Thank you, President Biden, for leading us through the pandemic
President Biden’s stunning announcement that he will end his reelection bid has led many to laud his accomplishments. Chief among them should be how his administration handled the coronavirus pandemic and saved millions of American lives.
When Biden took office in January 2021, the United States had endured nearly a year of turmoil. The coronavirus had become the nation’s third-leading cause of death and was continuing to spread at alarming speed. His predecessor’s pandemic strategy could most charitably be described as surrender. (Less-charitable descriptions, as I wrote about at the time, include supreme recklessness and knowingly facilitating superspreader events.)
The one saving grace of Donald Trump’s administration was the remarkable speed with which it facilitated the development of safe and effective vaccines. But it’s one thing to promise shots and quite another to get them produced, distributed and administered into the arms of Americans. As the public health aphorism goes, it’s not vaccines that saves lives; it’s vaccinations.
This is where the Biden administration excelled. In just weeks, Biden’s COVID-response czar Jeff Zients, vaccinations coordinator Bechara Choucair and their team turned the slow and disjointed operation inherited from their predecessors into one of the most effective vaccination campaigns in history.
They easily exceeded Biden’s campaign promise to administer 100 million doses in the first 100 days; it took just 58 days to deliver that many shots. In the first six months of 2021, nearly half of the U.S. population got shots. By the end of 2022, more than 80% of Americans had received at least one vaccination.
A 2022 report from the Commonwealth Fund estimated that in those first two years, these vaccines prevented more than 18.5 million hospitalizations and averted 3.2 million deaths. The vaccination program also saved more than $1 trillion in medical costs.
The Biden administration can be credited with many other COVID-related actions, including partnering with drug companies to develop and distribute antiviral treatments, scaling up at-home testing, improving disease surveillance and investing in longCOVID research. Their efforts were successful because Biden rightfully elevated the voice of medical professionals such as Anthony S. Fauci and Vivek H. Murthy. But just as crucially, he chose people experienced at implementing complex programs — such as Zients and Choucair — and empowered them to do their jobs.
There are those who remain critical of the administration for its support of mask and vaccine mandates and for not pushing for schools to reopen sooner. Others wish Biden had kept the public health emergency for COVID in place longer. And much work remains to be done, including to increase lackluster booster uptake among vulnerable older adults and to restore trust in scientific institutions.
On balance, though, I believe Biden’s legacy will be that he was the president who got the United States out of the pandemic as well as could be hoped for. Let’s not forget, too, that he expanded access to health care, embraced harm reduction in treating opioid addiction and reduced the cost of prescription drugs for seniors.
For all his work to advance public health, I thank Joe Biden. Future leaders would do well to learn from his foresight to set ambitious targets, enlist the private sector and positively channel the power of the federal government to help fix urgent problems. Leana S. Wen is an emergency physician, clinical associate professor at George Washington University and author of “Lifelines: A Doctor’s Journey in the Fight for Public Health.” Previously, she served as Baltimore’s health commissioner.