In response to a question during a 60 Minutes interview on Sunday, President Biden said, “The pandemic is over. We still have a problem with COVID. We’re still doing a lot of work on it. But the pandemic is over.” Some have asked when Biden will end the public health emergency if the pandemic is over. If Dr. Anthony Fauci has his way, the crisis will never be over.
The day after Biden’s comments, Fauci walked back the notion that COVID-19 is something America is prepared to live with. At a fireside chat at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, as part of his months-long farewell tour, Fauci said:
“We are not where we need to be if we are going to quote ‘live with the virus’ because we know we are not going to eradicate it,” Fauci said. “The next question we ask: ‘Are we going to be able to eliminate it from our country or from most of the world?’ and the answer is unlikely, because it is highly transmissible and the immunity that’s induced by vaccine or infection is also transient.”
“We still must be aware of how unusual this virus is and continues to be in its ability to evolve into new variants which defy the standard public health mechanisms of addressing an outbreak,” Fauci said Monday, adding that the intensity of the outbreak currently is “unacceptably high.”
Do you know what else defies the standard public health measures for an outbreak? The common cold, which is often caused by coronaviruses. While Fauci admits the problem is trending in the right direction, he predicts another variant. It is also not news that COVID is here to stay. Once researchers discovered animal vectors like deer, dolphins, and domesticated pets, eradication was not an option. Fauci knows that.
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Of course, he also wants to blame the continued proliferation on a “lack of a uniform acceptance of the interventions that are available to us in this country.”
Fauci lamented, “Even now, more than two years, close to three years into the outbreak, we have only 67 percent of our population vaccinated, and only one-half of those have received a single boost.” In other words, get your fifth jab, plebe. Even though there is no data to support whether the shots can prevent transmission or illness. There are also no studies to back up the claim that shots and boosters prevent severe disease.
Still, Biden’s lame-duck COVID advisor decided to try and ignite new fears about the BA 2.75.2 variant. So far, the information on the omicron 2.75 variant family shows that it may be more transmissible than previous versions. However, nothing indicates that it is more deadly. It may evade the immunity gained from infection with delta. However, there is no information about how immunity from a previous omicron infection holds up or how a prior illness with any variant may blunt the severity of the new omicron variant.
Yet the CDC is still collecting data on the virus for some reason. It is no more reliable or detailed than it was two-and-a-half years ago. The agency tracks cases, hospitalizations, and deaths. Cases are a pure guesstimate with the proliferation of home testing and no testing for mild symptoms.
It is also well-known that the CDC is not delineating hospitalizations and deaths with COVID from those caused by COVID. Until there is better data, telling America that 355 people who died last week had a positive COVID test hardly incites panic. The reality of everyday life in 90% of the country looks more like Biden’s assessment than Fauci’s.
Even Politico had to concede that the situation is not as dire as Fauci would like us to believe:
The White House also downplayed the rhetorical significance of Biden’s comments, dismissing it as the president’s attempt to highlight the administration’s success in beating back the virus. Widely available vaccines and treatments are capable of blunting the worst of Covid’s effects, businesses and schools are open, and emergency health measures have largely evaporated. Even if the U.S. is technically still in a pandemic, aides argue, Biden was trying to express that most people’s lives are no longer being controlled by it.
A White House spokesperson on Monday pointed to the administration’s previously released fall Covid plan,which encouraged the use of vaccination and treatments to “manage fluctuations in COVID-19 and move forward safely.”
As much as it pains this writer to admit it, Biden apparently went with the administration’s fall plan. If there are tools to effectively manage the fluctuations in an illness, COVID is no longer an emergency, no matter what Fauci wants to believe.
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