Top advisor says Biden's team 'underestimated' disinformation and political opposition to its pandemic plans

President Joe Biden speaks during his COVID-19 response during a Jan. 13 speech on the White House campus.

Andrew Harnik/AP

• The White House has a mixed record on its management of the pandemic, a report found.
• One top advisor said the White House underestimated the amount of political opposition they would face.
• "Everyone had a failure to anticipate delta and omicron, the administration included," another offered.

President Biden's top pandemic advisor says the administration didn't anticipate how much disinformation and sheer political opposition would undermine the federal pandemic response.

"[W]e underestimated in that original strategy … the amount of disinformation and the fact that people would actually stand in the way of the pandemic response for political or other motivation,"  White House COVID-19 response coordinator Jeff Zients told The Washington Post.

The Post, in a lengthy examination of Biden's track record against the pandemic, found that the White House has both succeeded and struggled to implement much of its original 200-page COVID-19 plan. Officials and healthcare providers credit the White House for a vaccination campaign that has led at least 250 million Americans to receive at least one dose of the shot. But advisors say a novel and ever-changing virus combined at times with a lack of preparation has also undermined their efforts

"This is a good plan overcome by events," Andy Slavitt, who was the head of Biden's vaccine rollout, told The Post. "Everyone had a failure to anticipate delta and omicron, the administration included."

Health officials are especially concerned about the state of the global vaccination effort. According to Oxford's Our World in Data project, less than 5% of people in low-income countries have been vaccinated versus 71% of people in high-income nations. But addressing this vast disparity poses some thorny questions when the virus continues to spread domestically

"It's been difficult to get the White House to focus on improving vaccinations in Malawi, when the president is getting calls about overflowing hospitals in Missouri," one unnamed official told The Post.

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