Politics. March 24, 2020 was the day it all began.
On that day, Governor Andrew Cuomo chose his daily FEMA-style daily press conference to accuse the White House of not providing sufficient support for his battle against Covid.
He claimed that the White House had pledged to send but 400 of the 20,000-30,000 ventilators his modelers claimed he would need. According to Jared Kushner’s biography, the White House had pledged 4,000.
With that Cuomo turned a public health problem into a political catastrophe, for himself, his party, and the nation.
From that point forward everyone from governor to city councilman saw the rampant spread of SAR-CoV-2 as an opportunity to contrast their completely imagined virus-fighting skills with a hapless president and his fellow travelers.
Instead of choosing competency, leadership, and a command of the solutions for this particular problem, political leaders choose to double down on the Trump administration’s ineptitude.
Since that terrible spring it has been wholly predictable that commanding people to leave their streets; shutter their businesses; deprive their children of education; and deny the practice of religion; would not go unanswered.
The apology, $4T in government munificence, took things from bad to worse when all those U.S. dollars asserted its demands against massively disrupted supply, sparking generational inflation.
In some parts of the world, the response will be bloody. In the U.S. it seems likely it will be red of a different sort Tuesday night. For all the incoherent talk from President Biden and others about “saving Democracy,” it appears that voters, after almost three years of incompetence and malfeasance are behaving quite rationally and, above all, democratically.
Policy. If you can trust social science research – and there are many reasons you should not – it suggests that humans are generally happy people. However, when resentment arises it is due to one or more losses: loss of economic status; loss of social status; and loss of good health.
The Covid pandemic has the dubious distinction of spawning all three.
It is the last of those you should expect to be a focus of Senators Rand Paul and Ron Johnson if Republicans resume their ownership of the Senate majority. Johnson has focused on vaccine injury especially in the armed services. Sen. Paul is concerned about the medical and scientific evidence that has supported vaccine approvals and mandates.
About the time the new session convenes, private vaccine injury lawsuits aimed at employers should have gotten legs. Vaccine mandates were initiated by a number of large companies, like Disney, before the White House released its executive order in the fall of 2021.
The law firm, Fisher Phillips, has a COVID-19 Employment Litigation Tracker that tallies 430 federal and 362 state actions. The health care industry, where mandates persist to varying degrees today, is the most common target of claims. Some of these may be related solely to mandates, although it is difficult to see what the cause of action would be without some sort of injury.
Vaccine injury is notoriously difficult to prove. Of course, up until the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, vaccines were delivered under informed consent protocols and administered to select populations most likely to benefit. So, that history notwithstanding we are probably in uncharted territory.
After a few hundred million shots, nearly everyone has some story about adverse events, real and imagined. Federally funded restitution in some form seems inevitable and Sen. Johnson has begun laying the groundwork with hearings. It appears for now, anyway, to be confined to vaccines administered to U.S. Military.
Restitution from employers who mandated the vaccines, especially those that did so before the Executive Order in Fall 2021, will probably have to come from the courts. All it takes right now is for one of those 700 cases to make it to a jury, then every personal injury lawyer in the country will be chasing that bone. (see also: Asbestos)
Power. The secret sauce of the Democrat party has been its culture defining power. The Republican Party has, since the 1970s been more closely associated with scold-y figures like Phyllis Schlafly, no match for the urban sophistication and Smith College education of Gloria Steinem. She may have been right about one to two things, but it did not matter, she reminded you of your 5th grade English teacher.
For America, Bill Clinton’s saxophone and youth made it easy to ignore his often-irresponsible behavior. Clinton’s gifts were enormous, and he gets credit for rescuing his party from a devolution into a sort of liberalism the country would not tolerate.
With the Democratic Party once again sinking under the weight of its excesses, a rescue this time seems improbable. All those governors and mayors that tried to outdo one another with by closing playgrounds, arresting surfers, and mandating populations-wide vaccinations, will be forced to answer for it by all but the most inept Republican opponent.
Centrist Members of Congress like Abigail Spanberger are in tight races, lashed to the mast of President Biden’s poor performance. Rep. Hakeem Jefferies, Speaker Pelosi’s probable favorite for Minority Leader, will have to choose between his passionate and sincere advocacy of criminal justice reform and the rising intolerance for urban crime.
They may not know it yet, but Covid and its aftermath blew a generational hole in the Democrats’ bench. To restore it will require restitution of a very different sort and a lot of time.
One question, however, will continue to hang in the air, when will Donald Trump answer for his own incompetence?
Have a great rest of your weekend and Election Day.
Emily Evans
Managing Director – Health Policy
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