VICTOR JOECKS: Biden catches virus he promised to shut down

President Joe Biden once promised to shut down the coronavirus. He couldn’t even keep himself from catching it.

On Thursday, the White House announced that Biden has COVID. Fortunately, his doctor says he has only mild symptoms, including a runny nose and dry cough. He is also taking Paxlovid, an antiviral drug. There’s every reason to expect that he’ll make a full recovery. I hope and pray he does — and not just because Kamala Harris is vice president.

According to Biden, this wasn’t possible.

“You’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations,” Biden said at a CNN townhall last July. Biden isn’t just vaccinated. He’s received two booster shots. Oops.

This isn’t an attack on vaccines. Harris’ chances of becoming president would be much higher if Biden weren’t vaccinated. That’s reason enough to appreciate them.

But Biden’s illness highlights just how wrong he has been about the coronavirus.

“I’m going to shut down the virus, not the country,” he tweeted in October 2020.

That didn’t happen. Instead, he routinely attacked those Republican governors, such as Florida’s Ron DeSantis, for not imposing enough restrictions.

“If these governors won’t help us beat the pandemic, I’ll use my power as president to get them out of the way,” Biden said last September.

Of course, if Biden abided by his own standard, he wouldn’t be president any longer. During the October 2020 presidential debate, Biden noted that 220,000 Americans had died from the coronavirus.“Anyone who is responsible for that many deaths should not remain as president of the United States of America,” he said.

More than 1 million Americans have now died from the coronavirus. Around 600,000 of those deaths occurred since Biden took office. Biden isn’t resigning anytime soon, however. He may even run for a second term.

It was always a garbage attack. It wasn’t as if Donald Trump ordered nursing homes to accept coronavirus patients, like former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo did. Trump didn’t cover up a testing scandal, like Gov. Steve Sisolak’s administration did, either.

The president has a lot of power, but he can’t overrule reality. Elected officials need to adapt their policies to the facts, including that government bureaucrats aren’t all-knowing. That’s especially true when they’re dealing with a new virus.

But since early in the pandemic, Biden and other Democrat politicians insisted it could be done. They promised to keep you safe if only you gave them enough power to make King George blush. Businesses shuttered. Schools and churches closed. Mask and vaccine mandates. You couldn’t be trusted to examine data and make decisions for yourself. You had to listen to the experts, while prominent Democrat politicians flouted their own rules.

It didn’t work. Biden couldn’t even keep himself from getting the coronavirus. Meanwhile children have been devastated both academically and emotionally. A recession seems inevitable, if it’s not here already.

If you want to solve these problems, don’t vote for the people who caused them.

Victor Joecks’ column appears Sunday, Wednesday and Friday. Contact him at vjoecks@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-4698. Follow @victorjoecks on Twitter.