Biden’s COVID-19 Response Eroded Civil Liberties
In the January 2025 issue of Reason, we’re giving performance reviews of Joe Biden’s presidency. Click here to read the other entries.
When Joe Biden was sworn in as president in January 2021, he had good reason to be optimistic about the trajectory of the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite being widely criticized for—and arguably losing his first reelection because of—the perceived insufficiencies of his coronavirus response, President Donald Trump had successfully overseen Operation Warp Speed. As a result of this public-private partnership, federal health officials were able to grant emergency authorization for COVID-19 vaccines by the end of 2020, a much faster than expected timetable. In the first few months of Biden’s presidency, millions of Americans got vaccinated and COVID-19 cases dropped rapidly.
The fantastic news was short-lived. Infection numbers began to climb again in the summer of 2021 with the rise of the delta variant. While health officials had initially suggested that the vaccines would prevent infection—a claim also repeated by Biden himself—it turned out that they offered limited protection in this regard. More Americans died of COVID-19 during Biden’s first year in office than Trump’s last.
How did Biden respond to these problems? By doubling down on the most intrusive and least justified pandemic prevention policies: mandates and lockdowns. These policies proved incredibly ineffective at stopping COVID-19.
In September 2021, Biden declared a national vaccine mandate—not just for federal workers, but for 80 million employees of private companies as well. Despite having personally assured Americans that he would not require them to get vaccinated if he was elected president,
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