On the menu today: President Biden told 60 Minutes, “The pandemic is over. If you notice, no one’s wearing masks. Everybody seems to be in pretty good shape.” The problem is that a bunch of his administration’s policy and budgetary priorities — including the student-loan-forgiveness plan! — are based on the premise that the pandemic is not over. Grandpa gets confused, and once again, the president’s words and his administration’s actual policies are no more than distant cousins. Elsewhere, we say farewell to a friend.
Biden’s All-Purpose Pandemic
You may have noticed that Joe Biden doesn’t pay a lot of attention to what he says until after he says it — e.g., “minor incursion,” “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power,” “You ain’t black,” his repeated insistence that the U.S. has an established commitment to defend Taiwan where one doesn’t exist, etc. This past weekend, Biden’s habit of blurting out the first thing that pops into his mind once again made a hash of his administration’s policies.
In that 60 Minutes interview on Sunday, Biden was eager to take a victory lap, boasting:
The pandemic is over. We still have a problem with COVID. We’re still doing a lotta work on it. It’s — 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. And I think this is a perfect example of it.
The problem is that several Biden-administration policies rest upon the argument that the pandemic is not over. Much like Schrödinger’s cat being both simultaneously alive and dead, the pandemic is both over and not over, depending upon what Biden and his administration need at any given moment.
As our Charlie Cooke observed, this off-the-cuff comment abrogates the entire justification for Biden’s student-loan-debt cancellation:
Why does Biden’s statement matter so much? I’ll tell you: It matters because the memo that the Biden administration released to justify his order rested entirely upon there being an ongoing emergency, and because, as Biden has just confirmed, there is no ongoing emergency.
Back in August, Biden’s lawyers argued with half-straight faces that the 2003 HEROES Act — which, as Bloomberg Law has noted, was passed not as a generalized enabling act but “to help borrowers serving in the military in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks” — could be twisted to apply to any national emergency, including pandemics such as Covid-19. This, of course, was nonsense. Among the specific problems with Biden’s argument was that the 2003 HEROES Act does not cover debt cancelation (i.e., transference to taxpayers); that its “direct economic hardship” language does not allow for mass relief; that the application of its “or national emergency” language clearly violates the major questions doctrine; and that the administration’s insistence that the act was designed to allow the executive branch “to act quickly should a situation arise that has not been considered” was flatly contradicted by the fact that the president waited until two-and-a-half years into the pandemic before acting, and then gave relief to the most privileged people in America. But, even if one were to ignore all that, one could still not get past the fact that the powers to which Biden laid claim can be applied only when there is an active emergency, and that the active emergency Biden is citing has now passed.
The U.S. federal government’s official position is that a public-health emergency is still ongoing. The Department of Health and Human Services has stated it will give 60 days’ notice before ending the state of emergency. And yet, HHS secretary Xavier Becerra, caught between his department’s policies and health experts on one hand and his boss on the other, issued a statement in response to Biden’s 60 Minutes remarks declaring that declaring that, “The president is correct.”
The president says the pandemic is over, yet his administration is keeping the state of emergency in effect and apparently the plan is to hope that no one notices.
Here’s the administration, laying out its budget request for next year, 18 days ago:
Second, our COVID-19 response efforts continue to require additional funding. . . . While we have made tremendous progress in our ability to protect against and treat COVID-19, we must stay on our front foot. Doing so requires additional resources, which is why today we are updating our previous funding request. The updated request is for $22.4 billion to meet immediate short-term domestic needs, including testing; accelerate the research and development of next-generation vaccines and therapeutics; prepare for future variants; and support the global response to COVID-19. This funding is vital to our ability to protect and build on the progress we’ve made.
The president says the pandemic is over, but he needs another $22 billion to fight it.
Twelve days ago, White House officials told Politico that they were bracing for a perilous winter, and that “COVID is not over and our response continues to be active, comprehensive, and led out of the White House. That is not changing right now or soon.”
Biden’s Department of Justice is still fighting in court to defend the CDC’s authority to issue mask requirements on airplanes.
Both on the campaign trail and in the early days of his presidency, Biden pledged that he would always follow the science and listen to the experts. Apparently, Biden didn’t consult with Dr. Anthony Fauci before declaring the pandemic to be over.
“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 Monday. “We must be aware,” he said later, “that it is likely, that with the combination of the evolution of variants as well as the seasonal aspects that as we get into this coming late fall and winter, it is likely that we will see another variant emerge. And there’s already on the horizon one that looks suspicious that it might start to evolve as another variant, and that’s the BA.2.75.2.”
Also note that the administration is trying to get people to receive their updated Omicron boosters, in a rollout that the New York Times characterized as “methodical but muted.” Unsurprisingly, people are less motivated to go out and get their fourth shot than they were to get the first three. How motivated will people be to get them now that the president has appeared on television and declared that, “The pandemic is over”?
Finally, while the cases are down, it is worth noting that they were relatively low in September 2021, too, and then in late autumn and winter, the Omicron wave arrived and cases and hospitalizations spiked to their all-time highs. A year ago at this time, cases were on the downward slope, after a rise in southern states, where people were spending more time indoors in air conditioning.
Between past infections (more than 95 million reported cases since the start of the pandemic), vaccinations, and boosters, there are probably very few Americans who don’t have any protection against the virus at all. Most of us will be fine, and maybe if you’re lucky, you’ll realize your most recent infection was asymptomatic.
But the cold weather makes people spend more time indoors, which means that they are closer together, and all kinds of contagious viruses spread faster and more easily — this is why winter is called cold-and-flu season. We’re going to have more Covid-19 cases this winter; hopefully, an overwhelming number will be mild, indistinguishable from the usual mundane winter cold, and won’t require hospitalization. But we still have the elderly and immunocompromised among us, and like with any viral infection, they may well have a harder time fighting it off.
Considering the track record of this president — who assured us that the surge of migrants at the border was a routine seasonal pattern, that the Afghan army was well-trained and well-equipped and deserved our confidence, that we wouldn’t see helicopters evacuating people from the U.S. embassy in Afghanistan, that inflation was transitory, that the U.S. would not enter a recession, that the supply-chain crisis didn’t occur, that Covid testing would be easy and plentiful last winter, and that the infant-formula shortage would get resolved quickly — maybe he should avoid confident declarations that the pandemic is over.
If the measuring stick of a pandemic being over was the virus’ influence on daily life, then the beginning of the end of this pandemic came at the tail of the Omicron wave, and the end itself came with the with lifting of the Covid-testing requirement for international travel in June. (You know what moment I would choose to characterize the end of the pandemic? When Virginia’s state legislative Democrats surrendered to Glenn Youngkin on school mask mandates.)
We know why Biden doesn’t do a lot of sit-down interviews. You never know when he’ll give a “four or five days ago, man” to George Stephanopolous, a “You’re being a wise guy” to Lester Holt, or rambling remarks about interracial couples in commercials to Jimmy Kimmel. Joe Biden is not who he used to be, physically or mentally, and he wasn’t the most mentally or verbally disciplined guy even back when he was in his prime. He’s not going to get any better after he turns 80 this November.
ADDENDUM: It had been too long since I had chatted with Greg Pollowitz, who used to write for us here at NR before moving on to Twitchy. And now I won’t get that chance. The world lost a good one earlier this week, and it will be a sadder, less snarky, less funny, less sharp-eyed place without him.