An Excellent Question

At Haut Hair, John Sexton wants to know What standard should we hold Joe Biden to on COVID deaths?

Two days ago the NY Times reported on another grim COVID milestone:

Coronavirus deaths in the United States surpassed 800,000 on Wednesday, according to a New York Times database, as the pandemic neared the end of a second year and as known virus cases in this country rose above 50 million.

The new death toll — the highest known number of any country — comes a year after vaccines against the coronavirus began rolling out in the United States. It also comes at a tenuous moment in the pandemic: Cases are rising once again, hospitals in some parts of the country are stretched to their limits with Covid patients and the threat and uncertainties of a new variant loom.

Asking who is to blame for these deaths strikes me as a pretty silly question. COVID is spreading as fast as it can everywhere it can. You can blame each individual who spread it or you can blame the Chinese for not isolating it fast enough last year. But what I don’t think you can do is point at Joe Biden and say he’s to blame for every death.

The problem is that a tremendous number of Democrats spent much of last year saying exactly that sort of thing about President Trump. One of the people who explicitly made this argument was candidate Joe Biden:

220,000 deaths. If you hear nothing else I say tonight, hear this: Anyone who is responsible for that many deaths should not remain President of the United States.

9:13 PM · Oct 22, 2020

That wasn’t the only time he made that argument. He said the same thing in a presidential debate:

I'm not going to shut down the country. I'm not going to shut down the economy. I'm going to shut down the virus.

3:10 PM · Oct 30, 2020

Here we are 11 months later and the economy is looking better in some respects though rising inflation is a big cause for concern. But putting that aside how are we looking on shutting down the virus? Not so good it turns out. In fact we’re now bracing for the spread of Omicron which, may lead to another winter in which a lot of people are sick.

Or maybe not. Whatever happens in the next few months, we already know right now that more than 800,000 Americans have died (either from or with) the virus and about half of those have happened on President Biden’s watch.

I don't believe in unilateral disarmament. Until Joe Biden apologizes to President Trump, and explains it was a lot more difficult than he thought while he was running for office, I'm perfectly OK with blaming him for every WuFlu death after Jan. 20, 2021.