Joe Biden could have been much more sensible about COVID on day one of his presidency, but he either forgot or just didn’t care. His mind has been turned into oatmeal so I can see him totally forgetting what his COVID advisory panel suggested during the transition. In short, members were advising Joey to be more realistic about COVID, namely that shutting it down was no longer an option. It’s endemic—and the new administration should have a policy that reflects that new reality. Instead, Joe lied, said the nation was gaining the upper hand, and that if you got vaccinated, you could take off the mask. All promises have turned to ash. It’s like the 1968 Tet Offensive. We were all told by the military we were winning the war, then scores of Viet Cong popped out of nowhere all over South Vietnam. Well, we were told Biden would shut down COVID, and then Omicron hit.
This highly contagious variant is everywhere. Everyone is going to get infected eventually, both vaccinated and unvaccinated. It’s nothing to fear or be ashamed about. Did you ever feel bad about contracting the flu? Take a deep breath because the stigma that liberal America injected into this circus due to their insufferable moral superiority complex got its throat slit with this new variant. Even those who followed all the fake Fauci rules are getting infected. It’s an airborne virus, folks. Get used to it along with its 99 percent survivability rate.
The New York Times listed what this board advised Biden to enact and will continue to reach out, though they’ve admitted they feel like their advice goes unheard. And I thought the Biden crew was the ‘we’re the science people’ crowd. You might agree with some of the proposals. The vaccine mandates will always be a controversial topic but making testing more readily available should be a facet of an endemic approach to COVID. Having N95 masks available and free is also another focal point. Look, it’s. a start. It’s certainly a saner approach barring the mask stuff whose messaging has become so brutalized by the experts that maybe they should abandon it altogether. To this day, we still have people wearing store-bought and cloth masks which do nothing to protect you (via NYT):
On the day President Biden was inaugurated, the advisory board of health experts who counseled him during the presidential transition officially ceased to exist. But its members have quietly continued to meet regularly over Zoom, their conversations often turning to frustration with Mr. Biden’s coronavirus response.
Now, six of these former advisers have gone public with an extraordinary, albeit polite, critique — and a plea to be heard. In three opinion articles published on Thursday in the Journal of the American Medical Association, they are calling for Mr. Biden to adopt an entirely new pandemic strategy — one that is geared to the “new normal” of living with the virus indefinitely, not to wiping it out.
[…]
They say the first thing the administration needs to do is to step back and take a broader vision, by recognizing that Covid-19 is here to stay. In one article, Dr. Emanuel and two co-authors — Michael T. Osterholm, an epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota, and Dr. Celine Gounder, an infectious disease expert at New York University — pointedly note that in July, Mr. Biden proclaimed that “we’ve gained the upper hand against this virus,” which in retrospect was clearly not the case.
Now, they say, with the Omicron variant fueling a dramatic new surge, concerns have risen about the United States becoming stuck in “a perpetual state of emergency.” To be better prepared for inevitable outbreaks, they suggest that the administration lay out goals and specific benchmarks, including what number of hospitalizations and deaths from respiratory viruses, including the coronavirus, that should trigger emergency measures.
“From a macro perspective, it feels like we are always fighting yesterday’s crisis and not necessarily thinking what needs to be done today to prepare us for what comes next,” Dr. Borio said in an interview.
Mr. Biden published a pandemic strategy when he came into office, and recently released a new winter strategy to battle the coronavirus, just as the Omicron variant began spreading in the United States. But the authors say the administration needs a new and broader vision for the future, though they concede that it is impossible to know whether the coronavirus will become a seasonal infection, “or whether even more transmissible, immune-evading or virulent variants will arise after Omicron.”
In the three articles — one proposing a new national plan, the others suggesting improvements to testing, surveillance, vaccines and therapeutics — the authors also call for every person in the United States to have access to low-cost testing, saying the Biden administration’s purchase of 500 million rapid tests is not enough; for “comprehensive, digital, real-time” data collection by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; for next-generation Covid-19 vaccines that would target new variants or perhaps take new forms, like nasal sprays or skin patches; and major upgrades to the nation’s public health infrastructure.
The authors also said that vaccine mandates should be imposed more broadly, including for schoolchildren, and that N95 masks should be made free and readily available to all Americans, as should oral treatments for Covid.
In interviews, the authors said they had made their views known to Biden officials, but had sometimes felt unheard.
Maybe their calls and emails aren’t being returned because this doesn’t fit into the government control scheme that Democrats and panic porn peddlers have relished for the past 18 months. Once the government has more power, it seldom gives it up. You all know this—and reducing that scope gives the institution the equivalent of DTs for alcoholics. It’s not pretty and it doesn’t end well. Government always wants more—and emergency powers especially during wartime are always the beginning. Also, Biden’s winter plan is nothing new. In fact, a lot of it centers on policies that never worked in the first place. Whether we like it or not, Omicron just needs to burn through. It’s too late to do anything with regards to curbing the spread. It’s here. It’s all over. We’re in a sea of red regarding gauging areas of transmissibility. And the president increasingly looks like a man who simply has no idea what's going on. He came back with the 'this is a pandemic of the unvaccinated' line. Not the case, sir. The vaccinated can catch and spread the virus.