On July 18, Joe Biden tested positive for COVID-19. Despite having symptoms, he’d spent the morning shaking hands with voters and workers before bothering to test during yet another massive surge of the virus; we won’t be getting breathless health updates about the peasants he exposed, nor will those infected be receiving any of the free medical treatment the President received from the comfort of his isolation bed, in his vacation home. The New York Times reported that he looked ill and unsteady as he walked to Air Force One (maskless) and was helped into his limousine, then carted back to his beach house in Rehoboth.

On July 19, Biden tweeted that he was “stuck at home with COVID”; most Americans, of course, have to return to work while ill these days, even when experiencing symptoms. His administration has thoroughly minimized the illness, with his former COVID response coordinator calling masking “fringe", and his CDC encouraging people to end isolation when they’ve been without a fever for one day, a standard that has absolutely no scientific relationship to infectiousness. (Amidst the wall-to-wall minimizing and ever-changing guidance, most employers interpret this most recent update to mean “no isolation”).

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It was a poetically appropriate end for Biden, who, as hundreds of thousands died on his watch, alternated between ignoring COVID, joking about it, mocking masks, and appearing ignorant of the strict COVID protocols that his staff used to protect him for years while his administration unwound protections for everybody else.

In fact, in order to meet with or be in the room with Joe Biden at all, you had to submit to PCR testing for COVID-19 right up until this past March; it only took four months of life in the "new normal” he’d thrust the rest of us into years ago for Biden to get a taste of his own medicine.