The news that Joe Biden will end his presidential campaign is not surprising. What matters in American politics is not the “will of the people,” nearly 52 million of whom watched the disastrous debate on June 27, but the fears and desires of wealthy donors. The ultimate decision to force him out was made by the millionaires and billionaires fronted by celebrities like George Clooney, people who had so far ignored voters who opposed Biden for his support of the genocide in Gaza. In the weeks to come, Biden’s decision will be portrayed as the act of a selfless man who understood his own frailty and stepped aside for the sake of the nation: all of this is sheer nonsense, but it will become the official story.
While Biden’s announcement was inevitable, what is far more surprising is the scant attention paid to COVID diagnosis. This is, on the record, his third infection but I suspect he may well have tested positive more often. I’m a child of the Seventies: I grew up reading about Three Mile Island, watched movies like Silkwood, and understood, even then, enough about Watergate and Vietnam to remain forever suspicious of official news channels. Besides my natural and non-conspiratorial belief that the state’s accounts are never to be trusted, I also believe the science: there is enough reliable medical information now on the links between COVID, especially long COVID, and mental decline, in both scientific journals and the popular press.
Joe Biden is an 81-year-old man who, more than likely, is suffering from the stress of long COVID after at least three infections; the issue is not his age but the extent of the damage that the virus can inflict even on supposedly healthy bodies. Long COVID’s symptoms (including brain fog, fatigue, and shortness of breath) can mimic the kind of physical and mental decline we see in some aging people around us. In the Los Angeles Times, Daniel J. Stone cautioned against any quick judgements and opined that the president showed no signs of anything like Alzhiemer’s. That was back in March, before the debate, and, strangely for a medical professional, Stone made no mention of COVID. He wrote, “As a geriatrician, I discuss the effects of aging with patients every day,” but there was no word on how he might ask about their COVID history to determine whether their symptoms, if any, might be a result of the virus.
This erasure of COVID, even among medical professionals, is also apparent in a New Yorker piece posted right after the debate, where nine—count them, nine—physicians delivered their analyses of Biden’s health. But not one of them suggested that COVID might have at least accelerated his now visible frailty and cognitive decline. And what they saw was severe enough that one of them was willing to say (off the record) that Biden has “a neurodegenerative condition.” In the face of a pandemic that remains, forcefully, in the present tense, why did no one raise the possibility that Biden’s condition might be COVID-related? How is it that Dhruv Khullar, who wrote the piece, did not even ask about it? Or, if he did and the medical professionals replied in the negative, why was that not reported? In such ways, COVID is made to disappear from the lexicon of everyday life.
In his letter announcing that he would not seek the presidency, Biden claims that, “Together, we overcame a once in a century pandemic…” He writes this as someone isolating after his third recorded infection, who knows perfectly well (we hope) that his vice president’s husband tested positive for COVID in early July. This is like watching a man on the hull of the Titanic spreading out his arms and singing that his heart will go on, as the iceberg neatly splits his body in two.
COVID is not over. We are in the fifth year of the pandemic, and massive global inequalities mean that we will continue to see it spread unabated and unchecked, mutating as viruses do, becoming more and more lethal as the years go on (I’m aware that the official term is “evolving,” but as someone who also spent a good portion of her childhood watching Alien, I prefer to think in terms of mutations). In February, Maria Van Kerkhove, interim director of the WHO’s Department of Epidemic and Pandemic Preparedness and Prevention, said, “COVID’s not in the news every day, but it’s still a global health risk….The virus is rampant. We’re still in a pandemic. There’s a lot of complacency at the individual level, and more concerning to me is that at the government level.”
According to BNO News, “So far this year, more than 3.8 million COVID cases have been reported in the U.S., causing 304,772 hospitalizations and 32,588 deaths.” Those numbers are not insubstantial. Worldwide, numbers and data are hard to gauge given any number of factors, including mass poverty and the fact that the poorest and most marginalised are unlikely to be reporting themselves while they struggle to stay alive. One estimate is that COVID is the fifth leading cause of death worldwide (astonishing for a novel virus, in such a short time), but this report also claims that it “kills very few young children or adolescents,” a statement that we know is not grounded in current science. A JAMA Network report notes that “COVID-19 was a leading cause of death among individuals aged 0 to 19 years in the US,” from August 2021-to July 2022, a finding that contradicts early claims that children and youth were immune. A February 2024 NIH report states that long COVID affects no fewer than “10-20% of children and young adults.”
