Democrat President Joe Biden appeared to go against the advice of numerous scientific experts this week who formerly advised him on the administration’s coronavirus response.
“No, I don’t think COVID is here to stay, but having COVID in the environment here and in the world is probably here to stay,” Biden said. “COVID as we’re dealing with it now is not here to stay, the normal doesn’t have to be. We have so many more tools we developed and we continue to develop that can contain COVID and other strains of COVID.”
Biden’s comments about how he thinks coronavirus is not “here to stay” and that his administration can develop strategies to “contain” it do appear to challenge the advice that Biden was given by six experts this week.
Biden previously promised on the campaign trail that he was going to “shut down the virus.”
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.”
“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.