President Joe Biden’s incoherent COVID policies are falling down around him, and he still can’t decide where the pandemic is a dire emergency or already over.
Biden’s mask mandate for public transportation was struck down on Monday because the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention did not have statutory authority to impose such a mandate. The Biden administration thought the ruling was “disappointing” and wants people to still wear masks on public transit despite mask mandates being eliminated in nearly every other area of life.
And yet, Biden doesn’t even have a consistent message here either. After the mandate was struck down, Biden said it should be an individual choice, but he didn’t rule out appealing to reinstate the mandate. Meanwhile, Biden’s COVID response coordinator called the court ruling “extremely disappointing” and said he will continue to wear a mask indefinitely on public transportation, as should everyone else.
COVID is, apparently, enough of a problem that people should be forced to wear masks on airplanes (at least when they aren’t eating or drinking), but it’s not enough of a problem for the Biden administration to keep the southern border secure. Biden has already announced the end of Title 42, the CDC recommendation that all illegal immigrants seeking asylum be immediately sent back to Mexico. Masks on Amtrak are a necessity because the pandemic is an emergency, but hundreds of thousands of untested migrants? No problem!
Biden’s COVID response has been all over the map because he only cares about the politics surrounding the pandemic, not the “science” or data. Biden implemented “emergency” vaccine mandates to show he was taking the virus seriously, only to push back the deadlines so that mass firings wouldn’t reflect poorly on his administration.
Even with Title 42, Biden was allowing hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants into the country while admitting they weren’t being tested or checked for vaccination. All the while, Biden and the CDC still want children to remain masked indefinitely at school.
Biden has been completely lost on the issue of COVID since he took office. He’s treated COVID as a political issue, not a health issue, using the pandemic as an excuse to pander to his safety-obsessed liberal base and to push policies completely unrelated to COVID, such as student debt cancellation and the eviction moratorium. Both the eviction moratorium and the private sector vaccine mandate were struck down by the courts, just as the public transit mask mandate was. Biden’s COVID policies have been ineffective, unenforceable, and generally all over the map, and that’s because they were never about COVID in the first place.
Biden never had an answer on how he would handle COVID during the campaign, and he hasn’t stumbled into any answers in office. The country has moved on from COVID outside of a pocket of liberals who have been broken by safetyism. The only person confused about what the country should do is the president himself.
Given his track record, he isn’t likely to develop a coherent plan over the next 2 1/2 years, either.
