Report: Biden No-Shows COVID Coordinating Calls with Governors, Meetings Led By...Andrew Cuomo

We'll get to Biden in a moment, but first some thoughts on policy and messaging. US administration of Johnson & Johnson's safe, effective, one-dose vaccine was paused for more than a week by regulators, based on concerns about exceptionally rare potential blood clotting side effects. After a review, which found just 15 such cases out of the eight million Americans who'd received the J&J shot, the pause was lifted late last week, with a warning. Was this "abundance of caution"-inspired policy the right move, or a mistake? We've argued that it was the wrong call, likening it to Europe's AstraZeneca fiasco. Some have pointed to data that many Americans viewed the pause positively, with one pollster saying his focus groups found the extra care to be confidence-inspiring – but as I wrote at the time, the key factor would be how unvaccinated and vaccine-skeptical Americans react to it. As feared, the latest Washington Post/ABC News poll appears to give us a sense of how that's playing out:

That’s pretty high for a vaccine that the government pulled for giving people blood clots and killing them while being so ineffective you have to double mask while outdoors 18 feet away from people and even in an isolated room on a zoom call. That’s the message of our government. https://t.co/399965fSWP
— Marcus (@MarcusHUSA) April 26, 2021

Again and again, the medical community just wants to ignore the public relations aspect of this.

For a year. They still haven't learned anything.

You have to be able to sell the case to the public. ALL OF THE PUBLIC. We continue to fail in that regard. https://t.co/1kk7YyIY3I
— Pradheep J. Shanker (@Neoavatara) April 26, 2021

Obviously, the initial tweet was heavy on sarcasm, but how far off is its message, really? The president continues to double mask, even having been double-vaxxed before he took office. The powers that be are just now getting around to updating their (still absurd) outdoor masking mandate guidance. Those same powers that be chose to react to a microscopic possible J&J side effect risk, which might impact a fraction of the population writ large, and freeze the whole thing for a week-plus, nationwide. And now – surprise – three-quarters of non-vaccinated Americans say they would refuse that vaccine if it were offered to them. With the so-called "vaccine wall" (when we run out of vaccine-enthusiastic or -positive Americans to jab) already approaching, the confidence-shaking J&J pause seems to have come at an inopportune time:

"The risk of aspirin inducing a significant intestinal bleed is much higher" than any J&J vaccine risk, @NIHDirector Collins notes on MTP. It's "in the neighborhood of one in 500, one in 1,000 for people who regularly take aspirin."

Clots from J&J are "1,000 times less likely."
— Will Saletan (@saletan) April 25, 2021

As for ongoing vaccine hesitancy in the US, it's shown up most prominently in the data among young people, African Americans and especially conservatives (men in particular). Here's a Biden administration official making the point that in spite of media coverage that might lead people to believe that most Republicans are refusing to get the shot, the truth is that most right-leaners are either already vaccinated, willing to get a vaccine, or are open to it:

Per @CBSNews poll, the majority of Trump voters, Republicans, and self-described conservatives say they have **already been or will get vaccinated**.

We really should stop stigmatizing large categories of people when it comes to “vaccine hesitancy.” We’re all in this together. pic.twitter.com/tnik7B7eYI
— Ian Sams (@IanSams) April 25, 2021

It would be very helpful for achieving herd immunity quickly and stamping out the pandemic to convince some of the GOP-aligned holdouts (approximately one-in-three) to get vaccinated. We know they won't be persuaded by media shaming or yet another television appearance from Fauci. If such persuasion is possible, it will need to come from people other than the brain trust that has brought us the messaging and decisions highlighted above. I'll leave you with this nugget from a RealClearPolitics report:

This report says Biden has participated in zero weekly COVID planning/coordination calls with governors. Those meetings are now led by...Andrew Cuomo. https://t.co/GQoPWeNUwu
— Guy Benson (@guypbenson) April 26, 2021

How might this have been covered under the previous administration, especially if the president and vice president were delegating the job to a scandal-plagued governor with one of the worst COVID records in the world? Speaking of which, here's a bonus compare-and-contrast case study, followed by some conspiratorial trutherism from people who can't handle reality:

Fully open Texas and Florida reporting fewer COVID cases than Democrat-led Michigan, Pennsylvania and New York https://t.co/NOiZmg0nFu
— Fox News (@FoxNews) April 25, 2021

This BS casts aspersions on FL / TX data reporting. There has been one genuine scandal on this front in the US and that was in NY. https://t.co/tHiXoNLTEF
— Guy Benson (@guypbenson) April 26, 2021

As a reminder, there has been one bona fide US scandal on COVID data reporting, and that was in New York, at the hands of the man Biden has put in charge of state-level coordination. Good work, everyone. I'll leave you with Nate Silver debunking a leftist Florida conspiracy theory using data we've highlighted too:

There's a lot of "Florida is cooking the books!" in the replies, which is an ungrounded conspiracy theory.

If you don't trust their COVID data, look at excess deaths. Excess deaths in FL are 17% above normal, which is BETTER than the US average of 21%.https://t.co/n9thzCRW8M
— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) April 27, 2021