When former President Donald Trump left office, at least 420,441 Americans had died due to COVID, according to the Center for Disease Control (CDC).
Since Biden took office on Jan. 20, 2021, at least 627,839 Americans have died.
So, clearly, the pandemic is not over. But that’s just what President Joe Biden said in an interview that aired on “60 Minutes” on Sunday.
Now, before we go on, let’s admit that for most of us — except for those who are still wearing masks alone in their cars — we’re done with it all. Two years of lockdown was more than enough for most people, and with the Omicron mutation being much less serious for most people, we’ve all just returned to our normal lives.
But really, it’s not over. Not by a long shot.
The average number of positive COVID tests over the last seven days was 54,831. A year ago, that number was nearly 133,891, according to the CDC. And the average number of deaths in the last seven days was 360, well down from more than 2,000 a year ago.
So it’s all down — way down — but nowhere near over.
“Is the pandemic over?” CBS’ Scott Pelley asked Biden in an interview taped Thursday.
“The pandemic is over. We still have a problem with COVID. We’re still doing a lot of work on it,” Biden said.
Biden, walking through the Huntington Place convention center with Pelley, pointed out: “If you notice, no one’s wearing masks.”
The top U.S. immunologist immediately pushed back.
“We have only 67 percent of our population vaccinated and only one-half of those have received a single boost,” Dr. Anthony Fauci said.
“But we are not where we need to be if we’re going to be able to, quote, ‘live with the virus,’ because we know we’re not going to eradicate it. We only did that with one virus, which is smallpox, and that was very different because smallpox doesn’t change from year to year, or decade to decade, or even from century to century,” Fauci said.
Biden’s assertion threw liberal commentators into a tizzy. After all, they’ve been hyping COVID as the worst thing since polio, and their ratings soared.
Take MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan, who went so far as to accuse Biden of lying to the American public.
“One of the (many) reasons they’re not wearing masks is because people like Biden keep (falsely) telling them the pandemic is over,” Hasan wrote on Twitter.
Liberal Democratic Kentucky state Rep. Attica Scott blasted the mainstream members of her party who “keep playing these games with our lives.”
“’My goodness these folks are clueless. It’s no wonder the party is a train wreck…’ is going to apparently be my tweet theme through November and beyond since democrats keep playing these games with our lives,” Scott tweeted.
“You don’t get to just declare a global pandemic over, Mr. @POTUS.”
The president’s declaration came seven weeks before Election Day, and many political prognosticators predict a red wave is coming.
What makes Biden’s assertion clearly political is the fact that he has used the COVID pandemic as a reason to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on things like the recent student loan handout.
What was interesting in the CBS interview was how little Pelley pressed on COVID. He never asked, “Uh, how’s it over if hundreds of Americans are dying daily?” He never asked why his administration continues to prosecute members of the military who refuse the vaccine.
And he didn’t even bother to ask whether his administration would end the COVID public health emergency order, which was recently extended through Oct. 13.
But it’s suddenly politically expedient for Biden to declare the pandemic over, so that’s just what he did.
And he also knew nobody would ask him to explain himself — and no one did.
The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
Joseph Curl has covered politics for 35 years, including 12 years as White House correspondent for a national newspaper. He was also the a.m. editor of the Drudge Report for four years. Send tips to [email protected] and follow him on Twitter @josephcurl.