After a year of unfathomable bungling on COVID-19 from President Donald Trump and most everyone around him, the Biden Administration’s promise of a competent response to the pandemic is an undeniable relief. Trump’s mishandling of a crisis that has killed, as of press time, more than 400,000 people in the United States included feuding with experts, launching global wild goose chases after quack cures, sowing chaos with regard to messaging and coordination efforts, and modeling risky health behaviors.
Biden, instead, has assembled a competent coronavirus task force composed of medical and scientific professionals who, he’s assured the nation, he’ll actually be listening to.
“It’s like Marie Antoinette, you know? ‘Let them eat $600.’ What the hell are they thinking?”
The Trump Administration’s embrace of scientifically discredited strategies like unmitigated “herd immunity” and inconsistent directives on measures like mask-wearing and school closures has been answered by Biden’s thoughtful 100-day plan, which includes amped-up testing programs to facilitate safe school reopenings, an executive order requiring masks on interstate transit, and a large-scale rollout of vaccine doses to be distributed by local communities.
This transition of power is especially reassuring considering the emergence of a more infectious strain of the virus, which stands to drive up caseloads in the coming months if not checked by effective and coordinated mitigation measures—something that Trump and his allies could hardly have been worse at spearheading.
Biden’s COVID-19 Task Force is co-chaired by David Kessler, a former U.S. Food and Drug Administration commissioner who helped introduce the ubiquitous “nutrition facts” labeling system; Marcella Nunez-Smith, a professor of medicine and epidemiology and associate dean for health equity research at Yale School of Medicine; and Vivek Murthy, a former U.S. Surgeon General who zeroed in on issues like overprescription of opiates and e-cigarette use among teens while serving in the Obama Administration.
Other task force members include Rick Bright, the nation’s former director of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority who filed a whistleblower complaint about the Trump Administration’s coronavirus response; Zeke Emanuel, a former Obama Administration health policy adviser who helped design the Affordable Care Act; Atul Gawande, a writer, author, surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and professor at Harvard School of Public Health; Julie Morita, a former Chicago public health commissioner and advocate for equity issues; Jane Hopkins, a Seattle nurse and union activist with Service Employees International Union; and Jill Jim, executive director of the Navajo Nation Department of Health, who focuses on chronic illness and health disparities among Native Americans.
But even presuming that Biden, with such competent assistance, efficiently mitigates the spread of COVID-19 and its variants, it is an entirely different question whether or not he’ll be capable of grappling with the deep social inequalities exposed and exacerbated by the pandemic. However many people have been infected and made severely ill by the virus, the complicated social experience of living through a pandemic has impacted millions more for reasons no pathogen alone could ever cause.
Even with the Democrats having won the two Georgia runoff elections (and with it effective control of both houses of Congress), the institutional and political constraints obstructing transformative change on the order necessary will be difficult to overcome. And, given what we know about his decades of public service—largely marked by enthusiastic collaboration with Republicans—would Biden even want to?
Many Americans were rightfully relieved that 2020 gave way to a new year and new chances to get the nation back on track. But the enormity of the challenge ahead is daunting.
Most Americans have either received or are in line to get $600 stimulus checks, the most last year’s Republican-controlled Senate was willing to approve. Additional assistance may be provided by the new administration, under a new Congress, but the economic deficit in which the nation finds itself is vast.
Some eight million Americans slid into poverty between when the virus first reached our shores and this past October. While unemployment has fallen from a peak of nearly 15 percent in April, it remains high at just under 7 percent, with entire sectors likely to remain shuttered for many more months.
Millions of newly qualified patients are enrolling in Medicaid, further stretching state budgets. And millions face potential eviction and unpayable debt, including student loans. In short, while the worst days of COVID-19 may be behind us, a major recession could still be imminent.
“It’s like Marie Antoinette, you know? ‘Let them eat $600.’ What the hell are they thinking?” Gregg Gonsalves, a professor of public health at Yale University, tells The Progressive. “The point is, there’s no support in there for ordinary people, for public health departments . . . . If you ask people to stay home, you need to pay them to stay home. You need to give them the resources.”
Though he argues that Democrats better understand the political crisis we’re in, Gonsalves thinks there’s still too much timidity when it comes to spending. Even with the pathogen’s spread in check and a willingness to sign heftier stimulus bills, unless much more drastic action is taken, the root causes of so much of the harm wrought in 2020 will remain unaddressed.
So-called essential workers expected to keep coming in to work during the pandemic are disproportionately low-income, while wealthier college-educated workers are largely able to work from home, hiding from the virus as precarious workers deliver packages to their doorsteps.
