Biden Quits While Sick With Covid, Says We Overcame Covid

Joe Biden just quit the presidential campaign.

In his withdrawal letter touting his achievements, he says we ‘overcame the pandemic.’

A letter he wrote while literally sick with the pandemic virus.

For a third time.

Does this mean we overcame the pandemic?

Some might argue (indeed some have argued in response to a tweet I wrote) that he’s unlikely to die now, whereas he might well have died in 2020.

By this logic, the thinking goes, we overcame the pandemic.

This is the logic the world has been running on since about mid-2021, so no points for critical thinking for those regurgitating it I guess.

(All people who no doubt consider themselves Extremely Critical Thinkers).

Maybe they should try asking the families of the 540 people in the US who were killed by covid last week. Or the families of the 33,140 killed so far this year. Or the 310,000 people covid has put in the hospital in the US in 2024.

How many of them would agree we overcame the pandemic, I wonder.

For Joe Biden, the vast majority of Democrats, and to be honest the vast majority of politicians everywhere, we overcame the pandemic by absorbing thousands of new deaths weekly around the globe.

By absorbing thousands of new cases of chronic illness triggered by the virus.

Deaths and illness that mostly wouldn’t have happened in 2019.

We overcame the pandemic by believing the lies we were told and the lies we told ourselves.

We overcame the pandemic by breathing a sigh of relief when it was no longer in the headlines.

We overcame the pandemic through the normalization of extra suffering and death.

We overcame the pandemic by turning away.

We overcame the pandemic by accepting a worse world.

We overcame the pandemic by pretending our responsibilities to each other ended with a vaccine.

We overcame the pandemic by trampling on the vulnerable.

If the pandemic overcomers would just say this, would just be honest that overcoming the pandemic meant all the above, I’d have some respect for them.

But claiming we overcame a pandemic without any of the context around ongoing deaths, without mentioning long covid, WHILE YOU ARE LITERALLY SICK WITH THE PANDEMIC VIRUS, is different levels of gaslighting.

And let’s be real, Biden did nothing Trump wouldn’t have done.

The Democrats said everyone should get the vaccine, and that was it.

Then they opened everything up as quickly as possible to satisfy the corporate donors. Getting the capitalist machine back up and running was the over-riding priority.

Biden subsequently oversaw far more covid deaths than Trump even with the advantage of the vaccine. And as people died, he said nothing, and he did nothing. Not even when winter surges were killing thousands a week.

How hard would it have been to call for masks in hospitals? To say that you’d always said you’d follow the science and the science was saying that we need new measures during covid surges?

Far too hard apparently.

He preferred to spend his political capital on constantly repeating how much he loved Israel and funding a genocide.

And while Trump is pivoting to anti-vax sentiments now because he’s never knowingly run against the cultural mood within his base, he’s praised the covid vaccine on numerous occasions in the past. In 2021 he said the covid vaccine was ‘one of the greatest achievements of mankind.’

Trump as president in 2021 would have done exactly the same as Biden.

So to see Biden list overcoming the pandemic as one of his achievements, when that achievement started and ended with asking people to get the vaccine, defies any honest assessment of what he actually did in relation to what Trump would have done.

Anyway, now he’s done.

It’s been clear for a while it would end like this, never more so than when he was seeing struggling to step into his car after testing positive for covid.

It’s also instructive to see the treatment Biden received for a virus we overcame.

Antivirals

Round-the-clock O2 monitoring, blood pressure and temperature checks

Blood panel to check red blood cell function

White blood cell panel to check immune system function

Metabolic panel to test electrolytes, kidney, liver function

What do we get?

We get told it’s just a cold and to get back to work.

You’re very lucky to get antivirals outside the US, and lucky in the US if you’re considered eligible and your insurance covers it.

That’s if you even know you have it, because most people were long ago discouraged from testing.

Who knows to what extent Biden’s decision has been influenced by the fact he has covid. But he has quit while sick with covid, so it’s surely more than zero.

Is he sicker than we know with covid? Is he regular-sick with covid, but even regular-sick has made him reflect on the reality that immunity doesn’t exist and he can’t handle getting sick with this thing every year (like he has done since he ended all protection measures)?

It’s unlikely we’ll know either way. Unless he dies.

Yet already, so little of the mainstream news coverage of Biden’s withdrawal places it in the context of covid.

Even though he’s withdrawn while sick with the virus.

A virus he said last year ‘no longer meaningfully disrupts our lives’ and yet he’s cancelled all his events this week.

Covid has now bookended the fate of the last two presidents, both of whom were desperate to claim victory over it and wish it away.

What will it do to the next one, to Trump 2.0 or to Kamala Harris?

The one thing we do know is that in spite of the triumphalist language, in spite of the desperation to wish it away, it’ll do something.

Because physical reality has this knack of being real.