It was Oct. 25, 2019 when former Vice President and hopeful 2020 candidate Joe Biden tweeted out a warning to the American public.
"We are not prepared for a pandemic," he wrote, weeks ahead of COVID-19 being named and flagged as an emerging threat. "Trump has rolled back progress President Obama and I made to strengthen global health security. We need leadership that builds public trust, focuses on real threats, and mobilizes the world to stop outbreaks before they reach our shores."
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Biden was responding at the time to a Washington Post report that shined a light on the world's lack of preparedness for the kind of outbreak that we're living through right now. No one was prepared for COVID-19, but Biden made the case in October 2019 that the U.S. in particular was behind the curve because of a regressive administration whose principal focus over four years was undoing all the work of the Obama White House.
The Biden tweet took off almost immediately after WaPo reporter Dave Weigel flagged it on Sunday morning. A majority of Americans are well aware of all that we've lost over the past four years, but the Democratic presidential candidate's prescient words still broke through as he and Trump both round into the final days before the 2020 U.S. election concludes.
The tweet struck an especially stark contrast between the two candidates as White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows' name splashed across Twitter for asserting that "we are not going to get control of the pandemic ... because it's a contagious virus." Infectious disease experts around the world have repeatedly said that control is possible, it just takes discipline and personal responsibility.
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Is there anything more conspicuously absent from the current U.S. leadership than those two qualities? Donald Trump has spent years saying one thing and doing another, even when it costs him an opportunity to be the leader everyone hoped he'd evolve into when he took office in January 2017. And personal responsibility? This is the same president who said "I don't take responsibility at all" for the faults and failures in early U.S. testing.
Needless to say, the sudden reappearance of a year-old Biden tweet that seemed to peer into the future resonated with people who are more than ready for a change.
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