IMPORTANT CONTEXT: Biden Administration Pandemic Roadmap Reflects Right-Wing Pressure

This report was originally produced by OptOut’s investigative newsletter, Important Context. You can subscribe here.

With all eyes focused on Trump administration confirmation hearings, the Biden White House released its “roadmap” for combating infectious diseases. The 16-page document released Tuesday represents a public version of a 300-page report the outgoing administration is providing its successor.

The document, which comes as the U.S. enters its fifth year of living with COVID-19 and amid warnings from experts that the country is not doing enough to combat avian flu, touts the efforts of the administration to counter infectious disease threats. The report discusses efforts to contain threats like the SARS-CoV-2 virus, monkeypox, and H5N1. For example, it boasts that the Biden White House oversaw the creation of the largest free vaccine distribution program in U.S. history with the pandemic.

“In President Biden’s first year of office, the Biden-Harris Administration worked hand-in-hand with doctors, nurses, businesses, unions, community organizations, governors, mayors, and citizens across every state, Tribe, and territory to put vaccines at the center of the United States’ COVID-19 response,” it reads. “These vaccines still remain the best tools available to lower the risk of hospitalization and death.”

The roadmap is organized by headings like “Supporting Community-Based Organizations in Vaccine Outreach to High-Risk Communities” and “Ensuring an Equitable Pandemic Response and Recovery.” But what the document does not include is telling and reflective of the pressure the White House faced from the political right.

Political Pressure

The COVID pandemic hit the U.S. harder than its peer nations, killing more than 1.2 million Americans to date and leaving millions more suffering long COVID. Most of the deaths—at least 800,000–occurred after Biden was sworn into office in late January 2021. Yet, the roadmap the administration released does not include an acknowledgment of that staggering loss of life on the president’s watch, nor does it include an analysis of how those deaths could have been prevented.

There is no mention, for example, of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which had the power to create emergency safety rules for workplaces—something Biden promised to do on the campaign trail but ultimately abandoned. When the president did finally utilize OSHA it was to create a vaccine-or-test mandate for large businesses which was struck down in court. The mandate also does not make an appearance in the roadmap.

Similarly, there is no mention of air filtration or upgrading ventilation to address airborne disease threats in schools or workplaces. There is just one mention of paid sick leave in the context of partnering with local Chambers of Commerce to encourage employers to provide it to their workers. Quarantine measures are totally absent and there is exploration of the efficacy of closures, which are mentioned in the beginning of the report as a negative.

The most notable omission, however, is the lack of discussion about combatting misinformation. The roadmap only includes one reference to misinformation in the context of measles. Pediatric measles vaccination has plummeted since the onset of the pandemic, but the issue runs much deeper. The COVID pandemic saw the deliberate proliferation of vaccine misinformation for political reasons. The results were devastating: hundreds of thousands of preventable American deaths.

Business-aligned right-wing dark money groups like the Heritage Foundation, allied media, and Republican politicians, were already working to politicize public healthefforts to combat the spread of COVID when Biden took office. Measures like lockdowns and school closures were seen as simply too economically disruptive to justify the benefits.

These organizations and individuals worked to muddy the waters around the threat of the virus, downplaying the seriousness of the disease it caused and promoting an untested herd immunity strategy based on mass infection and “natural immunity.” They also cast doubt on the death numbers and politicized the origins of the virus to undermine faith in experts like Dr. Anthony Fauci, former head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Evidence still points to natural spillover and that explanation has long been favored by virologists and epidemiologists.

While early on in the pandemic, support for mitigation measures was strong across the board, over time, COVID cautiousness became a partisan indicator, putting pressure on political leaders looking to protect their constituents. Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, for example, faced angry, armed right-wing crowds outside her home and at the state capital demanding normalcy and was even targeted in a kidnapping plot. Although opponents of mitigation measures never constituted anything near a majority, their demeanor and aggressiveness made up the difference.

