When Joe Biden took office in January 2021, Americans were fed up with government officials closing schools, recreational facilities and businesses because of COVID-19.
Biden promised that his administration would use scientific evidence to evaluate risk of viral spread in the community to advise the public on when to open or close businesses, schools and other common spaces. Biden also promised that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would recommend steps to make facilities safe.
Biden's promises were rooted in criticism of President Donald Trump's handling of the pandemic. Trump gets credit for Operation Warp Speed, which quickly led to the development of vaccines. But Trump also was part of the downplay and denial about COVID-19.
In rating Biden's progress on our Biden Promise Tracker, we are not evaluating whether Biden should have sought closures to protect public health. There has been a lot of research and news reports about the negative effects of closures on workers, businesses, the economy and schoolchildren. Our task in evaluating this promise is to determine whether Biden achieved his pledge to use evidence to determine COVID-19 openings and closings. We rate promises not on the president's intentions or effort, but on verifiable outcomes.
But there was a challenge with Biden's promise from the outset: The federal government lacked the power to enact most of these closures. State and local officials decided whether to close schools, beaches, restaurants and bars.
"By 2021 and certainly by 2022, the public simply would not accept compulsory school or business closures," said Lawrence Gostin, director of Georgetown University's O'Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law.
Students and parents sit and wait June 11, 2021, after being administered their second dose of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine at a clinic at London Middle School in Wheeling, Ill. (AP)
Weeks into Biden's presidency, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published color-coded charts showing the amount of community viral spread and recommended that schools use data to decide whether to reopen.
The CDC issued the "test to stay" guidance in December 2021 to reduce the number of children sent home to quarantine. The administration sent COVID-19 tests to schools and replaced the CDC guidance that had said exposed children should quarantine for 10 days.
Beyond schools, the Biden administration generally assumed that other buildings such as restaurants, offices or stores would remain open.
The CDC issued masking and testing recommendations. Some states followed them; others did not.
"President Biden has had significant success in doing one thing that is most important in the midst of a pandemic," Gostin said. "He charged CDC with the task of evaluating the science regarding the risk of school and business closures. Throughout the pandemic, I cannot think of a single time when the White House interfered with CDC's research or censored its findings."
However, the CDC could not definitively determine how much school and business closures reduced COVID-19 risk, Gostin said.
By 2022, the CDC began to significantly relax containment measures.
"That was directly the result of considerable pandemic fatigue and a widespread resistance of the public to complying with strict measures," Gostin said. The "CDC and the White House were being realistic and tempering their recommendations."
The Biden administration considered science, but also appeared to take into account other factors, said Wendy Parmet, a Northeastern University law professor.
"If we read Biden's 'promise' to mean that the Administration would consider science and not traffic in misinformation, I think it largely kept its word. But almost surely politics, economics, and law affected some of the policies," Parmet said.
In spring 2023, the Biden administration ended the COVID-19 public health emergency, which meant there was no longer a uniform federal requirement for states and counties to track COVID-19's spread.
As of December 2024, the CDC's website page about how to protect yourself and others from COVID-19 doesn't mention closures. It recommends staying up to date with vaccines, washing your hands and staying home if you're sick.
Joe Antos, a health policy expert at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, said the Biden administration or the CDC could have done more to update recommendations when it was clear that young people were least at risk. Failing to do so meant that most schools were closed "well after the facts were known," he said.
"This resulted in major learning losses that have proven to be difficult to overcome," Antos said.
"By one measure, he was successful because he trusted our nation's scientists to do their work and to make evidence based recommendations," Gostin said. "But by another measure, it was an abysmal failure because it fomented distrust in science and public health, and caused a pushback against vaccinations."
Experts say that the federal government used science-based evidence to issue COVID-19 lockdown guidance, consistent with Biden's original promise. But experts said scientific evidence was not the only factor and that the federal government did not update its guidance quickly enough as new evidence emerged.
We rate this promise Compromise.
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