Little cheer for Joe's elves
WH aides in dumps: report
It is not a holly, jolly Christmas for the Biden White House.
West Wing aides are suffering from low morale and complaining about a lack of camaraderie, a new report says, while experts pan President Biden’s announcement of millions of free at-home COVID-19 tests for Americans as they endure yet another wave of infections.
The administration’s culture problems have led many staffers to eye the exits, with some hoping to leave as soon as early next year, as attempts to build a collegial atmosphere with informal happy hours and group dinners miss the mark, Politico reported.
Some White House workers blame the low morale on the presence of longtime Biden aides who keep distant from their colleagues, a situation summed up by the phrase “No new friends in Biden world,” according to the news outlet.
Others say working remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated the culture problem by limiting communication.
Staffers have also grumbled about not being able to attend special events and holiday parties at the White House with the administration’s lottery system for invitations.
“No one expects business as usual during the pandemic, but it’s beyond demoralizing, it’s insulting — especially when you see DNC and Hill staff and other DC types get invited,” an aide told Politico.
Too few tests
Meanwhile, Biden’s promise to make 500 million free at-home rapid COVID-19 tests available to order from an as-yet-unnamed Web site beginning early next month has fallen flat, with health experts saying it’s too little, too late.
“500 million #covid19 tests sound like a lot. But: -330 million Americans -If half want tests = 165 million -That’s only 3 tests TOTAL per person,” tweeted Leana Wen, a former head of Planned Parenthood and a public health professor at George Washington University.
“Not nearly enough for testing to become the norm before school/ work, and friends getting together.
We need a plan for far more.”
Since early September, the Biden administration has promised close to 1 billion free tests for schools, health centers, food banks, underserved communities and the American public.
But it remains unclear how many of those have been purchased or distributed. The White House and Department of Health and Human Services didn’t respond to requests for numbers.
Still, one expert says that even if all the tests promised by the Biden administration since Labor Day do get shipped out, it wouldn’t be enough to track and counter the rapid spread of the Omicron variant of COVID-19.
“If 1 billion is the total sum of the tests that are available, the answer is going to be ‘no,’ ” Dr. Robert Wachter, chair of the Department of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, told The Post. “Because if you just do the math, if you’re testing everybody coming into work, testing everybody coming into a restaurant . . . everybody getting on an airliner — all the reasonable things to do — then you’re going to do far more tests than that.”
The White House had yet to sign off on any contracts to purchase tests as of Thursday, raising the possibility that it would take weeks for many Americans to get a single test in hand.
US lagging
Even as the Biden administration tries to ramp up testing, the US still falls short compared with several other countries.
According to Johns Hopkins University Coronavirus Resource Center, the US is testing 329 people for every 100,000 daily, while Spain is testing 3,118, the UK 2,254 and France 1,384.
While other countries have placed more emphasis on testing than the US has, Wachter told The Post that “I don’t know any country that got” its COVID response right.
“In retrospect, this turns out to be a hard enough problem that we needed to do all of the above, and we didn’t, clearly, at this point,” he added.