COVID-19 for Biden treated as ‘teachable moment’
For more than a year, President Joe Biden’s ability to avoid the coronavirus seemed to defy the odds. When he finally did test positive, the White House was ready. It set out to dispel any notion of a crisis.
“The president does what every other person in America does every day, which is he takes reasonable precautions against COVID but does his job,” White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain told MSNBC. Klain said he hoped the president’s testing positive would be a “teachable moment.”
Thursday began with Biden’s COVID-19 results and included repeated assurances that the president was hard at work while isolating in the White House with “very mild symptoms” including a runny nose, dry cough and fatigue.
On Friday, Biden met virtually with his economic team, smiling when he took off his mask but speaking with a raspy voice and a cough. His personal physician on Friday said Biden’s symptoms were easing and the president had already completed a full day’s regimen of Paxlovid, the antiviral medication often dispensed as soon as people test positive.
It was all part of an administration effort to shift the narrative from a health scare to a display of Biden as the personification of the idea that most Americans can get COVID and recover without too much suffering and disruption if they’ve gotten their shots and taken other steps to protect themselves. Biden had been fully vaccinated and boosted.
The message was crafted to alleviate voters’ concerns about Biden’s health and demonstrate that the pandemic is far less of a threat than it was before Biden took office, thanks to widespread vaccines and new therapeutic drugs.