President Joe Biden’s COVID-fighting policy seems to be a reflection of his presidential campaign.
In the effort to win over skeptical progressives, Biden notoriously reversed himself on key policy positions, some of which he had held for decades.
Now that he’s in office, Biden has gone from crushing the coronavirus to saying he can’t change its “trajectory” for months.
He once advocated a national mask mandate, but then, after implementing the requirement for people who come on federal property, immediately left his mask in his pocket when he visited the Lincoln Memorial.
When it came to the vaccines, the fastest route to herd immunity, Biden agreed shots were critical to getting the country back to normal. Then, his administration leaked a plan that would have introduced racial preferences into the vaccine supply chain, with some of the most vulnerable, elderly white people, shuttled to the end of it.
He first said anyone who wanted a dose could get it by spring; now, it will be late summer.
Across the country, demand is far outpacing supply. And so as Biden struggles to implement a distribution plan, the people receiving the most immediate attention might be surprising.
The New York Times reported Thursday, in a piece buried deep in its website, “The Pentagon has decided to offer coronavirus vaccines to detainees at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, possibly starting next week, according to a prosecutor in the case against five prisoners accused of conspiring in the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.”
Gitmo has 40 prisoners. Per the Times, “The Trump administration had declined to say whether prisoners would be vaccinated.”
Biden leaves no doubt. “The 40 detainees at the prison complex could start receiving the first of the two required doses of vaccine ‘on a voluntary basis’ as soon as Monday.”
That includes the notorious KSM: Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, mastermind of the 9/11 attacks on America.
After Biden came out ahead on election night, the media began to notice that his top coronavirus expert had advocated against “vaccine nationalism,” and argued for “distributive justice” among nations.
The bottom line was that, unlike the Trump administration which would put Americans first, Biden’s advisers were recommending retaining just enough of the vaccine to reach herd immunity and ship the rest overseas.
The flaw in the plan, as we have recently learned, is that Dr. Anthony Fauci kept lying to the public about the herd-immunity threshold.
So even before we had a vaccine, Biden’s people were looking at some social-justice scheme that would have imperiled Americans by putting them further at the end of the line for a treatment developed at their expense.
Now, the Biden administration is telling us that suspected terrorists who murdered or sought to kill Americans outrank our citizens.