WASHINGTON – President Joe Biden is down in the polls, beset by rising inflation and struggling to get his message across to voters.
And now comes a potential new stage of the coronavirus pandemic.
The arrival of the omicron variant in the United States this week has introduced an unknown variable into Biden’s presidency, one that could either add additional pressure on a White House at a low point in public opinion or offer a political lifeline to a president whose approval marks are highest on his handling of the pandemic.
“In politics you like to be able to control everything ahead of you,” said Jared Leopold, a Democratic strategist. “And a pandemic is totally uncontrollable. So it could cut either way for Biden.”
Which way the politics break could depend on the public response to the plan Biden outlined Thursday at the National Institutes of Health that he said “pulls no punches.”
The full impact from omicron is still unknown, but its basic genetic makeup – carrying over 50 mutations – could mean the variant is more transmissible and capable of evading immunity than previous ones, scientists say.
A worst-case scenario would be that omicron has a severe impact on vaccinated and previously infected individuals, requiring governments to revive the lockdowns and strict social distancing measures that were seen early in the pandemic.
Biden’s team was eager to take those options off the table, even before scientists fully understood the danger posed by the omicron variant.
“People are not going to go for shutting the thing down again,” said Jim Cauley, a longtime Democratic strategist from Kentucky, who pointed out that even Democratic governors have backed away from lockdowns. “I just think they won’t.”
Some scientific experts say that vaccines should provide at least some protection from omicron, but question whether the administration should take any options off the table before more is known about the new variant.
“Nothing should be taken off the table for any variant before understanding it better,” said Dr. Julie Swann, head of the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at North Carolina State University and an adviser to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention during its response to the H1N1 pandemic in 2009.
“I think a full lockdown and quarantine is unlikely given what we know. Even partial immunity can help us avoid dire situations, especially with testing and masks widely available,” she said.
For now, the administration is adamant that it has the procedures to avoid another politically unpopular government response.
“Our belief is we have the tools in place to avoid lockdowns,” a White House official told McClatchy.
Public opinion about coronavirus-related restrictions has changed markedly in the more than 18 months since the beginning of the pandemic in the United States, especially since vaccines became widely available last winter.
Measures like virtual learning for schoolchildren and the temporary closure of schools and businesses — staples of the country’s initial response to the pandemic — now face more resistance.
Biden said he consulted with one of his advisors on polling and national strategy about public sentiment on the coronavirus response before coming to the National Institutes of Health to talk about his plan.
“I was told this as I was leaving the White House, that there is an expectation that 30% of the non-vaxxers who said ‘under no circumstances would I get a vaccination,’ because of the new variant are now saying ‘I’m gonna get a vaccination,’” Biden said. “So we hope that’s true.”
The plan doesn’t include shutdowns or lockdowns, Biden said. “My plan I’m announcing today pulls no punches in the fight against COVID-19, and it’s a plan that I think should unite us.”
Biden’s nine-point plan includes increasing the availability of booster shots for all adults; improving vaccination rates among eligible children to keep schools open; expanding at-home testing options; enforcing vaccine requirements in large workplaces; preparing antiviral pills to treat COVID-19; extending mask requirements for international and domestic travelers and tightening testing requirements for international arrivals.
“I know COVID-19 has been very divisive in this country – it’s become a political issue, which is a sad, sad commentary,” Biden said. “It shouldn’t be, but it has been. Now as we move into the winter and face the challenge of this new variant, this is a moment where we can put the divisiveness behind us, I hope.”
Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and Biden’s chief medical advisor, emphasized that federal guidance on combating the omicron variant was essentially unchanged from prior guidance.
“If you look at the things we’ve been recommending, they’re just the same,” Fauci told reporters earlier this week. “We want to keep doing that and make sure we pay close attention to that.”
A Morning Consult poll released this week found support for many of the measures emphasized by the Biden White House, with 73% saying it’s important to encourage unvaccinated people to receive a vaccine and 68% backing vaccine requirements.
The same poll found only 44% said it was important to close businesses and government facilities.
Pandemic-related policies in individual states have also shifted. Only 10 states and the District of Columbia have any kind of statewide mask mandate, according to data compiled by the Kaiser Family Foundation. And all but one state, Hawaii, is considered “reopened,” according to the health group’s tracking.
“We saw back in May and June that most states that still had any social distance requirements, at this point, we saw most of those rescinded,” said Jennifer Tolbert, director of state health reform at the Kaiser Family Foundation.
Even when cases and hospitalizations surged because of the delta variant during the late summer and fall, she added, nearly every state declined to reimpose any restrictions. Many states instead pivoted to trying to persuade as many people as possible to receive the vaccine.
“What we have seen is a shift in emphasis away from the social distancing requirements and toward vaccines, either mandates or efforts to increase vaccination rates,” Tolbert said. “So the focus really has shifted. The focus is on getting more people vaccinated.”
Biden’s approval ratings have fallen since the late summer, and a combination of the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, the surging delta coronavirus variant and rising inflation have taken a toll on his popularity ever since.
Republicans have already criticized the Biden administration for not doing more to roll back existing measures, such as a vaccine mandate for certain public and private-sector employees.
“The country started the year with great promise as the vaccines rolled out, and today, there is significant exhaustion,” said Dan Conston, president of the Republican super PAC Congressional Leadership Fund. “There was never a serious shift from the administration to move back to normal once vaccines came out, and now they’re in this very difficult position of justifying forever Covid. And that’s tiresome to people.”
Even if omicron proves as dangerous as initially feared, one official noted that the government’s response in the fight against COVID-19 is limited to well-known tools.
“Everybody’s very concerned, but we know what to do,” a CDC official told McClatchy. “With a new variant like this, people want us to come up with new tools. It’s the same tools. We don’t have new ones.”
