Last July 4, President Joe Biden proclaimed victory over COVID: “Thanks to our heroic vaccine effort, we’ve gained the upper hand against this virus. We can live our lives. We are closer than ever to declaring our independence from a deadly virus.” A few weeks later, Biden promised that people who got vaccinated would not get COVID.

Since last July 4, COVID has killed more than 400,000 Americans. More than 55 million have been diagnosed with the virus, and there have probably been tens of millions of unconfirmed or unreported cases.

Biden has been more successful decimating freedom than ending the pandemic. The wreckage of his COVID promises explains much of the collapse of Biden’s credibility and approval ratings.

Government coverups paved the way to Biden’s pratfalls. In May 2021, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ceased keeping track of almost all “breakthrough” COVID infections among vaccinated individuals unless they resulted in hospitalization or death. Last July, a COVID outbreak affecting more than 500 vaccinated individuals in Provincetown, Mass., hit the headlines.

On Aug. 5, CDC chief Rochelle Walensky formally confessed: “What [COVID vaccines] can’t do anymore is prevent transmission.” Prior to that admission, the Biden administration even refused to disclose the number of “breakthrough” infections that had occurred among White House staff.

On Aug. 11, the Mayo Clinic revealed that the efficacy of the Pfizer COVID vaccine had fallen to 42% — a stunning collapse after early boasts of 95% effectiveness in safeguarding people against infection. Biden responded to the failures by repudiating his 2020 promise not to make vaccines mandatory.

Biden dictated Sept. 9 that all health-care workers and any American working for a company employing more than 100 people must get vaccinated. Biden told viewers: “Recent data indicates there’s only one confirmed positive case per 5,000 fully vaccinated Americans per day.” That wildly inaccurate statement was the linchpin of his calculus of compulsion. Biden issued the equivalent of a declaration of war on 80 million unvaccinated Americans, portraying them as Public Enemy No. 1.

A month later, Biden boasted that thanks to his mandate, there were only “67 eligible Americans who aren’t vaccinated.” The White House Press Office added a correction to the transcript: “[million].”

Biden’s pandemic policy ignored the natural immunity that protects people after they recover from the virus. A major Israeli study revealed that people who had COVID-19 had far better protection against the Delta variant than people who received multiple COVID vaccine injections. COVID vaccines can offer some protection for the elderly and people with compromised immunity, but Biden wildly oversold them to justify seizing more power.

Following the “summer of freedom,” Biden promised in December “a winter of severe illness and death for the unvaccinated” and declared that “almost everyone who has died from COVID-19 in the past many months has been unvaccinated.” Wrong again. Two months earlier, the CDC ceased publishing data showing soaring deaths among the fully vaxxed because the data “might be misinterpreted as the vaccines being ineffective,” The New York Times revealed early this year.

Even though almost two-thirds of the US population was fully vaccinated, COVID cases exploded late last year and soon exceeded a million new cases a day. The CDC later admitted that almost half the COVID deaths in early 2022 were among the fully vaxxed.

On Jan. 13, the Supreme Court struck down Biden’s vaccine mandate for Americans working for large companies, though it narrowly upheld the health-care-worker mandate. Biden’s prerogative to forcibly inject average Americans was obliterated.

As the president’s credibility faded, Team Biden became more aggressive in suppressing criticism. On March 3, Biden’s surgeon general, Vivek Murthy, demanded that social-media companies report to the feds anyone who posted “misinformation” regarding COVID. The odious Disinformation Governance Board was tasked with targeting COVID misinformation, among other suppression targets. Biden’s own false statements on COVID are exempt from the hit list.

The CDC recently estimated that that almost 200 million Americans (60% of adults and 75% of children) have already been infected by COVID. The CDC continues to report more than 100,000 new daily cases, and the White House forecasts up to 100 million new COVID cases in the coming fall and winter. What was the point of the last 18 months of Pandemic Security Theater?

America cannot afford any more Biden victories over COVID. The most honest thing the president said slipped out by accident Dec. 27: “There is no federal solution” to COVID-19. Biden’s debacles confirm the axiom of historian John Barry, author of “The Great Influenza.” Barry warned: “When you mix politics and science, you get politics.”

James Bovard is the author of 10 books and a member of the USA Today Board of Contributors.