Biden presented a misleading narrative about the pandemic during his State of the Union address in order to create the impression that much of the progress made under COVID happened on his watch.
“Two years ago, COVID had shut down our businesses, closed our schools, and robbed us of so much,” Biden claimed. “Today, COVID no longer controls our lives.”
The COVID pandemic actually began three years ago, in 2020. Many businesses and schools closed or shut down, but various sectors of the economy had already started reopening by May of 2020. According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the pandemic employment crash bottomed out in April 2020 and was trending upward well before he took office.
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As for schools, in May of 2020 the CDC issued guidance for how schools could safely reopen in that fall, and according to an interactive chart from CNN, only a few select states actually ordered partial closures.
But, by Biden’s telling, we were still in the throes of the pandemic shutdowns when he took office. In reality, he took office when things were just starting to reopen.
