In the January 2025 issue of Reason, we're giving performance reviews of Joe Biden's presidency. Click here to read the other entries.
When Joe Biden was sworn in as president in January 2021, he had good reason to be optimistic about the trajectory of the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite being widely criticized for—and arguably losing his first reelection because of—the perceived insufficiencies of his coronavirus response, President Donald Trump had successfully overseen Operation Warp Speed. As a result of this public-private partnership, federal health officials were able to grant emergency authorization for COVID-19 vaccines by the end of 2020, a much faster than expected timetable. In the first few months of Biden's presidency, millions of Americans got vaccinated and COVID-19 cases dropped rapidly.
