COVID-19 & The 2024 Election
A Rough Summary of How You Got Here
In 2020, the United States was slammed with a once-in-a-century pandemic disaster, with a Presidency that was impressively unprepared and unqualified to face the challenge. The Trump Administration invited such quacks like Scott Atlas, who insists he got nothing wrong to this day, and the Great Barrington Declaration dweebs to the White House to pitch their unscientific, delusional proposals that would have rapidly multiplied the bodycount.
It's nothing short of a miracle that any sort of comprehensive pandemic relief package was passed, helping relieve the burden of COVID-19 amongst working Americans. By the end of 2020, there was a light at the end of a tunnel: a safe and effective mRNA vaccine had been developed in rapid fashion thanks to some brilliant scientists and Operation Warpspeed, and would be ready for deployment later next year.
2020 would also happen to be an election year. The DNC rammed through austerity-fetishist Joe Biden, who championed the atrocities in Iraq as head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and boldly supported carnage across the Middle East in the decades that would follow, as their Hail-Mary candidate in a crucial election. Everyone willingly forgot that after eight years of Joe Biden as Vice-President, the Democrats lost 1000+ seats nationwide, and Donald Trump was elected President.
Political commentator for The Nation, Jeet Heer, previously noted that the Biden-Harris campaign won the 2020 Presidential election thanks to about 40,000 votes in a few key swing states, largely due to Trump's mismanagement of the pandemic, and Biden's promise to "follow the science." These are devastating numbers - a Pyrrhic victory by any standard - that should have raised major alarms across the Democrat Party - but instead were seen as proof that the Sanders-progressive "left" which debased themselves for Biden, abandoning their policy demands in exchange for nothing - could be soundly ignored.
In late 2020, the CEO of Moderna indicated that the COVID-19 vaccine was not a one-size-fits all solution; that other public health mitigations would have to remain in place for a time. A study from 2020 showed that all children hospitalized for COVID-19 had developed vascular damage from their bout with the virus. There was good science showing the need for continued precaution, even after a vaccine was deployed.
2021: Follow the Science? No, Dictate the Science!
In January 2021, people were hopeful, having faith that Biden would "follow the science," and take dealing with the pandemic seriously - with a vaccine on the way, the outlook was incredibly bright. Sadly, the Biden-Harris Administration saw this as an opportunity to "dictate" the science. The Biden Administration appointed former deli owner Jeffrey Zients, with zero medical or scientific credentials, as COVID Czar. This was a reward for bundling corporate donations for the Biden 2020 campaign. Zients would stomp around the White House, whining about when we could get rid of all these masks, tests, and quarantine protocols. Zients led the charge on pushing a vaccine-only response, and a death-march towards "normalcy."
PROFILE: Leana Wen
Media pundits, such as Leana Wen of the Brookings Institute, were more than happy to oblige pushing this ideal. Economist Emily Oster, who has zero medical or scientific credentials, pushed nonsense like "Treat your Unvaccinated Child Like Your Vaccinated Grandma," priming the public to accept repeatedly infecting their unvaccinated children with SARS - an obscene ideal had you suggested it 20 years ago.
It was astounding, the unyielding amount of propaganda from laptop class media pundits, from David Leonhardt of the New York Times, to Nate Silver, to Dave Weigel of the Washington Post, to Ryan Cooper of The American Prospect - who without an ounce of critical journalistic integrity - placed such blind faith in the Biden Administration's COVID-19 response that they would in fact ridicule and snark at Biden's critics - even those coming from medical and scientific backgrounds.
The end of the 2021 Summer, after a thorough adult COVID-19 vaccination campaign, seemed like to many (myself included, admittedly) the end of the pandemic. UCSF's Monica Gandhi, who mocked people taking SARS-CoV-2 seriously in the fall of 2020, even got her own holiday, cutting a ribbon of masks. Yet, there were warning signs that precautions should remain in place - including Long COVID and breakthrough deaths, and the Delta variant loomed on the horizon. Instead of "following the science" and protecting the public from COVID-19, the Biden Administration proceeded to dictate the science and offloaded the entire burden of COVID-19 onto the backs of the American working class. Worse yet, we saw liberals *celebrating* COVID-19 deaths, smugly assuming that they were all MAGA anti-vaxxers. This delusional fantasy clearly did not end well.
Keep in mind for later that Biden diverted COVID-19 relief funding to police, so they could buy more assault rifles, tear gas, and other military toys to assault Americans.
The Biden Administration ended many COVID-19 relief programs on Labor Day, 2021, in a perverse insult to the American people. Even worse, they forcibly enlisted tens of millions of unvaccinated American children into a grand experiment: forcibly infecting them with SARS-CoV-2 in the classroom. The pediatric death count soon doubled before Christmas. Many wound up disabled. Many would bring home the virus and infect a primary caregiver, killing them - a story that has shattered hundreds of thousands of American families.
