The White House became a cathedral tonight for a candle light remembrance for the 500,000+ American COVID-19 deaths during this pandemic, the most of any country in the world.
NPR reports, Watch: President Biden Delivers Emotional Remembrance Of 500,000 COVID-19 Victims:
President Biden and Vice President Harris acknowledged and honored a grim milestone Monday: the death of more than 500,000 Americans from COVID-19.
Biden and Harris, along with first lady Jill Biden and second gentleman Doug Emhoff, emerged from the White House at sundown. They stood at the foot of South Portico, covered in 500 candles honoring the dead, and listened to a Marine band play Amazing Grace as they held a moment of silence.
Before the brief ceremony, Biden spoke, emotionally and somberly, from the White House. As he often does in moments of tragedy, Biden spoke directly to people who have lost friends and family members. “I know all too well,” Biden said. “That black hole in your chest. You feel like you’re being sucked into it. The survivor’s remorse. The anger. The questions of faith in your soul.”
While President Trump repeatedly downplayed and sought to minimize the COVID-19 pandemic, Biden is pushing Americans to acknowledge and directly confront the enormity of the loss the country has experienced over the past year, even if that action brings pain.
“We have to resist viewing each life as a statistic, or a blur,” he said Monday, in the second ceremony he’s held to honor people killed in the ongoing pandemic.
“To heal we must remember. It’s hard, sometimes, to remember,” Biden said on the eve of his inauguration, in a similar ceremony at the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. At that time, the country had just marked 400,000 COVID-19 deaths.
Remembering, he said, is “how we heal. It’s important to do that as a nation.” Biden echoed the sentiment Monday, emphasizing his own experience of loss. “I know it’s hard. I promise you,” he said, “I remember.”
Biden acknowledged how each family touched by death during the pandemic has experienced a personal level of pain. “The birthdays, the anniversaries, the holidays without them. And the everyday things — the small things, the tiny things — that you miss the most: that scent when you open the closet, that park that you go by that you used to stroll in. That movie theater where you met. That morning coffee that you shared together.”
Remarkably, Biden’s inauguration-eve ceremony was the country’s first national collective moment of mourning for a pandemic that has upended life around the world, thrown the economy into a recession, and, at this moment, has now killed a half-million people in the U.S.
On Monday, ahead of the latest grim milestone, Biden ordered flags on federal property to be flown at half-staff for five days.
As grim of a marker as a half million dead — more, Biden said Monday, than the American soldiers killed in both world wars and the Vietnam War combined — it comes at a time of comparative hope: new coronavirus cases, hospitalizations, and deaths are all declining. The vaccination of millions of Americans — and the federal government’s purchase of hundreds of millions of additional doses — has pointed to an end-point that could come sooner, rather than later. But experts caution the progress is fragile.
The U.S. remains on pace for the number of dead in the 1918-20 Flu Pandemic – an estimated 675,000 Americans.
[T]he equivalent of a large American city’s population has now died from a pandemic lasting a bit more than a year. And no matter how quickly the U.S. achieves herd immunity through vaccination and people who have recovered from COVID-19, there is no doubt that many thousands more will die.
“I promise you,” Biden said Monday night, as he often does delivering eulogies and marking deaths, “the day will come when the memory of the loved one you lost will bring a smile to your lips before a tear to your eye. It will come, I promise you.”
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Tommy Christopher writes, “Are You Kidding Me? Media Trying to Pin 100,000 Trump Covid Deaths on Joe Biden”, https://www.mediaite.com/opinion/are-you-kidding-me-media-trying-to-pin-100000-trump-covid-deaths-on-joe-biden/
President Joe Biden has been in office for one month, and the media is already trying to weaponize Donald Trump’s coronavirus disaster against him by pinning 100,000 of the 500,000 (and counting) Covid fatalities on the new administration.
During Monday’s White House daily briefing, ABC News White House correspondent Cecilia Vega asked Press Secretary Jen Psaki a question that carried the suggestion that the Biden administration bears some negligent responsibility for Covid deaths since they took office.
Vega said that “you mentioned at the top of your remarks the grim milestone that the country is facing today with these 500,000 deaths,” added that “100,000 of those Americans have died within the last month,” and asked, “What reflections is this White House having on the last month, as we ask as a country, Could more have been done? As Dr. Fauci said today, ‘It didn’t have to be this bad.’ Could more have been done in the last month also?”
I’ll get to Psaki’s answer in a minute, but this question is factually dishonest and illegitimate on every level, notwithstanding its nauseating intent to “both-sides” the death toll.
Scientifically speaking, there is nothing that the Biden administration could have done to reduce those 100,000 deaths because those infections all occurred either during the last days of Trump’s presidency or maybe during the first week of Biden’s. The timeline from exposure to death of Covid-19 ranges from about three weeks to two months.
Psaki soft-pedaled her response, telling Vega that “we, one, inherited a circumstance where there was not a — there were not enough vaccines ordered, there were not enough vaccinators available to vaccinate Americans, and there were not enough places to — for people to go to get those vaccines shot into their arms.”
Psaki added that “you can always look back and say, ‘We wish we would’ve done this better. We wish the storm wouldn’t have come.’ But our focus is on building out of the hole that we inherited and ensuring that we are taking every step necessary, every step possible to reach people in their communities, to tap into the manufacturing sector through the DPA, to communicate effectively about eligibility. And that’s what our focus is in on — at this point in time: the path forward.”
What she could have said was, “Are you freaking kidding me? The last guy spent an entire year lying about the virus, telling people to take poison, actively campaigning against mask-wearing, literally superspreading the virus, telling Americans that the devastating death toll ‘is what it is,’ and left us without any plan for actually getting vaccinations into people’s bodies. We are doing the best we can, and we take full responsibility for fighting this disaster, but hell if we will ever own a single one of the deaths that Donald Trump and his accomplices caused.”
This is a trap being set by the media to weaponize the Biden administration’s relative decency and maturity, and perhaps susceptibility to dimwitted narratives like “the blame game,” but it cannot be allowed to flourish.
[T]here will never be a time when it is appropriate to hand off the disastrous Trump death toll to someone else, or to equate his actively pro-virus actions with good-faith efforts to end the pandemic and heal the damage that was done by them.
The media played this game with then-President Barack Obama and the Bush financial disaster, and the Obama administration unwisely played into it. They succumbed to demands for empty bipartisanship that hobbled their efforts at recovery, then spent years apologizing for the consequences of Republican obstruction. If I had a nickel for every desk I smashed with my forehead when Obama said something like “We’re making progress but it’s not nearly enough,” I could have paid off everyone’s mortgage.
President Biden isn’t shy about reminding people of Trump’s Covid clownery, which is a good sign, but the days of carefully-worded and measured pushback are over. Reserve that for legitimate criticism. This garbage needs to be met with the derision it deserves.