An existential timeline of the Trump/Pence and Biden/Harris presidencies

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News media begin reporting on Chinese authorities investigating a mysterious pneumonia circulating in the city of Wuhan in China. By the end of January, the World Health Organization (WHO) declares the disease now called COVID-19 a public health emergency of international concern.

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After a case of COVID is detected in Washington State, Trump tells CNBC, “We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China, and we have it under control. It’s going to be just fine.” In the months that follow, Trump repeatedly downplays the severity of the crisis.

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Eleven days after the WHO declares COVID a public health emergency of international concern, the Trump administration releases a budget proposal that includes heavy cuts to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), as did his proposals in previous years. Experts criticize Trump for such moves, including his disbanding of the National Security Council directorate for pandemic preparedness in 2018. Trump has pledged to disband a similar unit, the Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response, if re-elected in 2024.

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Most states issue official “stay at home” orders that curtail non-essential business. But the moves, backed by health experts and intended to slow the spread of the pandemic, come along with a massive economic shock as schools, businesses, and travel shudder to a halt. After initially backing the pandemic mitigation measures, Trump quickly begins vacillating, telling reporters on March 23, “America will again and soon be open for business. Very soon. A lot sooner than three or four months that somebody was suggesting.”

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Trump claims that COVID-19 originated in a Chinese lab, siding, without offering any evidence, with those who believe that the pandemic was the result of a research accident in Wuhan, one of the world’s major bat coronavirus research centers. Trump initially had praise for Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s pandemic response, “China has been working very hard to contain the Coronavirus. The United States greatly appreciates their efforts and transparency. It will all work out well. In particular, on behalf of the American People, I want to thank President Xi!” he tweeted in January. But as the pandemic worsens, Trump changes his tune, frequently calling COVID the “China virus,” language that some Asian Americans say leads to incidents of verbal and physical abuse against them.

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After Chinese scientists release the genetic sequence for SARS-CoV-2, governments and companies like Pfizer and Moderna pivot toward quickly developing, testing, and mass producing a vaccine, a daunting task given that vaccines can take between 10-15 years to develop. The US government program, Operation Warp Speed, officially announced on May 15, sets out to have large quantities of vaccine by January 2021, eight months from the announcement.

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The United States surpasses 100,000 COVID deaths. Trump credits himself with keeping the numbers at that level. “For all of the political hacks out there, if I hadn’t done my job well, & early, we would have lost 1 1/2 to 2 Million People, as opposed to the 100,000 plus that looks like will be the number,” he tweets.

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The United States officially tells the United Nations that it is withdrawing from the World Health Organization (WHO). Trump accuses China of concealing the seriousness of the pandemic and the WHO of being “China centric.”

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Trump and his wife, Melania, test positive for COVID, amid a re-election campaign with frequent large gatherings of mainly maskless attendees and other risky situations. Trump receives experimental treatments while recovering from COVID, an indication to some of the severity of his illness. Before leaving the hospital, a defiant Trump tweets, “Don’t be afraid of Covid. Don’t let it dominate your life. We have developed, under the Trump Administration, some really great drugs & knowledge. I feel better than I did 20 years ago!.”

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The final month of the 2020 presidential election is dominated by concerns over the pandemic. Joe Biden makes Trump’s oversight over the US pandemic response and his (in Biden’s view) callousness toward the toll COVID was exacting a central argument for his candidacy.

COVID deaths had spiked past 200,000 in late September, but in the campaign’s final stretch, Trump had stopped embracing the pandemic control measures such as masking, social distancing, and restrictions on gatherings endorsed by many health experts in the days before a vaccine became available.

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Many voters choose to use mail-in ballots in the presidential election, in part due to fears over the pandemic. Some states allow these ballots to be counted before Election Day, but others require that authorities wait, leading to delays as batches of ballots are tabulated after the polls had officially closed. The Associated Press doesn’t project that Biden will win until four days after the election. Trump, who had long spread false conspiracy theories about mail-in voting, falsely argues that vote counting delays, which had been expected, were allowing Democrats to steal the election. On the day after the election, he tweets, “Last night I was leading, often solidly, in many key States, in almost all instances Democrat run & controlled. Then, one by one, they started to magically disappear as surprise ballot dumps were counted. VERY STRANGE, and the “pollsters” got it completely & historically wrong!”

