An awkward dispute with Michigan has given President Joe Biden the most divisive and politically unpalatable moment since taking responsibility for the US response to the pandemic.
His administration’s blunt rebuff of his ally and Michigan’s Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s call for expanded availability of vaccines to fight a Covid-19 spike reflects the kind of difficult choice the president and his team will increasingly face on the way out of the crisis.
On Tuesday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Federal Drug Administration ordered a pause in administering the Johnson & Johnson vaccine after six confirmed cases of a rare blood clot among 6.8 million US recipients. The step is unlikely to seriously restrain the U.S. vaccine push as most doses entering U.S. weapons come from other manufacturers. But it underlines how vulnerable the administration is to events that threaten public vaccine trust.
Agonizing trade-offs have long characterised the emergency, none more so than the one between public health and economic well-being crushed by the lockdowns required to stem successive infection tides. But the speeding vaccine programme that has become the president’s political shield won’t spare him from potentially crippling dilemmas like one involving a swing state that helped pave his way to the White House.
Whitmer made many direct appeals to the White House for a vaccine surge—including last week’s 20-30-minute call with the president, CNN’s Kaitlan Collins reported Monday. Her failure to persuade the White House to augment the state’s vaccine stocks could expose a governor on the short list to be Biden’s running mate last year to fresh attacks by Republicans who spent months blasting her business restrictions and masking her mandate.
Tuesday’s White House tried to downplay conflicts with Whitmer. Asked by CNN’s Phil Mattingly about the fight, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki gave a long response praising the Michigan Democrat.
“She was relentless in her dedication to keeping Michigan’s people safe and a tremendous collaborator in the battle against Covid,” Psaki said. “And if you go back over a year ago, she led the battle to make sure that first responders in the state had the PPE they needed when cases started. And she pressed for further research when the federal government said they were, frankly, alone. “
Psaki’s added, “She had to survive not only a public health epidemic and a hostile state legislature, but friends from the virus, armed violence in the state capital, and threats to her life. She had to organize a disaster response to a defective dam break, all while doing all this, and a ravaged community in Michigan. We believe she’s displayed some real determination, fighting, and resolving. We will continue to work with her to help solve the uptick in her state and help deploy the tools we have. “
The political dimension of this episode, combined with fierce debate over the wisdom of a vaccine surge as hospitals fill up, means the condition of the Great Lakes State has become the most discordant moment in Biden’s smooth steering of the U.S. virus attack.
Michigan’s misery also provides a glaring warning of the ability of a pernicious virus strain first identified in the UK to manipulate fatigue with social distance and businesses’ desire to avoid trade-choking restrictions. The State Department of Health and Human Services announced more than 9,600 Covid-19 cases on Sunday and Monday.
But considering its desperate condition, Rochelle Walensky, Director of US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, frankly clarified that the time vaccinated patients need to develop immunity requires rejection of Whitmer’s pleas.
“If vaccinations go into arms today, we won’t see an impact of such vaccines, depending on the vaccine, for about two to six weeks,” Walensky said at Monday’s White House briefing.
“So when you’re in an emergency situation, an exceptional number of cases like we’ve had in Michigan, the solution isn’t necessarily vaccination. Indeed, we know the vaccine will be delayed. “
‘Close stuff’
Walensky’s alternative prescription to quell the latest virus surge was possibly much more unwelcome to Whitmer, who suffered months of threats and even an abduction attempt as conservatives demanded that she open her state. The governor, who is up for reelection next year, asked Michiganders over the weekend to voluntarily follow two weeks of voluntary limits on events such as indoor dining and community sports, indicating that current lockdowns are strategically unsustainable for her.
But Walensky suggested that Michigan should “really close things down, go back to our fundamentals, go back to where we were last spring, last summer, and shut things down, flatten the curve, decrease touch.” Although Michigan is not experiencing a surge in vaccine demand, the White House is sending therapeutics, more research products, and medical professionals to help the state better manage its current vaccine allocation.
