When it Comes to COVID, Biden is Trump Lite

2020? 2021? 2022? Anyone fancy a shot at 2023? For the past two years, the United States

and the rest of the world have longed for the year when COVID would finally run up a white

flag and slope off into the distance, never to be seen again. Masks could be burned

liberation style like bras, and we could finally go and spend time seeing just how many

people we could hug in day.

However, January 2022 is showing that it can do a great impression of March 2020 when it

comes to COVID. Of course, back in 2020, we had Trump and his patently dangerous

downplaying of the virus throughout, deriding mask wearing and the administration of

Clorox into the body to “perhaps do a number on the virus.” So, when Trump got hoofed

from the White House and Joe Biden took up the federal government’s reins, it was all going

to be so much better. Ha! The lol of it all…

When Trump left office, 400,000 Americans had perished in the pandemic. Roughly a year

later, that figure is hurtling to 900,000. So, while Trump had hundreds of thousands of

Americans die on his watch, Biden has, erm, well, you know. The federally coordinated

national plan under Biden still looks like a patch-work quilt, and a potentially deadly bed-

cover at that. Where is the financial assistance for especially vulnerable industry sectors

that are being relentlessly hammered by the pandemic? The ocean to ocean contact tracing

and national testing strategy? While vilifying the anti-vax band wagon may be a go-to fix for

brief moral superiority, it doesn’t cover up Biden’s Trump like short-comings.

Heaven forbid that the corporate blood that courses through the heart of the Biden

administration has anything to do with this? Sounds far-fetched? Well consider this. The

CDC, with it’s many nods and winks to big business, has declared that those who are COVID

asymptomatic, can halve their quarantine time from ten to five days. Sounds liberating yes?

Well, no, not at all. One person’s asymptomatic COVID symptoms spell something way

more serious, or even deadly for another. Looked at another way, people in quarantine for

less time can spend more time getting back to work so as to continue to walk the relentless

treadmill of corporate America. And that’s at a time when the US continues to smash daily

rates of new infections at an eye-watering pace.

Yes, the science about COVID can change and we are still learning about the virus. The first

version of COVID, simply known as the L-strain, has since spawned Delta, then Omicron and

other lesser-known variants, six in total, at present. And what if the deadliest mutation is

yet to come? Reduce quarantine times further still as the economy just has to keep on

rolling at the cost of yet more human life sacrificed on the alter of COVID smothered

corporate greed?

The lives of millions and millions of Americans were in peril under the Trump administration.

The same continues to be undeniably true of the Biden presidency. When the history books

of the future are written about the early twenty-first century, numbers, particularly so

numbers of fatalities, tend to jump out at you from the page. While Trump made a

complete hash of his response to the pandemic through a head-spinning mix of denial,

idiocy and strongman showmanship, leading to 400,000 COVID related deaths, we have to

ask the question how has the Biden set-up added another 400,000 deaths, and counting?

It was not supposed to be like this with President Biden, yet it has turned out to be exactly like

how it was before. Maybe the scholars of the future will look back at Biden’s fudged COVID

response and make an assessment that it was incompetence that was at the heart of the

strategy. Or maybe determine that there were too many Republican Trump stooges and

anti-vaxers making merry hell with his efforts to implement a coherent national COVID

strategy. Or maybe, those historians of the future, those with a more forensic eye, will see

this for what it actually is – yet another display of corporate America flexing its trillion-dollar

muscles at the expense of yet more innocent Americans.

So, when it comes to COVID 2022, move over ex-President Trump, here comes President

Trump Lite. Two sides of the same coin.

2023 anyone?