On the menu today. Long after it would do any good, the Biden administration realizes that public discussion of the Covid-19 pandemic should not be focusing on the total number of cases and instead should be focused on severe infections and hospitalizations — just as the newsletter you’re reading has been insisting for months; the CDC vaccination data may not be as accurate as we thought; Joe Manchin finally makes the Biden administration and progressives pay for their arrogance; and recalling Jen Psaki’s snippy answer about a proposal to send Covid-19 tests to every American.
Biden’s Team: Wait, Maybe Counting Covid-19 Cases Isn’t the Best Measurement after All
This newsletter, September 20: “Cases are no longer the useful measurement of this pandemic. Fully vaccinated people can catch the virus, and the vast majority of cases will be mildly symptomatic.”
This newsletter, November 18: “These warnings and expressions of concern are focusing on the measuring stick of an increase in the daily rate of new cases, and as I try to emphasize, over and over again, cases are no longer the most useful measuring stick for the severity and risk of this pandemic.”
This newsletter, December 14: “Yes, I’m the guy who keeps emphasizing that the number of cases is no longer the most useful measuring stick for determining the severity of this pandemic.”
Behind the scenes, administration officials have been debating how to shift public attention from the total number of cases — which appear likely to surge, even if many are mild — toward the number of severe infections that are overloading health systems and causing interruptions to normal life.
Some of Biden’s advisers are encouraging the administration to begin discussing publicly how to live alongside a virus that shows no signs of disappearing, a potentially stark shift in messaging for a White House that once touted “freedom from the virus.”
Steering public attention away from the total number of infections and toward serious cases only — as some Biden advisers have encouraged — could prove a challenge after nearly two years of intense focus on the pandemic’s every up and down. It is a part of a growing conundrum that Biden faces as the Covid-19 pandemic refuses to abate.
“We’re getting to the point now where . . . it’s about severity,” said Xavier Becerra, the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, in a meeting with reporters this week. “It’s not about cases. It’s about severity.”
Becerra said the issue recently arose during a meeting at the White House with Biden’s Covid response team. Other officials also said the issue of how to refocus the public away from total cases toward the severity of illness has been an ongoing subject of discussion within the administration.
Where the heck have you been, geniuses? (In the spirit of the season, “Welcome to the party, pal!”) Week after week, month after month, the administration, certain national, state, and local health officials, members of the media, and Covid obsessives have pointed to increases in the number of cases as an indicator of the worsening severity of the pandemic. And week after week, I’ve argued that the more relevant measuring sticks are hospitalizations and deaths. (And it’s not just me!)
First with Delta and now with Omicron, we’re dealing with really contagious variants in a society that is no longer minimizing human contact (and shouldn’t be, really, when we consider the far-reaching physical, emotional, psychological, and societal consequences of asking human beings to minimize social interactions). In addition, it’s winter in North America, meaning that people will be spending more time indoors, closer together, enabling the virus to spread faster. Cases — meaning infections — are going to increase in those circumstances, but we don’t worry about every infection of every pathogen. We worry about pathogen infections that cause particularly bad outcomes — hospitalization, death, and even “long Covid.” A huge increase in mild or asymptomatic cases is actually a good thing if it gets us closer to something akin to herd immunity, in which vast swaths of the population end up with antibodies that can quickly fight off SARS-CoV-2 when the body encounters it.
With Omicron here, the number of cases across the country is going to continue to explode. (The seven-day average of daily new cases has nearly doubled since early November.) But that doesn’t necessarily mean the number of hospitalizations and deaths are going to explode! Former FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb said on CBS News’ Face the Nation yesterday that:
There’s no indication that [the Omicron variant] causes more severe illness, what we’ve seen in South Africa in particular, is a decoupling between the cases and hospitalizations. So, hospitalizations are down about 30 percent relative to cases, and we’re probably not measuring all the cases in South Africa. We’re probably only picking up a small fraction. And more severe cases requiring ICU admissions are down 80 percent relative to past waves in cases versus ICU admissions, so it does appear to be a less severe illness. Now, a lot of people believe, including myself, that the reason why it’s manifesting as a less severe illness is probably because we have baseline immunity in the population. Probably around 80 percent of Americans and 90 percent of South Africans have some level of immunity, either from prior infection or through vaccination. So even though we’re still getting infected because this is spreading through immune evasion, it’s spreading by evading the immune- immunity that we’ve acquired. We have some baseline immunity that protects us from getting very sick. And that’s in fact what you’re probably seeing in terms of these hospitalization statistics. [Emphasis added.]
I think is going to blow its way through the population, probably very quickly. When you look at what happened in South Africa and even what’s happening in the UK right now, where it’s moving very fast. But we do face a hard four to six weeks ahead of us, as is most of the population.
But if the Biden administration wanted the public to stop focusing so much on total case numbers, the time to start making that argument was months ago, not a few days before Christmas when the case numbers had already started rising quickly. If administration officials start changing their tune now, it makes it sound like they’re saying, “By this measurement, we’re doing a terrible job, so please stop looking at this measurement.”
CDC: Look, Some Days, It’s Hard to Keep All These Vaccinations Straight
This isn’t quite a correction, but it’s a cautionary note: Throughout the U.S. vaccination effort, this newsletter has referred to the CDC data on how many shots had been administered, how many Americans had one shot, how many Americans are fully vaccinated, etc. But apparently, some boosters are now being recorded as first shots: “The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which millions of Americans rely on for up-to-date information on vaccination rates in their communities, recently acknowledged that its data might overestimate the number of people who have received first doses while underestimating the number who have received booster shots.”
Biden Can Keep His House in Order, but He Can’t Keep His Manchin in Order
On last week’s episode of The Editors, I noted how much I hated talking about “Build Back Better” on the show because for the vast majority of weeks, there was exceptionally little to talk about or new to report. Progressives dreamed of spending $6 trillion, most Democrats wanted to spend $4 trillion or $3 trillion or $2 trillion, and West Virginia senator Joe Manchin — and Arizona senator Kyrsten Sinema — thought that was too much, would increase taxes in harmful ways, and would exacerbate inflation. Lather, rinse, repeat, over and over again. Week after week, congressional correspondents would ask Manchin if he had changed his mind, and week after week, he’d say “no.” Manchin is unpersuaded by protesters outside his houseboat or furious denunciations from the media or threats to run primary challengers against him in 2024.
For the entirety of 2021, the Biden administration and most progressives have behaved as if they had 63 or so Democrats in the Senate, instead of 50. That arrogance finally caught up with them Sunday morning.
ADDENDUM: As large swaths of the country try to manage the upcoming Christmas holiday and look far and wide to find any available Covid-19 tests . . . doesn’t White House press secretary Jen Psaki’s snippy “Should we just send one to every American? Then what happens if every American have [sic] one test?” response from December 6 look even worse?