Why Isn't Biden to Blame for COVID-19 Deaths?

But, again, if the president were personally responsible for the deaths of thousands of Americans during the summer of 2020, why isn't the president responsible for thousands of deaths in the summer of 2021?

Biden ran on stopping the pandemic. "I will not shut down the country," the then-presidential candidate promised. "I will shut down the virus," "I will beat this virus" and so on. Biden blamed COVID-19 deaths on Trump personally on numerous occasions, so one assumes he believed that the former president had the power to stop COVID-19.

Other than promising to employ his imaginary competence, Biden never informed us of how he would conduct policy any differently than Trump. Biden, in fact, had opposed Trump's China travel restrictions, calling him "xenophobic." And though Biden has benefited from, and tried to take credit for, the Trump-era Warp Speed program, his team initially worked to undermine trust in those vaccines. Since Biden's inauguration, hundreds of thousands of Americans have perished in the pandemic.

Biden's handling of COVID-19 is perhaps the last issue that he isn't upside-down on in the polls, so his allies want to change the subject and continue creating the impression that Govs. Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott are intentionally putting their constituents at risk because they refuse to adopt the authoritarian policies preferred by Democrats. Despite the perception created by histrionic media coverage, we don't yet understand why states do better or worse under pandemic conditions.

Yet, suddenly, governors, rather than the president, are at fault for spikes. Perhaps the only American politician who can credibly be blamed for causing significantly more deaths than necessary is disgraced New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, whom Biden once called "the gold standard" in COVID-19 leadership. New York still holds the dubious distinction of having the third highest percentage of coronavirus fatalities in the country. Cuomo's few remaining defenders point out that most of those deaths happened earlier in the pandemic, when we knew less. OK, what's Biden's excuse, then?

Why Isn't Biden to Blame for COVID-19 Deaths?