Joe Biden, all things considered, looked fairly healthy when he was exhumed Monday to declare the Trump administration a “failure” in its attempt to address the current health scare.
The exercise is surely good for Biden’s health, but he might want to stay quiet on this topic. The Obama administration, during which Biden served as the vice president, doesn’t come out looking so hot when you consider the two infectious disease outbreaks it dealt with while still doing nothing to ensure that we would be better prepared for this moment.
There should have long been a system in place that would allow any administration to rapidly respond to new disease spread. Though President Barack Obama, with a great assist from Biden, was tasked with hampering the swine flu in 2009 and the Ebola crisis in 2014, there remained no framework for future outbreaks.
True, the Trump administration was slow to react to the virus, sent mixed signals as to its severity, and has been woefully slow at producing the number of test kits needed to diagnose those who are infected. But who is Biden to criticize?
Other countries with less impressive economies have reacted with more haste than ours. Their governments were better prepared after those earlier outbreaks.
“It’s an unpreparedness challenge,” Jeremy Levin, chairman of BIO, the leading biotechnology trade association, told the Financial Times. “Why is it that you have tens of thousands tested in South Korea and China? They learned from the last crisis. They stockpiled key items they might need and they trained to deal with this and they have communicated clearly.”
The Ebola panic was different from the new coronavirus situation in that the disease didn’t spread as easily, but it was a lot more deadly. And yet the Obama administration still couldn’t get even those directly infected to commit to self-quarantine. Recall that Kaci Hickox, known back in 2014 as the “Ebola nurse,” honored the directive for voluntary quarantine by going on an outdoor bike ride.
Biden acts now as though he was the steady hand at the helm during the Obama years. He wasn’t. He confused everyone in 2009 by asserting that the swine flu might wildly spread throughout any enclosed space from person to person, a claim for which then-press secretary Robert Gibbs had to apologize from the podium at the White House.
Biden wasn’t a calming presence then. He was a liability.
Trump will eventually respond to the criticism from his putative opponent. And Biden isn’t in a great position to defend himself.
