Advisers to Democrat President Joe Biden are urging him to change his domestic strategy for how to respond to the coronavirus pandemic, which comes after Biden promised on the campaign trail that he would “shut down the virus,” a promise that he has failed miserably on delivering.
Six former advisers who counseled him during the presidential transition wrote this week in the Journal of the American Medical Association that it was time for Biden to change strategies to something geared toward living with the virus.
“The authors are all big names in American medicine; several, including Dr. Luciana Borio, a former acting chief scientist at the Food and Drug Administration, and Dr. David Michaels, a former head of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, have held high-ranking government positions. The driving force behind the articles is Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, an oncologist, medical ethicist and University of Pennsylvania professor who advised former President Barack Obama,” The New York Times reported. “They say the first thing the administration needs to do is 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.”
The call for a new strategy comes after Biden promised to “shut down the virus” while he was campaigning against then-President Donald Trump. Since he took office, more people have died from the coronavirus under Biden and daily case numbers have smashed records.
“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,” the report added. “The authors say the administration needs to acknowledge that Omicron may not mark the end of the pandemic — and to plan for a future that they concede is unknowable. They also make clear that the current rate of Covid hospitalizations and deaths is unacceptably high.”
The CDC reported that on January 20, 2021, at 1:16 p.m., there were 400,306 deaths recorded in the U.S. from the coronavirus. Biden officially became president of the United States at noon on that day.
Since then, the number of people who have died from coronavirus under Biden’s watch is now well over 429,000, according to recent figures.
Biden claimed during the 2020 campaign that Trump was essentially responsible for every American who died during the pandemic, a claim that was quickly debunked by mainstream fact-checkers.
“If the president had done his job, had done his job from the beginning, all the people would still be alive,” Biden said. “All the people—I’m not making this up. Just look at the data. Look at the data.”
About a month after Biden falsely claimed that Trump was essentially responsible for every American who died from coronavirus, Biden claimed that Trump “should not remain President of the United States” because he was “responsible” for “220,000 deaths.”