How Biden's Neglect of COVID Has Contributed to the Bird Flu Mess We're In

This excerpt about COVID is from Julia Doubleday's 12/26/24 column at The Gauntlet titled Biden's USDA Let H5N1 Spread. Now Bird Flu is a Loaded Gun in Trump's Hands; The Biden Administration never had any plan to control the H5N1 outbreak on dairy farms; now, it's spreading widely in a country ill equipped to understand or control airborne disease.

"The ongoing lack of transparency about airborne transmission is another COVID legacy that will leave the public twisting in the virus-laden wind should H5N1 mutate.

"Had President Biden used the last four years to implement airborne mitigations in public spaces, we’d be in good shape to beat an incipient outbreak. The campaign for pandemic-proof indoor spaces could have begun in 2021 with a public education campaign about the importance of clean air for reducing transmission of airborne viruses like COVID, RSV, flu, and every other bug people have been continually catching since lockdown ended.

"As public support for the idea built, we could’ve collectively fought for and won upgraded ventilation in public spaces, CO2 monitors, and HEPA filtration. We could even have pushed for Far UVC technology in crowded indoor spaces like airports, schools, and hospitals. People could’ve learned the significance of high CO2 indoors with the introduction of monitors, been empowered to advocate for open windows and better ventilation, and collectively kept one another safer.

"Since 2021, we could and should have been implementing strict airborne infection control protocols in all healthcare spaces, so that patients and healthcare workers would be protected from airborne infections. If we had done so, a new pandemic wouldn’t easily and immediately begin spreading through hospitals and ripping through doctors, nurses, and vulnerable patients the second it hits the ERs, as any new airborne virus inevitably will.

"Instead, President Biden and his administration lied to the public, claiming that COVID was over and no longer dangerous. His CDC has failed to replace outdated droplet infection control guidance for healthcare settings, resulting in rampant hospital-acquired infections and deaths among patients and sky-high absences and understaffing among HCW.

"An H5N1-infected patient entering an ER today will encounter HCW without masks, in hospitals equipped for droplet infection control only, without ventilation and filtration standards that would prevent infection of fellow patients in the ER. None of the staff will be trained on airborne transmission because Biden’s CDC chose not to train them, despite having years to update infection control guidelines.

"Biden’s team repeatedly encouraged the public to stop masking and failed to communicate the importance of respirators. Almost nobody understands what “airborne” means, that the 6-foot distancing guidance is outdated, or that covering a cough or washing your hands won’t prevent infection with airborne viruses like SARS-COV-2 or H5N1. The public was never educated about asymptomatic infections, virus lingering in the air for hours like smoke, or keeping windows open at home to reduce transmission risks. Misinformation about transmission, like that people are not contagious once a fever is gone, was spread by the CDC itself to force sick people back to work while they continued to test positive.

"The public even began believing that illness was good for them and their immune systems, a right-wing pseudo-science idea first invented by anti-vaxxers. Members of the press chose to mainstream this idea when Biden’s Grand Reopening resulted in recurrent sickness in kids. As parents became concerned about their children’s illnesses, the idea that masks and lockdowns actually harmed kids’ immune systems, leaving them more prone to viral infections, was repeated in multiple liberal press outlets.

"This idea, a corruption of the itself-controversial Hygiene Hypothesis which refers to beneficial microbes, not pathogenic viruses, was dubbed “Immunity Debt”. Parents stopped testing or avoiding illness entirely, chiding illness-avoidant peers that they needed to “build” their kids’ immune systems with “infections.” (Literally none of this is true and is, again, an anti-vaxxer idea). How do we think a public that has received four years of this messaging will react to more viral spread? What is the point of avoiding a virus now, if it just makes you sicker later? (To be clear, it doesn’t).

"If H5N1 goes pandemic, millions of conservatives will have tantrums about the fact that they don’t believe in the virus, or they think it’s not bad, masks don’t work, and they won’t wear them. Liberals may - or may not- be more willing to mask. But they’re unlikely to want to stay home or accept shutdowns. They, like conservatives, are likely to believe that keeping a child home will harm them, weakening their immune system and making them more vulnerable to future illness. They, like conservatives, are unlikely to know how to effectively halt transmission in a home, unlikely to know when or how to properly isolate, unlikely to understand airborne mitigation, and likely to view public health as an individual choice, rather than a collective responsibility.

"The “whole lotta nothing” approach to COVID was all in service to the Biden administration’s political agenda of memory holing the pandemic before the 2024 elections. No thought was given to the 800,000 Americans and counting who died of COVID on Biden’s watch, or the millions who developed Long COVID as their lies about COVID’s harmlessness were repeated in service to an election they ultimately lost to Donald Trump anyway.

"Should H5N1 hit, we’ll be worse off than we were in 2020. People have heard years of radicalizing propaganda about masks, lockdowns, and protecting vulnerable populations. That public health measures don’t work, that they’re tools of authoritarian control, that they’re shameful and embarrassing. To the degree that they heard anything from President Biden, it was essentially in agreement with those right-wing messages. After his last positive COVID test, he appeared in public without a mask. When bragging about “ending” the pandemic, his go-to boast was to point to the lack of masks and reopened businesses. 

"President Biden’s administration has done nothing to prepare us nor protect us since 2021. COVID spreads freely, not only because public health has been dismantled on his watch, but because the public itself has been purposely and painstakingly misinformed in support of his administration’s pro-disease agenda.

"It wasn’t easy to get the entire country to abandon masks, begin mocking them, turn spiteful toward those who wear them, and accept a “new normal” of constant illness. It wasn’t overnight that parents accepted endless illness for their children, and stopped questioning the carousel of RSV, flu, pneumonia and COVID infections. It took years of wall-to-wall media messaging, arguing that there were no tools available to prevent this, that a better world was not possible, that vulnerable people must die for the rest of us to live, that lockdowns were the reason for the suffering wrought by a world-historical pandemic, that sickness is healthy and that illness avoidance is, well, crazy.

"With this context, it’s easy to see why, when H5N1 was identified in dairy cows, there was no urgency to eliminate it. How can a virus in cows be an emergency, if nearly a million dead doesn’t trouble this administration? How can the threat of a pandemic be a concern, when an ongoing pandemic isn’t something they think about anymore?

"How could disrupting business as usual ever be good policy?

"Biden’s administration has loaded the gun, spun the cylinder one more time, and now hands it back to Donald Trump. We’ll be protected for as long as his luck lasts."