President Joe Biden is mad at unvaccinated Americans. In remarks Tuesday, he had a few choice words for those who haven’t yet gotten the jab, including children ages 5 to 11.
Unmentioned was the fact that on his watch, in the fiscal year 2021, a record number of migrants crossed the southern border illegally — only a fraction immunized. Rather than berate these people about the danger they pose, the Biden administration could very well release them into the United States or shower them with cash.
Also unmentioned was the country where COVID-19 originated. At no point during his speech did Biden say the virus was first detected in China, let alone rebuke Beijing for covering up the initial outbreak and thwarting honest investigations into its origins.
You’d think the White House would be doing its darndest to find out how COVID-19 came to be. But it seems uninterested in getting to the bottom of things. If the Biden administration wants to figure out whether the virus emerged from a lab, a wet market, or elsewhere, it’s doing a poor job of showing as much.
Following the release last summer of an inconclusive intelligence community report on the origins of the pandemic, the president has not pushed China to allow an investigation. As Jim Geraghty has written, he did not demand one when he spoke to General Secretary Xi Jinping in November, nor did he even bring up the virus’s origins. When recently questioned by the New York Post about why his administration has asked so little of China in this regard, Biden had no response.
All the while, over 800,000 of his compatriots have died from COVID-19. A reminder that the butchers in Beijing are to blame, not fellow Americans, would be most welcome.
Yet, in Anthony Fauci, the president keeps trotting out a man who has refused to rule out cooperating with Chinese labs in the future, merely saying the National Institutes of Health will be “very careful” in deciding what to fund. Some reassurance right there.
The most charitable reading of the administration’s approach is that it’s doing all it can behind the scenes to get Xi to come clean. Let’s hope this is so. However, one wonders why the administration isn’t saying much publicly. Its relentless drive for “equity” may explain the lack of action — problems that cannot be chalked up to systemic racism are low priorities in this White House. So may John Kerry and company’s attempt to negotiate a deal with China. Why rip the Chinese for their unconscionable obfuscation about the virus when doing so will imperil climate pledges they have no intention of honoring?
Whatever the case may be, the silence from the White House on the pandemic’s origins is deafening. Biden has said the unvaccinated are “costing all of us.” He’d be better served to save that ire for the real culprits in Beijing.
Daniel J. Samet is a Ph.D. student at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is a graduate fellow at the Clements Center for National Security.
