For His Vaccine Rollout Biden Prefers Optics Over Science and the Press Approves

As the press criticizes vaccine distribution they supported in the past President Biden opts for checkbox qualifications.

It has become a maddening aspect of the arrival of Joe Biden in the White House; everything pandemic and vaccine-related is interpretational and politicized. Yesterday I went into detail about the media vying to make a new distribution plan in Florida targeting the elderly for surplus vaccines sold as a scandal. Now we see the same press looking at Joe Biden seeking targeted vaccine recipients based on demographic optics over medical advice, and simply shrugging at the action.

The issue they attempted in Florida was a reinterpretation of intent. Governor Ron DeSantis, upon his state receiving additional Covid Vaccines, specifically sought out locations with a concentration of the elderly. The press decided to spin it as his focusing on Republican locales and making it about political favors. Now when we see Joe Biden engaging in that very behavior there appears to be little outrage.

In New York State there was an effort made for the Biden administration to open four new vaccine centers outside of New York City, and in the selection process relied upon a ‘’vulnerability index’’ created by the Center for Disease Control to determine counties determined to be underserved with vaccine access. The CDC matrix measures over one dozen differing factors in making this determination, yet when one particular county was selected with this process it soon became taken off of the list to be a new location.

Officials in the state came to their own conclusion that this county, Chautauqua, did not meet their own approval and decided that another county should be selected. The reason given was there were better locations which meet President Biden’s goal of providing vaccines to ‘’more black and brown people’’, according to NBC News. 

While the goal itself is not problematic, what we are looking at here is a decision being made that is not in line with the administration’s prior insistence that they follow the guidelines they had initially declared were important. Joe Biden campaigned on opposing Donald Trump’s alleged ignoring of science and contradicting the advice of medical professionals in his addressing the pandemic. Yet now we are being served up that specific practice, with barely a broadcast protest.

They (state officials) pushed back against the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which are expanding the federal footprint in the country’s race to vaccinate, a Biden administration official familiar with the fight said.

This was precisely the kind of behavior the press railed against under Trump. Biden has specifically called for FEMA to be involved in his vaccine plans, yet here he is defying recommendations from both, that agency and the CDC. Now try to imagine the media reaction to this sentence, had it been reported just months ago:

Because New York’s logic fit President Joe Biden’s mandate better than the CDC’s data did, the White House backed off. 

This is not only quite the contrast to complaints that President Trump was not following the guidance of the CDC, but this is remarkable when juxtaposed against the complaints of Ron DeSantis. NBC details, ‘’Biden has prioritized vaccinating people who are both vulnerable and representative of his political coalition.’’ Yet the current outrage about Florida’s governor is precisely that; he is being scorched for allegedly looking to get vaccines to his voters.

This is what makes the active double-standard in the media all the more glaring. They spent the past year raging that Donald Trump must follow the science and his medical advisors. Now comes a report that Joe Biden boldly states he is not following those agencies, nor the science, instead vaccinating based on political expediency. This was the very thing the same press incorrectly complained was happening in Florida, this weekend.

After spending 2020 lecturing loudly against politicizing the pandemic, that is precisely what the press is engaged in today.