The NPR Politics Podcast - The Pandemic And Biden's First 100 Days

Episode Date: April 26, 2021

As President Biden nears his 100th day in office, how much credit is he due for curbing the pandemic and what challenges remain?This episode: congressional correspondent Susan Davis, White House correspondent Tamara Keith, and health correspondent Allison Aubrey.Connect:Subscribe to the NPR Politics Podcast here.Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Listen to our playlist The NPR Politics Daily Workout.Subscribe to the NPR Politics Newsletter.Find and support your local public radio station.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This is Scott from St. Simons Island, Georgia. My wife and I are traveling tomorrow to see our new granddaughter, Audrey, who was born this week. This podcast was recorded at 2.06 p.m. on Monday, April 26th. Things may have changed by the time you hear this, but I know when I hold my new granddaughter for the first time, I will definitely be thinking, can't let it go. Okay, here's the show. That's so sweet. I feel like 2020 was the year of sad grandparent and 2021 is the year of happy, happy grandparent. Oh, you better believe it. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Susan Davis. I cover Congress.

And I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. And today we've got Alison Aubrey from our healthcare team back to hang out with us. Great to be here. So we have you on today because as you guys well know, this week, President Biden will cross his 100th day in office. We're going to be talking about this milestone all week, including on our live show tomorrow night and a late episode of the podcast on Wednesday after his joint address. But I thought today it would be good to just talk specifically about one aspect of the first 100 days for Biden in office, and that's the pandemic and how his administration has or hasn't met the challenge. So, Alison, if you could sort of give us the step back, big picture look at the country right now of how we are faring in the pandemic,

especially now as vaccines are being distributed all over the country. Yeah. So after a plateau and then an uptick in cases, cases are now declining. So that's good news. We have about 60,000 new cases a day. Deaths are declining. There are still hotspots, parts of Michigan, for instance, but even there, cases are declining overall. And we have about 29% of the total population fully vaccinated. Tam, as you were talking about last week, you know, vaccine distribution is difficult, right? We've traded challenges from one to another. One, it was production, and now it's distribution. Right. And in terms of the 100 days goals and milestones, President Biden did meet his goal of 200 million shots in arms within the first 100 days. I think he got there at like 88. And it was arguably a case of under-promising and over-delivering. But also that was the easy part.

And now we are getting to the harder part where it isn't people who are standing in line eager to get the vaccine. It is people who have day jobs or inflexible jobs or have some hesitancy or some questions. And so the actual pace of vaccination had ramped up to an average of about 3 million doses a day. It started ticking down a little bit. It's not at that hyper speed that it was before. It's still a lot of vaccine doses every day. But yeah, this is now moving into the part where supply isn't the problem, it's demand or demand where you are at the time where you demand it. One question I have for both of you is how much of the foundation

of the successes we're seeing today attributable to the foundation that was laid by the Trump administration, thinking things like Operation Warp Speed, and how much of it is because of exclusively what the Biden administration has done to make it a success? You know, I think an accomplishment of this scale, it's huge, right? I mean, this is a collective effort. But certainly, yeah, the Trump administration does deserve credit for Operation Warp Speed. That really helped accelerate the development, the manufacturing of vaccines. I think outside the administration, you know, untold thousands helped lay the groundwork. I mean, scientists, the vaccine companies,

countless public servants in state and local government, you know, health tech companies that work behind the scenes to plan for distribution. So, you know, to me, the great irony and kind of miracle of the U.S. pandemic experience is that at the same time that we led the globe in deaths and sickness, we simultaneously led the globe to this big fix. I mean, we represent kind of both ends of the spectrum, the death and suffering, and the Herculean success of vaccination campaign. Well, and President Trump had been, former President Trump, was almost single-mindedly focused on the fix, you know, the quick fix, or it's not that quick, but certainly it happened

fast, the way out, which was, in his mind, vaccines. And President Biden came into office, and absolutely there was groundwork there. The Biden administration has done a lot of work with the Defense Production Act, with just sort of streamlining logistics, rewriting contracts with the vaccine companies to get more doses sooner. that has been done that is not glamorous, but that results in there being vaccines where people need them. For instance, sort of streamlining the process and bringing certainty to states so that they know predictably weeks in advance how many doses they'll have so that they can distribute them and make appointments. So a lot of the logistics that you don't really even see is part of why they were able to get up to more than 3 million doses a day on average. I think President Biden's successes seem pretty self-evident. One, we have vaccines. They're being distributed.

We're hitting the metrics that his administration set. I wonder what y'all think the challenges that still remain. Allison, obviously from a public health standpoint, and then Tam from a political one. You know, I think getting the rest of the nation and the globe vaccinated, there are just lots of headwinds, lots of hesitancy. I mean, you and I have both reported on this, Tam. And really, as you've already said, people who are eager have already gotten the shot. Now it's getting out to communities, whether it's a pop-up clinic in a church or a grocery store parking lot. It's doctors meeting one-on-one with patients. And that really is what has helped the administration accomplish the goals that Biden outlined early on. I mean, when it came to whether it's scaling up the testing sites or getting kids back to school, I mean, there's $10 billion earmarked for testing and surveillance in schools.

