President Joe Biden may be about to pull off a miracle
We all lived through Donald Trump’s negligent, corrupt, egocentric, and frankly evil mishandling of the pandemic, so there’s no need to rehash all the details. But we all know that things wouldn’t have been nearly as bad if we’d had a reasonable President in power. Now that we do in fact have a reasonable President, the question has been just how much better things can go.
Because Joe Biden became President at a time when the vaccine was just beginning to roll out and Trump had completely botched that rollout, it wasn’t initially clear how much of a difference Biden’s leadership was making. But yesterday Biden made the bold and brilliant move of forcing competitors Johnson & Johnson and Merck to work together to massively increase vaccine manufacturing. Then he made a prediction that feels like a miracle: he said that he now foresees enough vaccine doses being available for the entire adult U.S. population by the end of May.
I don’t use the word “miracle” lightly here. We’re talking about having the entire country vaccinated less than three months from now. You know that annoying scenario where every reasonable person has already been vaccinated, and we then have to convince the anti-vaxers and loons to get on board as well? None of us are looking forward to that battle, but the beginning of that battle will signal the beginning of the end of the pandemic nightmare. And the experts say that we only need to vaccinate most of the population, and not 100% of the population, before the virus loses its ability to keep spreading.
Of course it’s not quite so simple as merely reaching a vaccination finish line. Experts say that the new COVID strains may change the percentage of the country that needs to be vaccinated before herd immunity kicks in, and so on. And even after the pandemic is “over” it’ll still be a new normal. But if President Biden can get every (willing) person in the country vaccinated by May, it’ll show just what the federal government is capable of when it’s at its best. America might even get to have a semi-normal summer. Considering what a nightmare the pandemic was even just a month ago, that would indeed be a miracle.
