538: Biden's own fault he got Covid, has been too lax about pandemic

[GeneralMacArthur]

The failure of COVID discourse right now is people's inability to distinguish between the different variants of COVID.

People are looking at restrictions for the original COVID-19 and saying "damn we've just given up on restrictions" even though the disease we're dealing with no, Omicron (or BA.5), is completely different.  This is what Nate Bronze is going for with "Biden has been too lax about the pandemic" -- taking advantage of our memories of lockdowns and mandates, even though those were for a completely different disease from what we're dealing with now.  This is also what some bad-faith commentators do on Twitter where they say like "there are twice as many cases today as there were a year ago but all the mask mandates disappeared" even though a year ago was Delta and this year is BA.5.

People also do the thing where they look at what we're doing today for Omicron/BA.5 and say "lol guess we didn't need those restrictions after all" or "politicians dropped the restrictions once they became inconvenient for them", etc. again ignoring that the restrictions for original COVID-19 and the lack of restrictions is in the context of Omicron/BA.5.

It's just the usual taking advantage of people being dumb and not willing to think about something for more than five seconds.  And it always seems to go in the Republicans' favor -- or at least against the Democrats.