2022: Your New Normal of Constant Illness
2022 would be a devastating year for Public Health in America. As the Biden Administration rushed to force Americans into a "post-pandemic" normal after a devastating winter, the problems caused by unmitigated COVID-19 did not vanish. Long COVID disability, constant pediatric illness, "brain fog," chronic fatigue, and many other issues from the ongoing pandemic were not resolved by forcing Americans to pretend SARS-CoV-2 had vanished. This left a void for answers that would be filled by a resurgent anti-vax movement. "Vaccine injury," or "myocarditis," would become common fearmongering terms pushed by grifters who insisted SARS-CoV-2 - which had already killed and disabled millions worldwide - was harmless, and that the lifesaving mRNA vaccine was at fault for all your ills.
This was incredibly convenient for the Biden-Harris Administration, who could now blame any casualties that resulted from lacking sufficient loyalty to their vaccine-only response. They needed a resurgent anti-vax movement to portray their own unscientific policies of mass infection, especially in unvaccinated children, as centrist and "moderate" against their "hysterical" critics - many of which being experts in medicine and public health. Unfortunately, breakthrough deaths and Long COVID disability in the vaccinated continued to pile up. More pseudoscientific terms, such as "hybrid immunity" and "immunity debt," were propagated as justification that embracing COVID-19 was in-fact beneficial to your health.
Meanwhile, young athletes such as rising tennis star Tanysha Dissanayake, were writing sad memorials to the end of their sports careers after being disabled by "mild" COVID-19, that was supposed to provide them with lifelong “natural immunity.” Their voices have been largely silenced, even though they were the ones suffering and being sacrificed for a fantasy of "normalcy."
2022 was also the beginning of the rewriting of history: proponents of mass infection, such as anti-vaxxer Marty Makary, began to attack the consequences of mass COVID-19 infection - denying Long COVID disability. As the science began to emerge that SARS-CoV-2 had negative impacts on the immune system, defenders of the Biden Administration's mass infection strategies began to attack said science, writing it off as "quackery," and endorsing the unscientific fantasy of "immunity debt." The latter is blatantly false, and the former is now well documented phenomenon in 2024. Oops.
The Biden Administration failed to state the importance of staying updated on COVID-19 boosters, even after it was well understood that the vaccine provided waning immunity. Instead of prioritizing public health, the Biden-Harris Admin elected to construct an artificial "post-pandemic" finish line for them to cross and throw themselves a party. It failed to result in meaningful electoral success during the midterm elections. Another holiday season came around, with more children developing serious “post-pandemic” health issues:
Biden ended 2022 by declaring "COVID no longer controls our lives." For millions of Americans now disabled by Long COVID, it very clearly did. Many lost their careers, and the ability to work. They fell into poverty, homelessness, and deaths of despair - including suicide. This phenomenon is well documented in scientific research.
There's a lot of talk about fascism as of late, but little spoken about the new bi-partisan precedent the Biden Administration set: The government, and your employer, could now force a career-ending disability upon you and your children, and leave you to rot in the shadows without an ounce of aid or support. Many have committed suicide as a result. You are no longer a "citizen" with rights and dignities to be defended by your government. You are now nothing more than a disposable serf, to be cast aside on a whim.
2023: Letting it All Burn
The Biden Administration ended the Public Health Emergency in May, giving the anti-vaccine movement everything they wanted in their crusade against public health, and yet they still weren't happy. Everyone knew that the vibes were clearly off, and something was wrong. Liberals such as Leana Wen started the year off by embracing anti-vax conspiracy theories, such as the delusion that COVID-19 deaths are being overcounted, or that COVID-19 was harmless to children, or worse, the now heavily debunked Cochrane review of PPE co-written by a laptop-class academic and UK government advisor who advocated for letting SARS-CoV-2 burn through an unvaccinated population in 2020.
Meanwhile, scientific and medical researchers from around the world were uncovering more and more harms caused by unmitigated, repeated SARS-CoV-2 infections, as we have compiled regularly to this day. Yet, the Biden Administration never used this evidence as justification for change in policy or a more cautious approach. Misogyny against women in medicine, science, and especially public health continued to surge, and became acceptable amongst credentialed professionals. This was never acknowledged as a problem by the Biden-Harris Administration.
Instead, the Biden Administration was focused on winding down the federal COVID-19 response, as Final COVID-19 Czar Ashish Jha, a laptop class academic who believes we should have been mass infecting unvaccinated children (and their families) with SARS-CoV-2 as early as Spring 2020, celebrated the "privatization" of the pandemic response as he stepped down from his role as Biden’s final COVID Czar, returning to Brown University as their Dean of Public Health. He never treated a COVID-19 patient, nor bothered to understand the true threat the virus posed.
The Biden Administration, and the larger Democrat Party, had formed a new consensus with the anti-vaccine movement: That you stupid proles all need to shut the hell up and simply embrace unlimited COVID-19 infections, especially on the job, and especially the burden of bringing the disease home to your family, infecting your loved ones. If you wind up disabled by it, well, you no longer exist to us anymore - so drop dead. You are no longer entitled to your own health or entitled to protect your children's health. Your employer is now entitled to your health, and may throw it away at the drop of a hat, fully protected by the legal system.
