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The Biden administration’s refrain that Americans fully vaccinated and fortified against the coronavirus could safely resume their lives is now being tested with the first patient, the 79-year-old leader of the free world, who on Thursday he made it a point to work publicly with his illness. .
“Guys, I’m doing great,” President Biden tweeted after the White House announced his infection, sharing a photo of himself behind his desk. “Stay busy!”
If Biden emerges quickly from his bout with covid-19, it will be a high-profile demonstration of his broader vote: a return to normalcy is possible thanks to vaccines and treatments, despite the surge in cases and the pandemic in progress. But if the president has to be ill for an extended period, or worse, becomes seriously ill, he will join many other Americans who have struggled. to stay healthy in a mask-scarce, social-distancing world, fueling more criticism that his strategy against the virus falls short, especially for the most vulnerable.
“I think Biden’s own covid response is what did this [illness] inevitable, really,” said Artie Vierkant, co-host of “Death Panel,” a left-leaning podcast that has blamed the administration for not pursuing a universal mask mandate and paid leave for those who test positive for the coronavirus, among other mitigations “He is just one of the tens or hundreds of thousands of people who will test positive for covid today.”
Others see their illness as a function of a highly contagious virus, as Americans weigh commitments to social gatherings, wearing masks and other decisions against the prospect of getting sick.
“I think the president’s case says more about covid than the White House strategy: It’s surprisingly infectious,” countered Tom Frieden, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Frieden added that vaccines remain “incredibly effective” at preventing serious illness and praised the decision to prescribe paxlovid, an antiviral pill, to reduce the chance that Biden could develop complications.
“It also says a lot about where we are in the pandemic,” Frieden said. “We are adapting to covid and as new variants emerge we may have to adjust again.”
In interviews, tweets and comments, White House officials emphasized that their strategy had prepared them for the president to test positive, with covid coordinator Ashish Jha telling reporters he wanted to “mark this moment,” when Biden rely on medical advances that are widely available to the general public.
We’ve spent the last 18 months making sure vaccines, treatments, tests and other tools are widely available.
As a result, we can manage COVID-19 and minimize disruption to daily life. https://t.co/Plyn5HdAun
— Subhan Cheema (@SubhanCheema46) July 21, 2022
“It’s a reminder of why we all work so hard to make sure that every American has the same level of protection as the president, that every American has the same level of immunity, and why we’ve worked so hard to make sure that people have access to life-saving treatments like paxlovid,” Jha said at a briefing.
“These are incredibly important things for the president. These are incredibly important things for all Americans.”
Jha declined to answer questions about Biden’s prognosis, saying he wanted to “avoid hypotheticals.”
But the details of Biden’s infection and treatment, made public Thursday, were immediately scrutinized by doctors, epidemiologists and other experts, some of whom questioned why the president has so often been without a mask in close conversations with others and who worried about their risk for a long time. – covid transport. And as they scrutinized early reports of the nation’s highest-profile covid case, some faulted the White House for downplaying the risks to the president, rather than highlighting the disease’s current toll. The virus is killing more than 400 people a day, according to The Washington Post’s seven-day average.
“I think this is a time to be mindful of high transmission and that we should aspire to a better normalcy than this,” said Julia Raifman, a professor of public health at Boston University who has called for federal support for the mask mandates, holding more outdoor meetings. , and other mitigations. “We have already lost more than 500,000 people to covid during this administration. … This is an opportunity not to minimize or exaggerate the president’s infection, and to recognize that it is a serious illness for people over 70 years old.”
Experts also emphasized that Biden’s case is being treated with a level of caution that they believe should be standard for all Americans.
For example, the White House said Biden would remain in isolation until he tested negative for the virus, beyond CDC guidance, a move that drew backlash from some experts who questioned why they weren’t told ask all Americans to do the same.
“The fact that they are overturning CDC recommendations that are flawed, without any evidence to support them, is telling,” said Eric Topol, director of the Scripps Research Translation Institute. “For all of us, not just for the president.”
Topol and others have called for all Americans to test negative before leaving isolation, saying the CDC’s failure to recommend that test result means many Americans are prematurely leaving isolation and n ‘infect others.
Ezekiel Emanuel, a University of Pennsylvania bioethicist who has advised the White House on the covid strategy and repeatedly called on officials to go further, said he wished the administration had pushed for more aggressive measures such as improving indoor air quality, but said Biden has found. generalized resistance to many recommendations.
“What I want the audience to do and what the audience does will do, they’re two different things,” Emanuel said.
He added that Biden’s infection, despite the use of testing, screening and masking around him for indoor meetings, stressed that “BA.5 is really contagious. He is probably the person in the United States with the best protections. No one can be sure they won’t get infected.”
Although Biden is the second president to test positive for the virus, the circumstances are very different from those of his predecessor, at least so far. When Donald Trump tested positive in late 2020, before vaccines were ready, he required hospitalization and aides worried he might die. He had access to antiviral drugs that were not yet authorized by regulators.
Instead, Biden’s positive test comes after he received two initial doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine and two booster shots, reducing his risk of serious illness, and also after a slew of senior U.S. officials administration have tested positive, including an 81-year-old person. Anthony S. Fauci, who suffered an infection this summer and is back at work.
“We have long said there was a substantial possibility that the president, like anyone else, could have COVID,” White House chief of staff Ron Klain wrote Thursday. Klain also took to Twitter to comment that Biden was right to adopt an increasingly visible public role, after spending much of the first year of his presidency physically removed from others.
“It would have been better for the country if Biden had stayed very physically isolated from other people, avoided traveling, etc., to the [Russian President Vladimir] Pose?” he asked reporter Nate Silver, in a tweet amplified by Klain. “I tend not to think that way.”
That public role has built on the White House’s vaccine-focused strategy, with Biden initially echoing claims by public health experts that the shots also protected against infections, a claim that a delta variant then nova would come back to mind last summer.
“You’re not going to get covid if you have these vaccines,” Biden said on July 21, 2021, at a CNN town hall, a year before the president tested positive.
Asked this week what to do about the nation’s rising number of cases, the president had a two-word answer: Get vaccinated.
“We have the ability to control it,” Biden said Wednesday, adding a message for the resistance. “They should get vaccinated now.”
Experts such as Boston University’s Raifman say the White House has remained too focused on vaccines, even as variants have evolved to circumvent some protections, and not enough on mitigations such as social distancing and the use of masks
“It all started with a premature ‘return to normal’ [declaration] that then we didn’t correct when there was an increase in delta, or when there was an increase in omicrons,” Raifman said, referring to a White House celebration last summer. “I’m very concerned that we don’t go back to correct the new variants,” he added.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton, who hosts the podcast with Vierkant and is immunocompromised, said she was troubled by the White House’s message that the president was working through his illness, especially after her own infection last winter left her with complications for three months. .
“It contributes to this idea that we’re living in a time where covid is no longer disruptive, which obviously doesn’t match a lot of the day-to-day experiences of working people diagnosed with covid,” he said.