Is Joe Biden spreading disinformation?
"Mr. President, first Detroit Auto Show in three years. Is the pandemic over?” asked CBS reporter Scott Pelley this week.
Biden didn’t refer to the auto show in his reply; he cited the absence of face masks as proof that
The pandemic is over. 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.
Just a day later, Dr. Anthony Fauci publicly contradicted Biden in an interview he gave to the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).
We must still 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 where you would expect that once a certain number of people get infected and/or vaccinated that you could, essentially, bring an end to the pandemic component of the outbreak.
Fauci also stated categorically that “there will be more variants,” and stressed the importance of reaching a “uniform acceptance of the interventions that are available.” He lamented the fact that “only 67 percent of our population [is] vaccinated and only one half of those have received a single boost.”
“We’re not going to eradicate” coronavirus, he added, explaining that this is because “the immunity that’s introduced by vaccine or infection is transient.” Hence the need for frequent boosters, he stressed – but they’re not going to protect against what CSIS Senior Vice President Dr. Morrison predicted would be up to a quarter of a million deaths per year from COVID-19. What will protect us? “New technological innovations,” and vaccines that can “address multiple subvariants.”
Dr. Bob Wachter, the chair of the University of California, San Francisco’s Department of Medicine, was equally pessimistic about the future with COVID.
“It’s likely, when we think of the causes of death in our society, that Covid’s on the list probably forever,” he said.
According to figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), COVID was the third biggest killer in both 2020 and 2021, and experts quoted by NBC predicted that COVID would continue to kill around ten times more people per year than the average influenza, “regardless of new vaccines, boosters or treatments that might become available.”
NBC added that “COVID death numbers could also fall if hospitals stop routinely testing people for the virus,” quoting Dr. Wachter. “I know that some of these deaths are 'with' rather than 'from' COVID.”
This view was confirmed by the director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, Dr. Chris Murray, who estimated that half of “COVID deaths” were actually not caused by COVID at all.
