Biden's COVID-19 Response Eroded Civil Liberties

In the January 2025 issue of Reason, we're giving performance reviews of Joe Biden's presidency. Click here to read the other entries.

When Joe Biden was sworn in as president in January 2021, he had good reason to be optimistic about the trajectory of the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite being widely criticized for—and arguably losing his first reelection because of—the perceived insufficiencies of his coronavirus response, President Donald Trump had successfully overseen Operation Warp Speed. As a result of this public-private partnership, federal health officials were able to grant emergency authorization for COVID-19 vaccines by the end of 2020, a much faster than expected timetable. In the first few months of Biden's presidency, millions of Americans got vaccinated and COVID-19 cases dropped rapidly.

The fantastic news was short-lived. Infection numbers began to climb again in the summer of 2021 with the rise of the delta variant. While health officials had initially suggested that the vaccines would prevent infection—a claim also repeated by Biden himself—it turned out that they offered limited protection in this regard. More Americans died of COVID-19 during Biden's first year in office than Trump's last.

How did Biden respond to these problems? By doubling down on the most intrusive and least justified pandemic prevention policies: mandates and lockdowns. These policies proved incredibly ineffective at stopping COVID-19.

In September 2021, Biden declared a national vaccine mandate—not just for federal workers, but for 80 million employees of private companies as well. Despite having personally assured Americans that he would not require them to get vaccinated if he was elected president, Biden left employees of businesses that employed more than 100 people no choice but to comply. He did not seek approval from Congress. Rather, Biden simply declared that he already possessed the power to impose a vaccine mandate under workplace safety laws. His own press secretary, Jen Psaki, had previously declared that the administration believed such a mandate is "not the role of the federal government"; Biden apparently changed his mind. Weeks later, the Supreme Court struck down the mandate, declaring it an unconstitutional overreach.

Biden also required masks and social distancing for the federal work force. While the administration did not formally require masks and distancing in private settings, the administration's health advisers certainly encouraged state and local officials to adopt such policies. Rochelle Walensky, head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) under Biden, continued to issue guidance in support of such disruptive mitigation efforts well into 2022.

Most notoriously, the CDC offered explicit justifications for government officials all over the country to keep schools closed, even as it became increasingly clear that COVID-19 was not particularly threatening for school-aged kids or a significant vector for out-of-school transmission. State and local governments listened, at least in blue states. By year two of the pandemic, many restaurants, offices, warehouses, and movie theaters were again open for business, even as schools in those areas remained closed. This was completely backward, and it continues to have profound effects on young people who suffered learning loss from being kept out of the classroom for so long.

Throughout his time in office, Biden empowered officials to violate Americans' liberties in the name of fighting COVID-19. There is little evidence those policies worked.

COVID-19 policy performance review: malpractice