Comment The Biden administration’s refrain that Americans fully vaccinated and fortified against the coronavirus could safely resume their lives is now being tested by the First Patient, the 79-year-old leader of the free world, who said Thursday that he has publicly worked through his illness. “Guys, I’m doing great,” President Biden tweeted after the White House announced the infection, sharing a photo of himself behind his desk. “Keeping busy!” If Biden emerges quickly from his fight with Covid-19, it will be a high-level demonstration of his broader vow: A return to normalcy is possible thanks to vaccines and treatments, despite rising cases and the ongoing pandemic. But if the president is ill for a long time or, worse, becomes seriously ill, he will join many other Americans who have struggled to stay healthy in a world with minimal mask use and social distancing, and further fuel criticism that his virus strategy is falling short, especially for the most vulnerable. “I think Biden’s own response to Covid is what did it [illness] inevitable, really,” said Artie Vierkant, co-host of “Death Panel,” a left-leaning podcast that has faulted the administration for not pursuing a universal mask mandate and paid sick leave for those who test positive for the coronavirus, among other mitigations. “He’s just one of the tens or hundreds of thousands of people who will test positive for Covid today.” Others see his illness as a function of a highly contagious virus, as Americans weigh the trade-offs of social gatherings, mask-wearing and other decisions against the possibility of getting sick. “I think the president’s case says more about the coronavirus than the White House strategy — it’s surprisingly contagious,” replied Tom Frieden, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Frieden added that vaccines remain “amazingly effective” at preventing serious illness and praised the decision to prescribe paxlovid, an antiviral pill, to reduce the chances of Biden developing complications. “It also says a lot about where we are in the pandemic,” Frieden said. “We are adapting to Covid and as new variants emerge we may need to adapt again.” In interviews, tweets and comments, White House officials stressed that their strategy had prepared the president to test positive, with Covid coordinator Ashish Jha telling reporters he wanted to “mark this moment” – which Biden relies on in medical discoveries that are widely available to the general public. We’ve spent the last 18 months making sure vaccines, treatments, tests and other tools are widely available. As a result, we can manage COVID-19 and minimize disruption to daily life. https://t.co/Plyn5HdAun — Subhan Cheema (@SubhanCheema46) July 21, 2022 “It’s a reminder of why we all work so hard to make sure that every American has the same level of protection that the president has, that every American has the same level of immunity, and why we’ve worked so hard to make sure that people have access to life-saving treatments like paxlovid,” Jha said in a briefing. “These are incredibly important things for the president to have. These are incredibly important things for every American.” Jha declined to answer questions about Biden’s prognosis, saying he wanted to “avoid hypotheticals.” But the details of Biden’s infection and treatment, made public Thursday, were immediately scrutinized by doctors, epidemiologists and other experts, some of whom questioned why the president was so often without a mask in close conversations with others and who worried about the risk of for a long time. – transmission of covid. And as they reviewed the first reports of the nation’s most high-profile case of the coronavirus, some accused the White House of downplaying the risks to the president, instead of focusing on the ongoing toll of the disease. The virus is killing more than 400 people a day, according to the Washington Post’s seven-day average. “I think this is a moment to reckon with high transmission and that we should aspire to a better normal than that,” said Julia Reifman, a professor of public health at Boston University who has called for federal support for mask mandates, holding more rallies outdoors. and other mitigation measures. “We have already lost more than 500,000 people to Covid during this administration. … This is an opportunity not to minimize or exaggerate the president’s infection — and to recognize that it is a serious illness for people over 70.” Experts also pointed out that Biden’s case is being treated with a level of care that they believe should be a model for all Americans. For example, the White House said Biden will remain in isolation until he tests negative for the virus, going beyond CDC guidelines — a move that sparked backlash from some experts who asked why all Americans aren’t being asked to do the same. “The fact that they’re skipping over CDC recommendations that are flawed, without any evidence to support them, is telling,” said Eric Topol, director of the Scripps Translational Research Institute. “For all of us, not just the president.” Topol and others have called for all Americans to test negative before leaving isolation, saying the CDC’s failure to recommend such a test result means many Americans are leaving isolation early and infecting others. Ezekiel Emanuel, a University of Pennsylvania bioethicist who has advised the White House on its Covid strategy and has repeatedly called on officials to go further, said he wishes the administration had pushed for more aggressive measures such as improving indoor air quality venues, but said Biden has faced widespread resistance to many of the recommendations. “What I want the audience to do and what the audience I will does, they’re two different things,” Emanuel said. He added that Biden’s infection, despite the use of testing, screening and wearing a mask around him for indoor meetings, underscored that “BA.5 is truly contagious. He is probably the person in America with the best protections. No one can be sure that he will not be infected.” While Biden is the second president to test positive for the virus, the circumstances are very different from those of his predecessor, at least so far. When Donald Trump tested positive in late 2020, before vaccines were ready, he needed hospitalization and aides worried he might die. He had access to antiviral drugs that were not yet approved by regulatory authorities. By contrast, Biden’s positive test comes after he received two initial doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine and two booster shots, reducing the risk of serious illness, and after a number of senior administration officials tested positive — including an 81-year-old Anthony S. Fauci, the who got an infection this summer and went back to work. “We have said for some time that there was a substantial possibility that the President — like anyone else — could contract COVID,” White House chief of staff Ron Klein wrote to colleagues on Thursday. Klein also took to Twitter to comment that Biden was right to adopt an increasingly visible public role after spending much of the first year of his presidency physically removed from others. “The country would be better off if Biden remained extremely physically isolated from other people, avoided travel, etc. [Russian President Vladimir] Putin?” asked reporter Nate Silver, in a tweet amplified by Klain. “I tend not to think about it.” That public role built on the White House’s vaccine-focused strategy, with Biden initially echoing public health experts’ claims that vaccines also protected against infections — a claim that a then-new delta variant would swirl last summer. “You’re not going to get the coronavirus if you get these vaccinations,” Biden said in a July 21, 2021, CNN town hall — a year before the president himself tested positive. Asked this week what should be done about the country’s rising number of cases, the president had a two-word answer: Get vaccinated. “We have the ability to control it,” Biden said Wednesday, adding a message about the restrictions. “They should be vaccinated now.” Experts such as Boston University’s Raifman argue that the White House has remained too focused on vaccinations, even as variants have evolved to avoid some protections — and not enough on mitigations like social distancing and mask-wearing. “It all started with an early ‘back to normal’ [declaration] that then we didn’t correct when there was a delta wave or when there was a micron wave,” Reifman said, referring to a White House celebration last summer. “I’m very worried about not fixing again in new variants,” he added. Beatrice Adler-Bolton, who co-hosts the podcast with Vierkant and is immunocompromised, said she was concerned about the White House’s message that the president was dealing with his illness — particularly after her infection last winter left her with complications for three months. “It contributes to this idea that we’re living in a moment where Covid is no longer a nuisance, which obviously doesn’t match many of the daily experiences of workers diagnosed with Covid,” he said.