Following the science, as we must, means that decisions on how to act in the face of a mortal crisis will be cautious or even incorrect at first as we struggle to navigate new terrain. When the pandemic began, we were told to wash our hands often and well (always a good rule!) and even scrub our vegetables. Cloth masks would work well, we were told, until it turned out that they wouldn’t. Some of what we now understand as incorrect information came about because the science on COVID-19 was still in its infancy, but it did cost lives. And some of that misinformation came about because institutions we trusted dragged their feet. For example, despite the insistence of many experts for over a decade prior to the pandemic, the WHO persisted with what we now know as misinformation about COVID being spread by droplets and only recently conceded, in May of this year, that “airborne transmission occurs as sick people exhale pathogens that remain suspended in the air, contained in tiny particles of saliva and mucus that are inhaled by others.” The news could mean a dramatic shift in public strategies, and an emphasis on providing clean air equipment and masks to everyone—but imagine how many deaths we could have prevented if the WHO had not held on to its central tenet for so long.
Ordinary people everywhere are recording the devastating effects of COVID on their lives, especially when it turns into long COVID, an ultimately debilitating set of symptoms that can result in a sharp decline in the quality of life, especially with the loss of income and healthcare. A CNBC report on the economic effects of long COVID focuses on the loss to the economy at large (nearly $4 trillion), but it does also reveal the cost to individuals: interviewees speak of struggling to make ends meet while coping with symptoms.
In light of all this, the fact that a president who claims to have ended a pandemic keeps getting re-infected should be much, much bigger news than it is. It is entirely understandable that the news of Biden removing himself from a presidential run is the big news of the day, but much more attention needs to be paid to the virus that has clearly been plaguing him for a long while. Despite his clearly infectious state, the president has been spotted walking around maskless, followed by unmasked bodyguards and aides.
This is more than COVID denialism: it’s a failure to understand the pandemic as a matter of national security. As an avowed anti-war leftist, that phrase, “national security,” is not one I like to echo (especially given the potential for COVID to be transformed into a “terrorist threat” when convenient), but it baffles me that no one is making the connection between a president withdrawing from a race and a surging pandemic. What if COVID affects Harris? Or Trump? I know we’re not supposed to care about the other guy, but at some point and at this rate, we could see Trump and large numbers of legislators on all sides laid low by the virus (although, as at Davos, where the elites have all the precautions they need, it’s likely our politicians—already armed with excellent healthcare—will be kept safe). COVID, as we know from any number of accounts and scientific data, remains persistent and its long-term effects will include an attrition in the workforce and, much more importantly, in the quality of people’s lives. We can’t trust security forces to ensure that a presidential candidate is not the target of a 20-year-old’s ire, and guns are visible weapons.
COVID is invisible and its range and effects are far more pervasive. Yet, even prominent media outlets have gone along with the fiction that the pandemic is, as Biden put it, over. Biden’s age is one factor in the lack of attention paid to his diagnosis: we think of the elderly as disposable. As I’ve written, in “Person,” “The old, everywhere, are seen as dispensable, dry husks and carcasses even when they still live and breathe, their memories and entire lives deemed unworthy of memory and regard.” At some point, we will have to contend with our callous disregard for the elderly and with the loss of lives of those we think of as young. It shouldn’t take mass illness and death, but I suspect this is the only way we might start to pay attention.
COVID is not a cold—its effects are now deadlier and more long-lasting than was thought possible in 2020. COVID is also not an inevitability, and we need to stop pretending that it’s only the lucky few who somehow remain uninfected. No one is naturally immune, but some of us have been fortunate enough to be able to navigate everyday life in ways that help us avoid the virus: we mask everywhere, we don’t join crowded events like concerts, and we keep up with vaccines. In terms of public responses, our best option is the Swiss Cheese model: no one method can save us, and what we need is a combination of tactics that include vaccinations, masking, and clean air technology. And we need to support those who fall sick by giving them money, resources, and healthcare as they need it. What we need is a Davos for all: sensible and easy precautions to protect everyone, not just the elites.
Biden will receive the finest healthcare available in the world, and for the rest of his life. But millions of others will lose their jobs and stability in their already fragile lives as they fall prey to a pandemic that official channels, including their elected leaders, keep insisting is over.
COVID can be eliminated but to do that requires a political will that remains absent in media and medical fields and among politicians. Right now, we’re not even willing to make a connection between politics and the virus.1This sentence added an hour after initial publication, and the first line in the paragraph was moved down from above. When an American president’s COVID diagnosis is ignored as a factor in one of the most momentous events in recent world history, it seems futile to hope for an end to this ongoing pandemic. But without hope, and without calling attention to the large, persistent virus in the room, the future looks bleak.
For more of my work on the Pandemic, see these links.
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