Although not all essential workers had particularly high infection rates, certain sectors did: Amazon warehouses reported some 20,000 infections. Meatpacking plants became superspreader locations, with more than 40,000 infections and at least 200 deaths nationwide. Well-resourced health-care settings have routinely provided better personal protective equipment (PPE) than have providers in poor and rural settings.
White-collar workers tend to have more flexibility and paid leave, permitting them to more easily fit their work responsibilities around their home lives amid the upheaval caused by societal disruption. While the very top strata of Americans are richer than ever before, organized labor is at its weakest point in nearly a century.
As such, relative levels of worker power have defined how a given person has fared through the pandemic. Unionized teachers have largely managed to keep public schools closed, and unionized health-care workers were able to win more support, resources, and safety for themselves and their patients.
Directives to “stay home” also relegated people to vastly different spaces, with different levels of risk. Home, after all, is where a majority of cases are reportedly contracted, and where the sick are far more likely to transmit the virus to others than they are through casual community contact.
One Boston-area study found a strong correlation between overcrowded housing and case rates, which weren’t found in richer districts with roughly similar density. That’s because substandard housing and multigenerational households—much more common among poor communities and communities of color—drive transmission.
Notably, detention facilities and nursing homes—each ranking among the riskiest settings in the country for transmission, severe illness, and death—are also forms of overcrowded housing, made more so by years of insufficient and poorly allocated funding. Inadequate housing also causes overall health deterioration—making vulnerable populations sicker to begin with.
Race and gender additionally shaped the ways people have experienced the pandemic, particularly in the absence of robust public spending. Disproportionate rates of illness and death have been found among Black, Indigenous, and Latinx populations, who are also more likely to be poor, have comorbidities, and lack suitable housing. And while men are more likely to die of COVID-19, women have suffered a more significant economic impact and shouldered heavier burdens caring for children without the relief of a comprehensive public child-care sector.
Finally, and perhaps most obviously, income largely determines health itself: resource deprivation is stressful and traumatic, which can erode well-being and make people sick. It’s harder for low-income people to manage chronic conditions or plan for their health long-term, as well as harder to exercise and access, prepare, and store healthful food. Poverty can also exacerbate mental illness, substance use disorders, and self-harm. It can leave people with fewer social supports and coping mechanisms, which have proven key for millions of people thrust into an unprecedented social experience that’s left us isolated and grieving.
Even though all of our lives have been disrupted by the coronavirus, it’s infinitely easier to endure with the sort of stability that money can buy.
As Congress scrambled in March 2020 to cobble together a relief bill amid staggering uncertainty and job loss, it crammed sizable unemployment benefits into the package. These $600 weekly extra payments proved to be substantial: two-thirds of the people who received them exceeded their previous earnings; nearly 20 percent doubled them. Until these benefits expired in July, poverty rates fell, and the benefits did not seem to reduce the recipients’ desire to work.
Moreover, the payments had far-reaching impacts on well-being: As Annie Lowrey reported in The Atlantic, the extra cash helped people pay down utility and credit card bills, and use the time to focus on their own needs. The weekly deposits, Lowrey concluded, painted a persuasive picture: “An extra $600 a week buys freedom from fear.”
It’s language that echoes the words of a President who surely understood the sentiment: After Franklin D. Roosevelt assured a despondent nation that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself” during his first inaugural address in 1933, he promised to take action to help those struggling during the Great Depression. Within a few years, the federal government would begin its dramatic expansion in the form of the New Deal, entrenching robust social insurance programs that still form the cornerstone of our welfare state today.
But despite the New Deal’s legendary status—and the more recent successes of the CARES Act—these sorts of interventions seem highly unlikely under President Biden, who ideologically embraces the austerity politics that made it so easy for a virus to ravage communities along race and class lines. And however welcome it has been to show Trump out the White House door, Biden continues to tout bipartisan dealmaking, seek compromises, and chart a mostly centrist course.
In Gonsalves’s opinion, this represents a sorely missed opportunity. He laughs to think back to the presidential primaries, and how it felt to gather with others in hopes that Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren could push the country in a new direction, away from its rightwing trajectory. For forty years now, he explains, the rich have gotten richer; their prosperity hasn’t trickled down as promised.
“The pandemic basically showed us what our social experiments since Reagan have done,” Gonsalves reflects. “We were alone against the virus, we were sitting ducks with a weak public health and health-care system.”
He’s right, and Biden probably won’t reverse the tide. But Gonsalves finds inspiration in the words of poet Paul Monette, who died of complications relating to AIDS in 1995 and called for action to save the lives of others in his community.
“[We] died of the greed of power, because we were expendable,” Monette said. “Tell yourself: None of this ever had to happen. And then go make it stop, with whatever breath you have left. Grief is a sword, or it is nothing.”