It has been over a year since I personally declared the covid pandemic over, and then subsequently projected the virus would join the family of “common cold” respiratory viruses.
A day late and a dollar short, Biden’s chief medical advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci has declared the same, saying Americans need to assess their own personal risk and take appropriate precautions as we enter the endemic phase of this disease.
Fauci, speaking to Jonathan Karl on ABC’s This Week, was asked about an op-ed in the Washington Post by former public health official Dr. Lena Wen who said that we will likely have to accept at some point that Covid infections will keep occurring.Karl asked Fauci if we’ve reached the point where we ‘accept there is going to be a risk’ and get back to a new normal.’There will be – and we’ve said this many times even in our own discussions between you and I, that there will be a level of infection,’ Fauci said.’This is not going to be eradicated and it’s not going to be eliminated. And what’s going to happen is that we’re going to see that each individual is going to have to make their calculation of the amount of risk that they want to take in going to indoor dinners and in going to functions.’
Fauci also commented on the Gridiron dinner, an elite event that became a super-spreader event when many vaccinated and boosted officials became infected.
“Let me ask you about the spike we’ve seen right here in Washington,” Karl said. “You and I were both at the Gridiron Dinner. This is a dinner that had about 600 or so attendees. So far, I believe we’re at 67 people that have tested positive who were at the dinner…What is the lesson here?””I think the people who run functions, who run big dinners, who run functions like the White House Correspondents’ ball, or thinking back, the Gridiron Dinner, are going to have to make a determination looking at the CDC guidelines and seeing where the trends are,” Fauci responded.
Meanwhile, President Joe Biden has a new COVID-19 czar, Dr. Ashish Jha. Despite the pleas from the American airline industry, Jha says extending the federal mask mandate on public transportation is ‘on the table’.
The nationwide pandemic-era health rule is set to expire on April 18.The newly-minted Biden official’s caution comes despite the White House pivoting to a more adaptive approach on the pandemic, encouraging Americans to assess their ‘individual risks’ and readying to drop the Trump-era Title 42 expulsion policy.Bipartisan lawmakers have stood up to oppose the Biden administration lifting the policy on May 23, which allows border agents to turn asylum-seekers away regardless of their status in the name of mitigating COVID-19’s spread.Speaking with NBC News’ Today on Monday morning, Jha, who has been one of the leading scientific voices throughout the pandemic, was vague about the mask mandate’s future.He said it was up to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Rochelle Walensky to determine what to do when the rule expires next week.’Yeah I — look. This is a CDC decision, and I think it is absolutely on the table,’ Jha admitted.
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