Joe Biden entered the White House vowing to end the COVID-19 pandemic. By the Fourth of July, he declared the U.S. was closer than ever to its independence from the virus. But a year into Biden’s presidency, COVID-19 still very much has its grip on the country. 

Coronavirus cases nationwide are just now starting to come down from record levels driven by the omicron variant. COVID-19 hospitalizations have also been higher than ever. Masks are still part of everyday life for many people, tests have been hard to come by, and there’s been renewed uncertainty about schools keeping their doors open. Meanwhile, more than 60 million eligible Americans remain unvaccinated.

No, the pandemic isn’t over.

The virus’ unpredictability and vaccine hesitancy are among the reasons COVID-19 still weighs heavily on practically every aspect of American life. But Biden and his administration have had missteps along the way, too, health experts said, including lacking foresight on issues such as testing and masking.

“There have been some some real positive steps taken and things that just really need to be acknowledged and called out as critical,” said Jennifer Kates, senior vice president and director of global health and HIV policy for the Kaiser Family Foundation, a health policy think tank. “And there have been some other things that I think collectively a lot of experts and others are looking at the decisions that were made and wondering why certain things didn't happen as quickly as they probably could have.”

The Biden administration’s crowning pandemic achievement has been its vaccination campaign, experts said. After a bumpy rollout of the vaccines under former President Donald Trump, the Biden administration worked feverishly to put shots in arms by making them more widely available, forming partnerships to provide free rides to vaccination sites, child care and incentives, and sending workers door-to-door answering questions, among other initiatives.

To date, nearly 210 million Americans — 63% of the population — is fully vaccinated, according to data from the CDC.

But there also has been much pushback to the vaccines, particularly in red states – and much of it fueled by misinformation largely spread on social media.

In July, Biden said social media companies were “killing people” for allowing anti-vaccine misinformation to circulate. And as the delta variant surged over the summer and hospitals filled with largely unvaccinated Americans, Biden coined the phrase “pandemic of the unvaccinated,” which he has often repeated.

To drum up lagging inoculation rates, Biden turned to mandates. He required the shots for federal employees, including military. He urged business owners to do the same before attempting to require vaccines or weekly testing for businesses employing 100 or more workers, a move that was blocked earlier this month by the Supreme Court. The mandate push became a bone of contention among the president’s critics.

Health experts argue that one of Biden’s biggest mistakes has been relying too heavily on vaccines. For instance, Eric Feigl-Ding, an epidemiologist and senior fellow at the Federation of American Scientists, says there should have been more of an emphasis on ventilation and indoor air quality. 

“If you're trying to create a castle, you have a moat, you have a drawbridge, you have the outer wall, you have the inner wall — you have multiple layers of protection to protect the inner keep,” Feigl-Ding said. “And what happens is they relied too much on the wall or the moat. Vaccines work — the other wall does keep enemies out. But they're not foolproof.”

“With pandemics or any infectious disease, no one intervention, even the best one, is alone going to do the job,” added Kates.

Kates and Feigl-Ding also agree that the Biden administration fell short in terms of anticipating testing needs. As the highly contagious omicron variant has spread and sent daily case counts to new record highs — more than three times above the previous worst peak — many Americans stood in long lines for tests, waited several days for results or were unable to find at-home rapid tests at stores. 

The Biden administration has responded by, in recent days, requiring health insurance companies to reimburse customers for at-home tests and launching a website to mail free tests to households, moves Feigl-Ding calls “too little, too late” now that omicron infections are beginning to trend downward.

At a news conference Wednesday, Biden acknowledged his administration fell short when it came to testing.

“Should we have done more testing earlier? Yes,” he said. “But we're doing more now.”

When it comes to the pandemic, a lack of foresight has been a problem in general for the Biden administration, Feigl-Ding said.

“We're always sandbagging after the flood’s already coming,” he said. “We're always boarding up the windows whenever the eye of the storm is just a mile offshore.”

Feigl-Ding and Kates, however, both applaud Biden for deferring to the scientific community, unlike his predecessor

“The sort of constant undermining of the science, questioning the science, questioning public health guidance … and really undermining the information … I think has eased,” Kates said.

“I think it's still much better than the previous administration, where they were trying to muzzle and completely gag the CDC,” Feigl-Ding said. “So, in terms of that, this is much better. And in terms of the government itself spewing misinformation, that doesn't really happen anymore like it happened last year.”

The Biden administration’s messaging, however, has come under fire at times. In August, Biden announced a September rollout date for booster shots. While the plan still hinged on the FDA authorizing and CDC recommending the boosters, critics argued Biden’s announcement was premature and placed pressure on regulators to green-light the additional shots.

The CDC also has been criticized for its sometimes ambiguous recommendations, most notably shortening the isolation period from 10 days to five days for asymptomatic COVID-positive people. It also, in May, told fully vaccinated Americans they could remove their masks in public, only to reverse the guidance in July. While Biden has said he stays out of the CDC’s work, he appointed its director, Dr. Rochelle Walensky. 

Also in his first year, Biden has successfully pushed the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan through Congress to help the U.S. economy rebound from the pandemic-related recession and help reopen schools for in-person learning, overseen the first vaccinations for children, closed the vaccination gap between whites and minorities, purchased tens of millions of courses of new antiviral pills, is making 400 million N95 masks available for free, and has taken a leading role in global vaccination efforts, although health experts say more still needs to be done abroad. 

An Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research released Thursday found that just 45% of Americans approve of Biden's handling of COVID-19, down from 57% in December and from 66% in July 2021.

At a Senate committee hearing last week, Republicans attacked the Biden administration’s pandemic handling by noting on multiple occasions that more Americans have died from COVID-19 under Biden than under Trump.

Biden, however, insisted Wednesday that the U.S. is better off in the pandemic than it was when he took office.

“We're in a very different place now,” he said. “We have the tools — vaccines, boosters, masks, tests, pills — to save lives and keep businesses and schools open.

“I'm not going to give up and accept things as they are now," Biden added. "Some people may call what's happening now the new normal. I call it a job not yet finished. It will get better.”