With 400 to 500 Americans still dying every day from Covid-19, President Joe Biden has declared that “the pandemic is over.”
The president made the remarks while speaking in an interview that aired on CBS’s “60 Minutes” on Sunday night. By Monday morning, the backlash was in full swing, reports the New York Times.
“We still have a problem with COVID. We’re still doing a lotta work on it. But the pandemic is over. If you notice, no one’s wearing masks. Everybody seems to be in pretty good shape. And so I think it’s changing,” said Biden.
From family members who have lost loved ones this year to those suffering from chronic fatigue syndrome, a condition often brought on by viruses, including the coronavirus, there is disagreement with the president’s assessment of the pandemic being over.
But I suppose, to give the president his due, his comments recognize the reality of the disease at this stage and the public mood. The Wall Street Journal points out that the trouble is that his Administration still hasn’t lifted its official finding of a Covid public-health emergency.
Eric Topol, the Scripps Research Translational Institute director who is one of America’s leading Covid scolds, tweeted “Wish this was true. What’s over is @POTUS’s and our government’s will to get ahead of it, with magical thinking on the new bivalent boosters. Ignores #LongCovid, the inevitability of new variants, and our current incapability for blocking infections and transmission.”
Yes, it is true that Covid deaths in the first week of September were the lowest since March 2020 when the World Health Organization declared Covid a pandemic.
And yes, today is a lot different from early in Biden’s term when more than 3,000 Americans per day were dying. This is due to enhanced care, medications, and vaccinations that have become more widely available, according to Reuters.
Yet Dr. Michael T. Osterholm, an infectious-disease specialist at the University of Minnesota said, “We’ve had two million cases reported over the last 28 days, and we know underreporting is substantial.” Covid-19, he said, “continues to be the No. 4 cause of death in the country.”
The bottom line? The White House is saying that the president was simply expressing what many Americans were already feeling and seeing and what Mr. Biden had been saying all along — that the nation has vaccines and treatments to fight the coronavirus and that for most people, it is not a death sentence.
But even still, as the worldwide pandemic eases, Biden has asked Congress for $22.4 billion more in funding to prepare for a potential fall case surge.
Earlier this month, the president asked for an additional $22 billion in COVID funding for testing and vaccine development, as well as $3.9 billion in funding to fight against an outbreak of the monkeypox virus.
The administration’s efforts to get lawmakers on Capitol Hill to approve more money have been repeatedly blocked by Republicans. Currently, the White House hopes to have the $22 billion included in a must-pass government funding bill.
It just seems to me that Biden’s comment on Sunday, while maybe being right, came at a bad time when more money is needed to fund vaccines and treatments for COVID.