Biden its not about your freedom free#

“Next slide,” he kept saying, to an aide, who would click to a new graph of data demonstrating that the existing vaccines were working well at preventing serious illnesses. Fauci’s presentation was different in tone, if not substance, from Zients’s.

Next up was Anthony Fauci, the longtime head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, whom Biden had elevated to the job of White House chief medical adviser. she emphasized the progress that had been made, even as she noted the remaining pockets of unvaccinated people who would be vulnerable to the Delta variant. Zients would turn the microphone over to Rochelle Walensky, a pioneering infectious-disease doctor whom the President had hired out of Harvard and Massachusetts General Hospital to run his C.D.C. In the liberal drama of the pandemic, the figures in the White House briefing room on July 1st were the good guys. Read The New Yorker’s complete news coverage and analysis of the coronavirus pandemic. “We are emerging from one of the darkest years in our nation’s history into a summer of hope and joy.” The President, perhaps self-consciously, added, “Hopefully.” “This is one of the greatest achievements in American history, and you, the American people, made it happen,” Biden said. After Independence Day, Biden delivered an address in which he praised the country for having nearly hit that target. On June 2nd, President Biden had promised Americans a “summer of freedom” and urged them toward a “month of action” to meet his goal of having seventy per cent or more of adults at least partly vaccinated by the Fourth of July.

Biden its not about your freedom free#

In May, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had liberalized its guidance on face masks, making clear that vaccinated people should feel free to go maskless indoors. When Zients appeared on “Face the Nation” three days later, Ed O’Keefe opened the interview by citing the Delta variant and asking, “Should we really be declaring independence right now from the pandemic?” Whatever the right answer to that question was-whatever the White House should have been doing-Zients hadn’t gone off the reservation. In retrospect, that optimism seems almost lurid. “This weekend, millions of Americans will be able to get together-back together, not just with their families and close friends for small backyard cookouts, but with their community for larger festivals, parades, and fireworks, celebrating our country’s July Fourth Independence Day and the progress we have made against the virus together.” Deaths from the pandemic were down more than ninety per cent since January, he went on, and the country’s progress had “exceeded” expectations. At the dais in the White House briefing room, he spoke slowly and exactly, keeping his body still, so that he seemed something close to an embodied talking point. “Going into the Fourth of July holiday weekend,” he said, “Americans have good reason to celebrate.” Zients, a wealthy businessman in his mid-fifties, had built a reputation within the Democratic Party for fixing impossible operational problems.

The mood that morning, when President Biden’s COVID-response coördinator, Jeff Zients, opened the White House’s weekly pandemic briefing, was unusually optimistic. Even in the compressed historical arc of the pandemic, July 1st wasn’t so long ago.