Star Atlantic Covid Writer Ed Yong Gives Biden a Failing Grade on the Pandemic: He’s ‘Done Very Poorly’

The Atlantic’s Ed Yong, known for his prolific long-form writing about the Covid-19 pandemic, blasted the Biden administration on Sunday for having “done very poorly” in responding to the virus.

“We know the failures and, I would argue, crimes of the Trump administration when it comes to the pandemic,” said MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan on his show, The Mehdi Hasan Show. “How would you rate handling of covid by the Biden administration, which is now warning of a potential 100 million Covid infections in the fall and winter of this year, if there’s a new wave, but also saying at the same time ‘Hey, it’s up to you to deal with this. It’s all about evaluating individual risk now.’”

Yong responded:

Yeah, I think they’ve done very poorly. I think they’ve done more poorly than a lot of people have hoped for.

I know that there were hard tailwinds to fly into, but nonetheless we, and people that I talk to warn that the Biden administration that you cannot simply put all your eggs in a vaccine basket. Vaccines are miraculous that marvelous but … they most readily go to people with the most privileged and power, they can’t be relied upon to end the pandemic on their own. we need measures to protect the health of large groups of people en masse. That is what public health is about.

We needed better ventilation, we needed better testing earlier on, we needed things like paid sick leave, and better access to health care. But many of those measures were put by the wayside in favor of this vaccine-only approach. And I think that caused cost us dearly. And the Biden administration has fallen prey to the same ideas that the previous administration felt prey to the individualism that runs ragged throughout American culture. …

It’s now become this question a protect yourself, do whatever you need to do to manage your own risk, which is just a nonsense for an infectious disease, because they spread, they very obviously spread. And so my health is profoundly in the hands the hands of your choices, the choices of everyone. We are all connected and to think of this slowly as a matter of individuals acting on their own, is just a nonsense, it’s not going to work, and it hasn’t worked.

Watch above, via MSNBC.