Biden Fails the Christmas Test

t a press conference yesterday about the huge surge of the Omicron variant of Covid-19, President Joe Biden once again stuttered and looked weak, tried to excoriate the purveyors of misinformation and shame the unvaccinated — and he also tried to empathize and reassure. “I know you’re tired, and I know you’re frustrated. We all want this to be over. But we’re still in it,” Biden said. “We also have more tools than we had before. We’re ready.”

Except we’re not ready and don’t have the tools. And it’s his fault.

More than ten months in, the Biden administration has been unwilling to break the monopoly public-health officials are trying to build over the case numbers and the general course of the pandemic. What America — the Northeast in particular — needed this week was an abundance of cheap, easy-to-use at-home Covid tests. The few that were on the shelves are long gone.

Almost every testing site has all its appointments booked. Every pharmacy that lists at-home Covid tests is reporting that they’re sold out. The few pharmacies that do list them as in-stock turn out to have outdated information.