It’s hard to forget that Joe Biden repeatedly promised that, if elected, he’d “shut down the virus.” Based on Biden’s rhetoric during the presidential campaign, Trump had botched the national response to COVID and that if he won the election, he’d right the ship, and COVID would go away.
Supercut: Biden repeatedly promised to “shut down” the COVID-19 virus.pic.twitter.com/7Y2eTOBHEZ
— Matt Margolis (@mattmargolis) December 15, 2021
That obviously hasn’t happened, and as the administration has been called out for it, they’ve come up with creative excuses. For example, earlier this month, White House press secretary Jen Psaki blamed unvaccinated Americans for the reason Biden’s promise to “shut down the virus” was unfulfilled.
Well, the Biden administration is going a step further and is saying that the virus won’t be “shut down” at all and that it will likely never go away.
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CDC Director Rochelle Walensky admitted this during an appearance on CBS Mornings.
“We’re going into year two, people think we’re waiting for you to sound the trumpet, say it’s all clear. We’re not really going to get an all clear, are we? We just have to face the fact that we’re going to have to live with this, true?” asked host Gayle King.
“I think that that’s probably true,” Walensky replied. “But what I would say is we have a lot of control and power to do that as we come together, as we get vaccinated, as we do those prevention things that work to protect one another and ourselves, and our family. We can bring down the amount of disease in this country and get much faster to that place.”
This is a stunning reversal of the administration’s previous position. When asked about Biden’s promise to “shut down the virus” last month, Jen Psaki told Peter Doocy of Fox News that “we need approximately 20 percent of the population or more people than are currently vaccinated to go get vaccinated and go get boosted,” so that Americans can “go back to normal or go back to normal life.”
Is the Biden administration now saying that normalcy will never happen?
Sure enough, nearly a third of Americans say they “do not expect to be able to return to their pre-COVID life until more than a year from now,” according to a new Axios-Ipsos Coronavirus poll released this week—the highest to say so this year.
This is a troubling statistic. However, as time goes on, more Americans recognize that going “back to normal” just won’t happen. Indeed, many people will never stop wearing masks in public—even when the virus reaches a low enough fatality rate that the pandemic will officially be over. Why? Because they’ve been scared enough by those in power that they will never let go of that fear. If you’ve shopped in public throughout the pandemic, you have observed people who have stayed masked up throughout, and some people ditch the masks for a while and then mask up again whenever there’s a new variant in the headlines. Chances are, the people who have remained masked despite being fully vaccinated and/or boostered will remain masked for the rest of their lives.
