WASHINGTON — “Folks, I know we’re all tired and frustrated about the pandemic,” President Biden said on Tuesday ahead of his meeting with his pandemic response team. It was not the message with which he’d hoped to open the new year, but with the nation recording more than a million coronavirus cases on Monday, there was little to do but acknowledge reality, which is that the virus Biden had promised to vanquish remains very much unvanquished.
“These coming weeks are going to be challenging,” the president said, himself sounding weary from months of battling crosscurrents of political resistance and medical misinformation, not to mention a virus that has proved intractable