Joe Biden

A Maskless, COVID-Positive Biden Bares His Naked Face to the World

Even the mask mandators are done with once-ubiquitous pandemic precautions.

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Joe Biden | Bonnie Cash - Pool via CNP/picture alliance / Consolidated News Photos/Newscom
(Bonnie Cash - Pool via CNP/picture alliance / Consolidated News Photos/Newscom)

On his first days in office, President Joe Biden issued several executive orders requiring federal employees, federal contractors, and travelers to wear masks to stop the spread of COVID-19.

Courts eventually struck down the mask mandate for travelers. It wasn't until April of this year that the Biden administration formally revoked its masking requirement for federal workers.

A COVID-positive Biden is now modeling this new freedom by traveling and interacting with federal workers while baring his naked face to the world.

This has caused no small amount of controversy among certain journalists, certain doctors, and the "We're still in a pandemic!" remnant of public health obsessives who see the president's behavior as dangerously negligent. And mask-critical conservatives aren't missing the hypocrisy.

 

Wherever you land on that spectrum, Biden's willingness to walk around with COVID and without a mask is one more nail in the coffin of pandemic protocols and mandates that dominated Americans' lives for a couple of very turbulent years.

It's one more piece of evidence that widespread masking, social distancing, and other anti-social anti-COVID mitigation measures are well and truly over.

Their disappearance was not always a sure thing. In blue cities and states, at least, it seemed that mask mandates could be near-permanent policy.

Here in Washington, D.C., for instance, the district government imposed indoor masking requirements three separate times. Two of those mask orders were issued after COVID-19 vaccines had become widely available to anyone who wanted one.

By that time, some evidence and a lot of common sense suggested that requiring people who'd already had COVID and/or been vaccinated to put on a mask for a few seconds before sitting down to eat at a restaurant made a negligible difference on the spread of the disease.

Nevertheless, the automatic public health thinking was "If cases go up, masks go on."

No longer.

Public sentiment is now clearly settled on the idea that masking is a thing of the past. A large body of research suggests that widespread masking, and mask mandates, do little to slow the spread of the disease.

A maskless Biden is one piece of evidence that so many pandemic-era mandates were a passing expediency at best and an unpopular mistake at worst.

See, for instance, someone like California Gov. Gavin Newsom criticizing Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis for enforcing his own lockdown regime during the pandemic.

Newsom was himself an arch-lockdown proponent—at least in terms of policy, if not his own personal behavior. Rather than atone for that, his rhetorical tactic is to shift some blame onto Republicans for also being bad on this issue.

People who chaffed under the restrictive, and often nonsensical, COVID restrictions can take some pleasure in virtually everyone basically coming around to their position. The COVID doves won. Masks and vaccine passports didn't become the new TSA regime. We don't live in a state of perma-pandemic precautions.

That isn't to say the effects of pandemic policy aren't still being felt.

While those pandemic-era masking, social distancing, and lockdown orders were in place, we also saw a huge infusion of government spending to keep a largely shuttered economy afloat. To impose those orders, all levels of government relied on expansive readings of often-obscure statutes.

The effects of those policies still live on. Pandemic-era spending has left us with persistently high inflation. The stretching of executive powers has encouraged the Biden administration to try to impose more non-pandemic policies (student loan forgiveness, medical debt forgiveness, and more) by presidential dictate.

It's hard to say that Biden has benefitted from that legacy. His administration is historically unpopular. If the polls hold, odds are he'll be a one-term president.

Trump—whatever his rhetoric—was a big-spending, inflation-fueling, imperial president during COVID as well. But the fact that voters are poised to punish Biden for following his lead suggests they don't want to see any element of the COVID state return, regardless of who's the president.