I predicted that the celebrity-packed White House Correspondents’ Dinner would be a covid superspreader event.
The State Department said Wednesday that Secretary of State Antony Blinken has tested positive for COVID-19 after attending the White House Correspondents’ Dinner and related events over the weekend.Spokesman Ned Price said Blinken tested positive in a OPCR test on Wednesday afternoon. Price said Blinken is fully vaccinated and is experiencing only mild symptoms.Blinken tested negative Tuesday and again earlier Wednesday morning. Blinken has not met in person with President Joe Biden for “several days” and is not considered a close contact of the president.He met earlier Wednesday at the State Department with the Swedish foreign minister. Blinken had been scheduled to give a speech Thursday about the Biden administration’s China policy, but Price said that speech has been postponed.
Unlike Kamala Harris, one of the newly ill actually came in direct contact with Biden.
ABC News reporter Jonathan Karl tested positive for COVID-19 on Monday after shaking President Biden’s hand and sitting next to Kim Kardashian at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.Karl tested positive roughly 48 hours after the Saturday dinner. He sat next to Kardashian, 41, and one seat away from her boyfriend Pete Davidson, 28, Politico reported.“Jonathan Karl tested positive for COVID late Monday night,” a source confirmed to The Post.“He tested negative on Saturday afternoon before the White House Correspondents Dinner by medically-supervised staff. He had no symptoms on Saturday. Jon is currently isolating and participating in contact tracing. He is fully vaccinated, boosted and tested regularly.”…Karl, 54, shook Biden’s hand and gave an impromptu speech in the ballroom of the Washington Hilton as he accepted an award for his coverage of the Capitol riot.The veteran journalist is ABC’s chief Washington correspondent. He is a former president of the White House Correspondents’ Association and a former City Hall reporter for The Post.Biden, who was unmasked throughout the event, said in his own dinner remarks that “we’re here to show the country we’re getting through this pandemic.”
It gets better. After two years of covid hysteria ginned up by the American press, several journalists have also tested positive for covid. Subsequently, the posterior-covering spin has begun.
In the days since WHCD weekend, reporters and staffers from CNN, ABC News, NBC News, CBS News, Politico, and other participating news organizations have tested positive for the virus. Most notably, ABC’s Jon Karl, who shook hands with President Biden and who sat next to Kim Kardashian, has fallen ill, as Politico’s Maxwell Tani first reported.There is no exact data to indicate precisely how many people have caught the virus from the weekend. But, anecdotally speaking, much of Tuesday afternoon seemed to consist of attendees trading text messages and emails about colleagues and friends and people they had seen who had tested positive. That’s almost certainly going to continue in the days ahead….In the days ahead, there will probably be stories that draw comparisons between the WHCD and Gridiron. But there is a key difference between the two events: Gridiron is a singular event, whereas the WHCD is bookended by dozens of parties held by news orgs and talent agencies. In other words, it will be difficult — impossible? — to identify specifically where the spread of Covid actually occurred.Was it at the dinner, which required same-day testing and vaccination? Or was it at one or more of the parties? Remember, the WHCA had no oversight over the outside events. Some of the orgs that hosted them implemented strict Covid precautions, others did not. And there were many events in which people were tightly packed into small, confined areas with little ventilation…
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