Biden is punting on COVID relief for the third time

Speaking Security Newsletter | Note n°174 | 27 September 2022

Sep 27, 2022

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Situation

Much of last week was spent debating what exactly Joe Biden meant when he said “the pandemic is over” (twice) in that 60 Minutes interview. He made it clear he didn’t mean this in a literal sense—that’d be entering full-on Covid denial territory—but his additional comments on the matter didn’t clarify much else.

The short-term funding bill that Senate Democrats rolled out late last night hinted at what Biden actually meant: The pandemic itself isn’t over, but the government’s pandemic response soon will be.

The stopgap spending bill excludes the emergency pandemic relief Biden proposed earlier this month. Republicans argued that because Biden declared the pandemic “over” they wouldn’t back emergency funding. The last time Biden requested pandemic relief, he explicitly ordered Democrats to remove the funding to expedite military aid to Ukraine. All told, this looks like it’ll be the third time since March that Biden ends up punting on securing pandemic relief:

Privatizing the pandemic

Biden sabotaging his own COVID funding requests twice in five months is probably related to the role he imagines the federal government playing vis-à-vis the pandemic moving forward. Ashish Jha, White House Covid-19 Response Coordinator, said last month that Biden’s plan is to delegate the public health crisis to the private healthcare system:

“One of the things we’ve spent a lot of time thinking about in the last many months—and we’re going to continue this work, and you’ll hear more from the administration on this—is getting us out of that acute emergency phase where the US government is buying the vaccines, buying the treatments, buying the diagnostic tests. My hope is that in 2023, you’re going to see the commercialization of almost all of these products. Some of that is actually going to begin this fall, in the days and weeks ahead.”

This sounds like a really bad idea. Jha himself warned about the major risks with commercialization, particularly with it coinciding with the comeback of the flu. The flu “really stretches our healthcare system,” said Jha, and under Biden’s plan, we’re effectively “throwing Covid on top of that.” In other words, the private healthcare system isn’t built for emergencies, and despite what Biden sought to imply in the 60 Minutes interview, Covid-19 still is one. There were roughly 2 million Covid cases during the last month-ish and the White House has said it expects 100 million Covid infections in the fall and winter. Also: