Biden has fought a pandemic before. It did not go smoothly.
“I wouldn’t go anywhere in confined places right now," Biden said. "It’s not that it’s going to Mexico, it’s that you are in a confined aircraft. When one person sneezes, it goes everywhere through the aircraft.”
Airlines angrily accused Biden of fearmongering. Media reports noted that Biden’s pessimism contrasted sharply with the reassurances President Barack Obama had given a day earlier, when he said there was no need to panic even as he declared a national health emergency. In a matter of hours, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and Deputy Secretary of State Jack Lew were summoned to the White House and assigned to clean up the mess Biden made: “Nip it in the bud,” LaHood said, recalling their instructions.
The snafu was the first of many scrambles and setbacks by the Obama administration in its initial response to the swine flu. POLITICO interviewed almost two dozen people, including administration officials, members of Congress and outsiders who contended with the administration’s response, and they described a litany of sadly familiar obstacles: vaccine shortfalls, fights over funding and sometimes contradictory messaging.
“It is purely a fortuity that this isn’t one of the great mass casualty events in American history,” Ron Klain, who was Biden’s chief of staff at the time, said of H1N1 in 2019. “It had nothing to do with us doing anything right. It just had to do with luck.