COVID-19. Mayorkas even said that “we certainly had some people get sick,” though he said that none of them had COVID-19 “to my knowledge.” He also said that up to 30,000 illegal border-crossers have been encountered in Del Rio since Sept. 9.
DHS Secretary Mayorkas confirms that there was no COVID-19 testing of the 15,000 migrants under the bridge in Del Rio. That includes the thousands who have been released into the country with NTAs or NTRs.
— Bill Melugin (@BillFOXLA) September 24, 2021
Meanwhile, roughly 12,400 migrants will remain in the United States while their asylum cases are heard, with another 5,000 still being processed. Their vaccination statuses are unknown. Mayorkas admitted that they aren’t being tested for COVID-19. Yet Biden essentially invited them in by ignoring immigration laws and suspending the “Remain in Mexico” policy put in place under the Trump administration.
Contrast this with Biden’s COVID-19 policies for Americans. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that all children over the age of 2 be forced to wear masks in school, regardless of vaccination status and the fact that children simply are not at risk of severe COVID-19 symptoms. The same goes for school staff and teachers — again, regardless of vaccination status.
And then there is Biden’s vaccine mandate for businesses with more than 100 employees. If Biden actually meant this to be a policy and not just a distraction from his massacre of 10 Afghan civilians (the New York Times piece on the strike was published one day after Biden’s announcement), then that would mean you need a vaccine or weekly negative COVID-19 test to work in the U.S. but not to enter the country illegally with a dubious asylum claim.
Is it any wonder why many people react to Biden’s COVID-19 measures with reflexive opposition? At the start of May, over 62% of adults approved of Biden’s handling of COVID-19, while over 31% disapproved. Now, his COVID-19 approval is down to 52%, and disapproval over Biden’s handling of COVID-19 is 42%.
A large and growing plurality clearly recognizes that Biden isn’t treating the pandemic as a serious public health crisis but as a political tool, one that can be conveniently ignored when it interferes with his other policies, such as at the border, or exploited when he needs to escape a bad news cycle, as with the Afghanistan drone strike.
It leads to an incoherent coronavirus response, and that makes it more difficult to convince the remaining holdouts to get vaccinated in order to facilitate our return to normal.
