Former first lady Jill Biden says the White House went a full year without a single visitor during the Covid pandemic, a stretch she described in vivid terms during a new podcast interview.
She shared the memory on “Get Real with Jim Weiss,” where she also defended the vaccines that rolled out during that period and recalled her own role in promoting them.
Weiss, a healthcare marketing executive, opened with a broad question about her years in public life.
“Is there one story that stands out that where you really needed someone?” he asked.
Biden went straight to the pandemic. She said her team could not thank supporters or bring people in for meetings, and she described the mood inside the building as the months dragged on.
Biden said the White House felt “like a ghost town in there.” She added, “It was so quiet and everybody was afraid.”
The atmosphere changed once the administration got busy, she said.
Biden then crisscrossed the country alongside Dr. Anthony Fauci and Vivek Murthy, visiting communities to promote vaccination.
Their mission, she said, was “to try to get shots in the arms.”
Weiss then told Biden that his company had worked on the Pfizer vaccine launch. He offered his own assessment of the product: “that kind of saved the world in a lot of ways.”
Biden answered without pausing. “Of course it saved the world,” she said. “My gosh, yeah.”
She then acknowledged that many people would rather not revisit those months, and she included herself among them. “I don’t blame them. I don’t want to either,” she said.
Biden said she still holds specific images from that time. She named “people dying and people outside of their hospital rooms, their loved ones who couldn’t go in and say goodbye.”
She also spoke about the nurses, doctors and caregivers who worked through the crisis and the hardship they endured. “It was just a horrible time,” she said.
Weiss closed the exchange with praise for the administration. “I think we needed you guys at that time and your approach, which was pretty empathetic,” he told her.
The administration’s approach to vaccination went beyond public outreach.
Biden’s White House imposed vaccine mandates on military personnel, federal employees and other groups, who had to get vaccinated or risk losing their jobs.
Researchers have since examined how the vaccines affected younger recipients. One study followed more than 1.7 million children in England who received a Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.
According to that study, only children and adolescents who received the shot developed inflammation in their hearts.
The authors also compared risks for children ages 5 to 11. They found that the vaccine carried a greater risk of pericarditis than Covid-19 carried of hospitalization for that age group.
The study laid out the numbers this way: “The reduction in risk of COVID-19 hospitalization in children (−0.02 for first dose vs. unvaccinated) was lower than the increase in risk of pericarditis (0.22).”
A separate FDA review focused on child deaths.
The agency’s memo covered 96 deaths of children that were reported to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, the federal database that collects such reports.
The memo stated that “no fewer than 10” of those 96 deaths were “a direct result of the children taking the COVID-19 vaccine.”
