From the Washington Post‘s profile of Vice President Kamala Harris, December 4:
Staffers who worked for Harris before she was vice president said one consistent problem was that Harris would refuse to wade into briefing materials prepared by staff members, then berate employees when she appeared unprepared.
“It’s clear that you’re not working with somebody who is willing to do the prep and the work,” one former staffer said. “With Kamala you have to put up with a constant amount of soul-destroying criticism and also her own lack of confidence. So you’re constantly sort of propping up a bully and it’s not really clear why.”
From Harris’s interview with the Los Angeles Times, Friday:
Vice President Kamala Harris said Friday that the administration failed to anticipate the variants that have prolonged and worsened the COVID-19 pandemic and that she underestimated the role misinformation would play in prolonging the disease that has killed 800,000 Americans.
“We didn’t see Delta coming. I think most scientists did not — upon whose advice and direction we have relied — didn’t see Delta coming,” she said. “We didn’t see Omicron coming. And that’s the nature of what this, this awful virus has been, which as it turns out, has mutations and variants.”
It is extremely difficult to believe that the president and vice president were not briefed or warned about the potential for variants that were more contagious than the original strains of SARS-CoV-2. The top U.S. virology experts may not have said, specifically, “you will be dealing with a more contagious variant called Delta in mid-summer, and an even more contagious but likely milder variant called Omicron around Thanksgiving,” but it is simply implausible that in all the briefings Biden and Harris received, they were not warned on the potential threat of more contagious variants and updates on those variants as they emerged.