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The Food and Drug Administration gives an emergency use authorization to Pfizer’s COVID vaccine, green-lighting the first phase of the US vaccinations. Trump, who for weeks has been making false claims about having won the 2020 presidential election, intermingles the vaccine news and his grievances as he tweets, “The Swine Flu (H1N1), and the attempt for a vaccine by the Obama Administration, with Joe Biden in charge, was a complete and total disaster. Now they want to come in and take over one of the ‘greatest and fastest medical miracles in modern day history.’ I don’t think so.”

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Sandra Lindsay, a nurse in New York City, becomes the first person in the United States to receive a shot outside of clinical trials on December 14. Trump receives a COVID vaccine in January before leaving the White House, encouraging others to get the shot, too.

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Biden announces vaccination requirements for large employers and 17 million health care workers. By then, the FDA has granted full approval to a coronavirus vaccine, yet, many Americans remain unvaccinated, Biden says, citing a “distinct minority” of politicians and vaccine holdouts who were slowing progress on the pandemic. “Many of us are frustrated with the nearly 80 million Americans who are still not vaccinated, even though the vaccine is safe, effective, and free,” he says. “The time for waiting is over.”

These mandates and others become the subjects of numerous lawsuits and a growing anti-vaccine movement in the country.

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Russia begins a full-scale attack on Ukraine. As Russian troops appear to make quick progress toward Kyiv, an old bit of disinformation—that the United States is developing biological weapons, now with Ukriaine—resurfaces. For many years, Russia, Ukraine, the United States and others had worked cooperatively to reduce the threat of Soviet nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons falling into the wrong hands and to prevent Soviet weaponeers from seeking employment with the highest bidder. But as Ukraine increasingly sought ties with the West, and the relationship between Russia and the United States frayed, Russia cast previous cooperative efforts in a false light. President Vladimir Putin and other Russian officials and state media begin to falsely depict a public health laboratory program in Ukraine as a bioweapons operation, in a Russian effort to justify the invasion.

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Right-wing figures in the United States parrot Russian bioweapons disinformation. Tucker Carlson, then a major figure on Fox News, mischaracterizes a Bulletin interview with Robert Pope, the director of the Cooperative Threat Reduction Program, which worked with Ukrainian labs on public health research. Pope had told the Bulletin he was concerned that the war might damage labs holding pathogens or that Russia would use information from ransacked facilities to create disinformation.

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Countries in Europe begin reporting cases of mpox. The disease, which has long circulated in African countries, spreads quickly, mainly within communities of men who have sex with men. Some 100,000 people are infected in two years during the global outbreak, with many suffering debilitating but usually not fatal illness. Critics say the US response is allowing the disease to gain a foothold in the United States. Case numbers come down and in the United States a vaccine becomes available, but mpox is still circulating in October 2024, according to the CDC. A more worrisome variant is today circulating in several African countries, drawing renewed concern.

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The Department of Health and Human Services allows the Public Health Emergency for COVID to end. The administration claims that 270 million people have been vaccinated against COVID, and that deaths have dropped 95 percent from January 2021. Some experts worry that the end of the emergency might lead the pandemic to fall from public attention, even though the virus is still circulating. By this point, more than one million people have died of COVID in the United States.

Harris warns of AI existential threat

At a summit in the United Kingdom, Vice President Kamala Harris calls attention to the risks posed by AI: “From AI-enabled cyberattacks at a scale beyond anything we have seen before to AI-formulated bioweapons that could endanger the lives of millions, these threats are often referred to as the ‘existential threats of AI’ because, of course, they could endanger the very existence of humanity.”

Bird flu jumps to humans

H5N1 avian influenza is detected in US dairy cattle. The virus has been decimating wild and domesticated birds for years, worrying health experts who have long seen it as a pandemic threat. Finding it in dairy cattle raises concerns that the avian virus could adapt to better infect mammals, including humans. The Biden administration’s efforts to grasp the full extent of the outbreak run into political hurdles, however, as some farmers and local officials balked at or rejected federal inquiries. By October 21, there are 31 reported cases of H5N1 in people in the United States.

Gain of function

The Biden administration releases a new policy on federally-funded research involving pathogens manipulated to enhance their pandemic potential as well as dual-use biological research (research that can have both positive and malicious applications). Experts had long been clamoring for a new “gain of function” policy. The debate over so-called “gain-of-function research” heated up during the COVID pandemic, when some began to believe the virus might have spread from a “lab leak” in Wuhan, China; researchers there, working with US funding, manipulated bat coronaviruses in ways that made them more harmful to lab mice. There is yet no conclusive evidence about how COVID began. A leading theory is that it resulted from the spillover of the virus from animals to people.