Granted, the Biden administration has had a lot more time under the COVID pandemic than Trump had, but the Biden administration has handled COVID in a very far from ideal way (see all the CDC missteps under Biden, for one example).
Not only did it have more time under it, but it also inherited a public that was much more threatening toward anyone attempting to advance COVID control measures, including common sense ones like masking indoors.
The utter lunacy that polluted the public square during the late 2020 - early 2021 time frame caused a lot of the deaths that happened under Biden’s early days to be in the category of being completely preventable but a large portion of the country had been fed bullshit for a year that told them to resist every possible preventative measure.
Do you remember when the media had a fit about Trump being racist for blocking the flights to countries with high covid rates? How about the two weeks after he announced operation warp speed to develop a vaccine and everybody swore up and down that they wouldn’t take Trump’s vaccine? Trump bears a lot of responsibility for the toxic political culture, but it wasn’t just him.
Trump looked like he was going to do the approval for the vaccine himself (or override it). He promised that it’d be ready even sooner than what the organizations making and approving it had said.
As far as “toxic political culture”, Trump bears the lion’s share of the blame. Before he entered politics, it was not at all normal for politicians to behave like this.
A lot of that is fair, except that it wasn’t just Biden’s early days. The mishandling of the COVID pandemic continues to this day. It’s been a clusterfuck from the beginning under Trump to the present under Biden. The US doesn’t seem to be that unique in that regard though. It seems like it’s been a clusterfuck around most of the world.
Once the virus went from stable to constantly evolving, there was no chance of eradication.
Trump’s early mishandling of the virus and America’s outsized influence over the rest of the world helped push the virus this direction long before it was a foregone conclusion that it would be endemic.
Agreed about Trump’s mishandling, but I’m not talking eradication. That was bound to be difficult. I’m talking about mitigation, harm reduction. This was essentially completely abandoned by the Biden administration.