That is the legal precedent that has been established under the “pro-labor” Biden-Harris Administration, as detailed on the 07/31/23 episode of Death Panel with Nate Holdren titled “Unlimited Liabilities:”
Even worse, it was later revealed that the Biden's cowardice in overturning Trump's rollback of public health regulations led to widespread food contamination and listeria outbreaks:
“In the year leading up to a deadly listeria outbreak now traced back to recalled Boar's Head deli meats, U.S. Department of Agriculture records show that Biden administration officials quietly made significant cuts to planned testing for germs across America's food supply.”
It's like every billionaire's wet dream was just handed to them on a silver platter: public health is effectively dead in America, and workers have been abandoned to widespread pestilence. Gee, let’s hope 2024 isn’t a critical ele… Oh. Whoops.
2024: Burning the Votes
Remember that 40,000 number from the beginning of this article? That was how thin the margin of victory Biden won the 2020 election, thanks to the sham of an electoral college. If it wasn't for COVID-19, Trump would likely be finishing a second term. Now what happened under the Biden-Harris Administration?
Thousands of children died of COVID-19 under Biden-Harris' leadership, almost all of them unvaccinated. They had parents who vote.
Over a million Americans died of COVID-19 under Biden-Harris' watch. Many of these were breakthrough deaths in the vaccinated. They all had families who vote.
Millions of children have been disabled by COVID-19 under Biden-Harris' campaign of mass re-infection and have been left to rot with no aid or support. They all have parents who vote.
Tens of millions of Americans were disabled by COVID-19 after being organized to embrace the virus and left to rot. Many committed suicide. They all had families, many of which voted for someone who promised to “follow the science."
As part of Biden's dismantling of the pandemic response, tens of millions of Americans were thrown off of Medicaid while they are repeatedly infected with SARS-CoV-2, multiple times a year. Child poverty doubled under Biden-Harris.
Looking at the election results, it's clear that the biggest contributor to Harris' historic loss was voters simply staying home. 16 million Biden 2020 voters, especially. One could reasonably presume that forcing Americans to suffer wave after wave of unmitigated COVID-19, and the negative consequences as a result, had a negative effect on the American psyche, and significantly depressed voter turnout. One could also infer that the reckless dismantling of pandemic relief had a disastrous effect on the economy, combined with rising healthcare costs as a result of unmitigated COVID-19 infections population-wide, destroyed family finances.
Pundits like Dave Weigel of the Washington Post, who started his career organizing protests in support of the atrocities in Iraq, are already mocking those who correctly infer that Biden’s botched pandemic response contributed to Harris’ historic loss.
Were there other significant contributing factors to the Harris Campaign's historic failure this week, such as Gaza and the economy? Certainly. Can you separate the Biden-Harris Administration's pandemic response from this? Absolutely not. The COVID-19 pandemic relief funding Biden diverted to cops so they could tear gas college protestors, a typically Dem-leaning voting bloc, absolutely depressed voter turnout. The end of pandemic relief programs under the Biden-Harris Administration doubled child poverty and left families struggling to put food on the table in the face of horrific price gouging. These same families would then turn on the news and see their tax dollars being used to turn Muslim children’s brains into glue…again.
If liberals and Democrat voters have anyone to blame, it is the Democrat Party and the Harris-Walz Campaign, which burned over a billion dollars yet again on consultants and vendors who produced incredibly toxic and self-destructive campaign messaging, such as "Join Team Normal," or "White Dudes for Harris," or recruiting multi-millionaire gamer "influencers" who lack the real-world problems that average working Americans face. Streaming "Crazy Taxi" for the Sega Dreamcast as the nation's foundations are crumbling and fascism is on the rise makes it clear that you are fundamentally unserious about politics in America.
If Trump follows through on appointing RFK, Jr. as head of the CDC and other public health agencies, your fury should be with the political party who had every resource and opportunity in the world to win against a uniquely unpopular candidate, and instead promised nothing except Trump's wall and unlimited bombs and bullets to turn hospitals into free-fire zones. What we face next didn't appear out of a void - the Biden-Harris Administration spent the past few years setting the precedent that Public Health regulations are a tool of the Third Reich.
Either way, the Pandemic Accountability Index isn't going anywhere. With your support, we can keep reporting and documenting on the failures of the ongoing COVID-19 response, future pandemics we will surely face, and holding accountable the bad actors who profit from spewing garbage.
Be sure to subscribe to the Pandemic Accountability Index today. We don’t have any billionaires funding the facts in America, and we’re about to enter a very “fact-free” era of an America that has eliminated public health.
A great roundup of the history of the SARS-2 pandemic. We need to remember.
I especially appreciate your comments about how the headwinds of constant illness and disability can influence a society despite deep denial all around. Yes, it's hard to quantify but that doesn't mean it's not important.
Thanks for writing.