President Joe Biden--who defeated Donald Trump in a campaign that emphasized he would be a stable, reliable hand on the wheel--is increasingly facing criticism that he has failed to rise to the challenge on two key issues.
The first has to do with his administration's inexplicable passivity in responding to evidence that both the Moderna and the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines were not as effective in dealing with the variants and subvariants of the original version of the coronavirus. Yet it took until June 30 for the Food and Drug Administration to finally urge that vaccines be updated to better address the omicron threat.
The risks this delay poses are compounded by the increasing failure of campaigns to get the Americans most at risk of serious covid-19 complications to protect themselves.
This pandemic isn't over yet. The U.S. needs updated vaccines -- and more people accepting them.