Vox carries COVID water for Biden despite promises that don’t hold water
April 7, 2021
Politicians are great at making promises. And mainstream media is great at repeating those promises as if they are promises already kept by Democrats.
Yet when looking at what was promised during the 2020 campaign by mainstream media and what has been delivered since the inauguration, there is little that separates Biden’s COVID response from Trump’s.
Take, as an example, the Vox “explainer” article from the 2020 campaign about Biden’s proposed COVID 19 response that, not coincidentally, shares the exact same title that the Biden campaign team used to puff the plan.
After saying that “President Donald Trump has badly botched the response” Vox wrote in “Joe Biden’s plan to beat the coronavirus” that the Biden administration would undertake a fundamentally different approach to COVID, “what public health experts say is the most effective strategy for containing Covid-19.”
That plan, said Vox, included four paramount measures: “a test-trace-isolate program, making mask-wearing and social distancing mandatory, and, once the science supports it, an equitably distributed vaccine.”
Thus far, besides sending the vaccines to states, which are then responsible for distribution, the Biden administration has failed to implement any nationwide contract tracing and isolation, mandatory social distancing or mandatory mask-wearing — this despite repeated claims by some health officials that the U.S. is now in the midst of a fourth COVID surge.
While Vox gave the press low marks for not asking many questions about COVID-19 during the first Biden press conference, they gave Biden relatively high marks so far for COVID 19 results, even though Biden has done little differently than the national policies followed by the Trump administration.
Despite this, Vox concluded that under Biden the “vaccine rollout has gotten [much better] in the past couple months, with a lot of experts now optimistic that life will go back to normal in the months ahead.”
In fact, in the approximately 75 days since Biden took office, about 155,000 people have died of COVID 19, which is nearly double the rate at which people reportedly died from the disease under Trump.
None of that is mentioned to make a scientific argument that Biden’s response is doing better or worse than Trump. A pandemic is a complicated event, for which there is little historical data from which we can make sweeping judgments, especially about an isolated time in the midst of a crisis.
It’s simply to point out the different grading methods by which Vox—and other liberal media—tend to grade the results of COVID policies based on ideology.
Vox helped reinforce the idea that somehow Biden’s response would be substantially different than that of Trump.
Thus far, however, it looks like the only difference in response is due to the fact that the COVID vaccines developed in the last year are more available, which has little to do with any policies implemented under Biden.
Yet, somehow, this policy sameness has convinced “a lot of experts,” in the words of Vox that life is getting back to normal soon, while other experts, ignored by Vox, are warning that a fourth COVID surge is happening right now.