Biden rode a promise to control the pandemic into the White House. But with victory came the fraught political landscape. It was not just right-wing groups opposing COVID mitigation measures, it was major industries. Between that opposition and an increasingly radicalized contingent of Americans demanding normalcy, the pressure was on. But promising early data about the efficacy of the new vaccines developed through Operation Warp Speed against transmission offered a potential easy solution—one seemingly everyone could get behind. As one administration staffer told The Washington Post, the plan quickly became “vaccine our way out” of the crisis.

The new president quickly pivoted away from closures, even announcing before taking office that school reopening would be a first 100-day priority. The focus became inoculation—getting shots in arms as quickly as possible. For a time, the virus and the public seemed to cooperate. Deaths were already dropping by Inauguration Day and the trend would largely continue until early summer.

It wasn’t long, however, before the same forces that had politicized pandemic closures came after the vaccines too, casting doubt on their safety and efficacy. Over time, the alignment between the mainstream political right and the so-called medical “freedom” movement would become clearer, culminating in Robert Kennedy Jr.’s pro-Trump Make America Healthy Again movement.

Partisanship became a risk factor for COVID death and hospitalization as skepticism toward the vaccines became widespread, particularly on the right. By late summer 2021, COVID was roaring back thanks to the delta variant. In the face of the rising death toll, the Biden administration took two key steps: mobilizing OSHA to implement a vaccine mandate for large businesses and attempting to work with social media companies to address misinformation on their platforms. The latter effort involved private content moderation requests and, when that failed, public shaming of companies like Facebook. The administration’s limited efforts faced right-wing backlash—and legal challenges.

The vaccine-or-test mandate was struck down in court in January 2022. Several months later, two GOP attorneys general launched a lawsuit alleging that the administration had engaged in unconstitutional censorship of dissenting voices through communications with social media giants. The Missouri v. Biden suit—later Murthy v. Missouri—was later joined by private plaintiffs, including prominent COVID misinformation spreaders who were popular on the right represented by a lawfare group funded by billionaire industrialist Charles Koch.

Although the case ultimately failed at the highest level with the Supreme Court ruling 6-3 that the plaintiffs had failed to establish that the government had actually harmed them—a majority opinion authored by conservative Amy Coney Barrett—the lawfare worked to cow the administration. The new, public pandemic roadmap does not include anything about working with or pressuring social media companies into doing more to protect their users against dangerous misinformation.

In a recent interview, outgoing Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, who oversaw the effort to combat online misinformation, admitted, “I can’t go toe to toe with social media,” citing the Murthy case and other litigation.

Unreceptive Audience

The release of the roadmap comes at a critical time. With avian flu spreading across the country, the need for cooperation between the outgoing and incoming administrations is clear. 

It is unclear, however, the impact the Biden White House’s roadmap will have on the incoming Trump administration. The president-elect, who is promising to slash government waste, has named a number of individuals to top public health positions who were instrumental in politicizing the COVID pandemic. Some of those individuals, like Dr. Marty Makary, the pick for Food and Drug Administration Commissioner, and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, who is set to lead the National Institutes of Health, were opponents of measures touted in the Biden White House report, like COVID testing.

In May 2022, for example, Makary took to Twitter to decry how the administration was trying to fund “the testing-industrial complex to over-test immune students.” Bhattacharya, meanwhile, who was also a plaintiff in the Murthy case, suing the administration for allegedly censoring him, suggested there may be ulterior motives for the testing push.

“As the Biden Administration spends billions more on "free" covid tests, a reminder from @unherd that there are politically well-connected experts who head up testing companies who stand to gain financially from the decision,” he tweeted in September 2023.

The OptOut Media Foundation (EIN: 85-2348079) is a nonprofit charity with a mission to educate the public about current events and help sustain a diverse media ecosystem by promoting and assisting independent news outlets and, in doing so, advance democracy and social justice.

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