Although advice to shutter states may be scientifically justified, given widespread public Covid-19 fatigue, they are now more likely to be in vain, and the fact that millions of vaccinated Americans are already beginning to regain their freedoms. For example, the kind of central government ordered shutdown lasting months from which the UK is beginning to emerge has long seemed incompatible with the American creed of individualism and personal freedom—even in Democratic-run states.
Many state governors, including the Republicans running Texas and Florida, have long chafed at CDC recommendations and responded to a loosening of the Covid-19 case load by quickly opening up business. They show no indication of changing their minds, even as Washington’s warnings of a boom materialise in cases of more contagious new varieties.
Walensky’s unequivocal message validates one of Biden’s promises to assume the Oval Office: depoliticize the pandemic battle. It’s not clear if Donald Trump would have made a similar decision considering his track record as a president who enjoyed giving favours to swing states and political allies, and then claiming credit.
Michigan’s argument against surging vaccines is not only rooted in the maximum six-week wait before people achieve complete immunity. The new population-based vaccination plan aims to ensure parity for all states and combat the virus nationwide. If the administration cedes to Michigan’s appeals, it will eventually receive identical calls from other states that could split the national vaccine initiative coherence. And Biden was quickly accused of favoring vaccine stocks.
“We must note that in the next two to six weeks, the variants we’ve seen in Michigan—these variants are also present in other states,” Andy Slavitt, Covid’s senior advisor to the White House, said Monday.
“So our willingness to vaccinate people easily in each of those nations, rather than taking vaccines and moving them to playing whack-a-mole, is not the policy outlined by public health officials and scientists.”
Discuss future vaccine plans
The request from Michigan and the federal response reflects the classic tug of war between national and local interests baked into the U.S. system, sometimes complicating public health and disaster relief efforts.
But, unlike many of Biden’s steps after taking office and deploying presidential authority to a pandemic that Trump had long tired of, there is no medical consensus on his Michigan decision.
“A core public health principle is targeting resources where they’re most needed,” Leana Wen, a former Baltimore Health Commissioner, said on Monday on CNN’s “New Day.”
“That’s the kind of strategy we need to come into the summer and fall where we’ll see these localised, regionalized outbreaks and the federal government will have to come up with a plan to boost resources, including vaccine distribution,” Wen said.
Dr. Scott Gottlieb, Trump’s former Food and Drug Administration commissioner, said the current crisis scale demanded creative thought.
“We’re not going to see a confluent outbreak, but we will see these hotspots, so we have to get used to having to push resources into those hotspots to disperse those flames,” Gottlieb said on CBS’ “Face the Nation” on Sunday.
However, medical experts who disagree with the notion of a surge contend that the B 1.1.7 variant is so widespread that it will be cascading nationwide in the coming weeks anyway, so isolated vaccine targeting won’t make much difference.
“If they divert vaccines to Michigan, the epidemic could be in another state next week,” Brown University professor and emergency room physicist Dr. Megan Ranney said Monday on CNN’s “Newsroom.”
Circumstances might change. Officials claim supply could outstrip demand in the coming weeks, given the vaccine rollout’s efficiency and increasing capability. Therefore, calculating the wisdom of vaccine surges could change simply because vaccines would otherwise go to waste.
Biden has enjoyed strong public support for pandemic management since taking office nearly three months ago. That’s undoubtedly partly due to the Trump administration’s denial and neglect.
But the White House was also effective in speeding vaccine deployment. About 120 million Americans have an injection. About 72 million are completely vaccinated. At least 78 percent of seniors had a first shot and 28 percent of US adults are now completely vaccinated, according to Slavitt, who revised inoculation statistics at Monday’s briefing.
But with a return of a sense of regular life, potentially approaching this summer, the capacity of the White House to sustain the balance between Covid-19 mitigation steps and resurgent commercial activity and gatherings would likely ebb further.
Key decisions — for example, the question of when to restart regular international flights — would also measure public approval of Biden’s management of the pandemic, but a change that may be months away given lower vaccine rates abroad.
Meanwhile, the prospect of new rises in infection in the fall could rekindle the dilemma of whether to encourage states’ local jurisdictions to shut down again, particularly if the administration is unsuccessful in persuading vaccine skeptics—including many Republicans—to shoot.
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