And that has really helped him accomplish the other goal, which he set out very early on, which was to get kids back in person to in person learning. And that's happening. Yeah. So in addition to the sort of domestic challenges and getting more vaccines in arms and breaking through any of the sort of political or other resistance to this wartime effort to vaccinate Americans. As Allison mentioned, there's also a global element here. And until the world is vaccinated, another variant or something else could come along and really mess things up. And so today, the Biden administration announced that they plan in the

coming months to share 60 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine, which is not authorized for use here in the US, but is a key part of the global vaccination effort. They were under pressure to do that for quite some time. And and we don't know which countries they'll be sharing with. But until the world is vaccinated, no one is really safe. All right, let's take a quick break and we'll talk more about Biden's record on the pandemic in his first 100 days when we get back. I'm Yoé Shaw. I'm Kia Miyakunatis. We're the hosts of the NPR podcast, Invisibilia.

You can think of Invisibilia kind of like a sonic blacklight. When you switch us on, you will hear surprising and intimate stories. Stories that help you notice things in your world that maybe you didn't see before. Listen to the Invisibilia podcast from NPR. And we're back. And Tam, I don't think we can talk about Biden's first 100 days in office and the pandemic response without bringing up the American Rescue Plan, the $1.9 trillion economic stimulus plan that as Allison had said earlier, you know, it really is the key to so much of Biden's agenda to help schools reopen, or they announced a program today to help feed children over the summer, a summer lunch program. Sue, I mean, this is just a huge package. I don't want to say that the first 100 days have been easy, because obviously that is not the case when you're talking about the situation the country is in. But in terms of the ability to

move an agenda, Democrats were just really rallied together. They blew through the rules. They got it through Congress. I mean, they got this done. I think the next 100 days for Biden and this very narrow Congress is when the rubber's going to meet the road, when all of that feel-good post-election unity starts to fray and everyone's sort of fighting for their own personal interests, because they know that they're probably not going to get much, if any, Republican support going forward, especially if it's not involving the pandemic specifically. Yeah. I mean, when you put it that way, the second 100 days are almost certain to be much more challenging for Biden and Democrats than the first 100 days. And Allison, we should be clear. I mean, we're not out of this yet. We still have a long way to go to get back to whatever normal will

look like after this event. That's right. Has there been sort of macro lessons along the way about public health or our infrastructure, our health infrastructure that you think has changed the way we look at that, the way that it may has changed the way we look at that, the way that it may have changed the way we look at our government? Absolutely. I mean, several. I'm going to point to two very important lessons. One thing that exacerbated loss of life from COVID is the prevalence of lifestyle-related diseases, so obesity, diabetes, heart disease. Most people who had very serious illness and many people who died had one or more of these diseases. And if you look at

what drives these diseases, it's complicated, but inequities in our system. And these diseases track with income, with access to healthcare, with access to healthy food. So this is a big wake up call. The second thing I want to point to is that for me, I think that the political polarization in our country is deadly. What I mean by that is that the moment that masking became a political symbol, the moment it became a fault line in the culture war, we all lost. Because when people refused to wear masks, it cost lives because it accelerated the spread of the virus. I had a doctor in North Dakota tell me just the other day that back in the late 1950s,

when he was young, when polio, when the vaccine for polio came along, everyone in his school went along with pride. They all took it. It was not a political act. And today, this doctor tells me, like, what happened to that? He's sort of scratching his head. He says, the thing I hear from patients in my office all the time is, I don't want the government to tell me what to do. That divide is deadly. That's such a good point. I hadn't even thought about masking as sort of public health issue more than a political one. Tam, we're going to hear from Biden himself this week. He's going to speak before Congress

on Wednesday night. How much of his legacy does he think the pandemic recovery is going to be about? And have they given any sense of what they want to the themes they want to hit on in this speech? So this is a not the State of the Union. It's a an address to a joint session of Congress. But it's coming later than most presidents have done theirs in their first year, which means he does have more of the State of the Union to talk about. He has more accomplishments to point to. And, you know, the flow and structure of these speeches generally includes, here's where we've been, and then here's where we're going.

And I think that there will be a large emphasis on what comes next and rolling out the American Families Plan, which is the other half the the American Families Plan, which is the other half of the American Jobs Plan, which is the broadly defined infrastructure package that President Biden is pushing through. And and so that the selling that through this big primetime speech is going to be the most significant part of it. But absolutely, there will be a victory lap. And I think you can almost guarantee that he will say, people told us that it was going to be hard to get 100 million shots in arms, and we did 200 million. And so I think that it's almost inevitable that we will hear that. All right, well, let's end

it there. Allison, as always, thank you so much for you and your reporting. It was great to be here. Thanks for having me. And Tam, I'm going to see you tomorrow night because we have a little Zoom live show coming. I still don't know what to wear. This is so much pressure. So much pressure for this Zoom.

And if any of our listeners want to join us, you can still. There are tickets available at NPRPresents.org. It'll all be on Zoom. I promise it'll be fun. Regardless, we will be back in your feeds tomorrow at the regular time. I'm Susan Davis. I cover Congress. And I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. And thanks for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.