“I’m not going to shut down the country. I’m not going to shut down the economy. I’m going to shut down the virus.” —Joe Biden, October 30, 2020

“I promise you if I’m elected, I won’t waste any time getting this virus under control. I’ll call Dr. Fauci and ask him to stay on. I’ll bring together top experts and leaders from both parties to chart a path forward. We’ll get it done, together.” —Joe Biden, August 11, 2020

“If the president had done his job from the beginning, all the people [who have died from coronavirus] would still be alive.” —Joe Biden, September 17, 2020, when coronavirus deaths surpassed 200,000

To a certain extent, it’s true that a president is responsible for how he handles a crisis on his watch. That ought to be less true of a novel virus than, say, a deliberate and humiliating military surrender, but still. Unfortunately, Trump became the poster child for COVID misery — because Democrats and their Leftmedia allies made him so in order to defeat him in November.

Well, if a president is to be judged by how he handles a crisis — if Joe Biden is to be judged by the standard to which Joe Biden held Donald Trump — then Joe Biden is a colossal failure.

The U.S. recently passed 700,000 COVID deaths, not 200,000 as it stood before the election. Biden called this “astonishing.” The pandemic has claimed more Americans lives in 2021 than in 2020. (Insert caveats here for the whole “died of COVID” versus “died with COVID” debate.)

To a large extent, neither president is directly responsible for deaths caused by a virus (or comorbidity factors), especially when that virus was leaked from a Chinese lab.

A president does, however, set the tone for the national response, and both presidents bear some responsibility for how the virus has been politicized. But this is not a “well both sides did it” argument. The far greater fault lies with Biden.

It was Biden who hid in his basement for most of 2020 while armchair quarterbacking the hard work Trump’s team put into responding to a new threat. Trump surely hoped his response to the virus would help him win, but he didn’t have the entire mainstream media at his disposal as Biden did to weave a political narrative.

It was Democrats, not Republicans, who politicized the vaccines last year, insisting that they couldn’t possibly take one when the Bad Orange Man had anything to do with development. And it’s Democrats who continue to politicize the vaccines now through hectoring, cajoling, passports, and constitutionally dubious federal mandates. Masks, likewise, are more often a virtue signal or badge of party identification than they are useful tools.

If you think vaccines are beneficial and effective at preventing more serious illness or deaths — and there is evidence indicating that’s true — then you should be outraged that millions of Americans are choosing not to be vaccinated in large part because Democrats are now so adamant about it after hysterically warning against it just a few short months ago. How many unvaccinated Americans have died because of Democrat politicization?

If you think vaccines are a big conspiracy by the pharmaceutical companies or you merely wonder why everyone is inexplicably ignoring factors like natural immunity — and we’ve warned against ignoring it — then you should be outraged that an entire political party has vested its electoral hopes in forcing compliance among the entire population. And not just one shot. Not just two shots, either. But continued boosters. Likewise, you should be outraged that social media giants censor even legitimate questions about the vaccines.

These questions should be settled between patients and doctors, not a presidential diktat.

The gross irony of Biden’s authoritarianism is that we’re further from herd immunity than we would have been if anyone could trust the government or the “experts.” That has cost lives, and it’s on him.

“Today,” Biden told us on July 4, “we’re closer than ever to declaring our independence from a deadly virus.” Are we? Not if he can help it.