Several members of Fox News panel discussion on “Outnumbered” mocked President Joe Biden’s claim that there was no “federal solution” to the COVID-19 pandemic, which is seeing a renewed surge driven by the highly-contagious Omicron variant.
Biden spoke with state governors on a call Monday about potential strategies to manage the continued impact of COVID-19, taking questions from several governors but only after COVID-coordinator Jeff Zients cleared the press from the room.
WH Covid coordinator Jeff Zients boots press pool before we could hear Biden take questions from governors on Covid…
Biden: “I understand you guys may have some questions. Jeff?”
Zients: “Good.”
*Long pause*
Zients: “I think we’re going to clear the press first.” pic.twitter.com/uwZ6xEmS4H
— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) December 27, 2021
Biden later said that there was no “federal solution” to the COVID-19 problem.
BIDEN, TODAY: “There is no federal solution” to COVID.
BIDEN, 2020: “I’m going to shut down the virus.” pic.twitter.com/3d1RaHRcyX
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) December 27, 2021
Former White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany introduced the topic on Tuesday’s broadcast of “Outnumbered,” noting that President Biden had run much of his 2020 presidential campaign on the claim that he had a plan to defeat COVID — and criticizing former President Donald Trump for leaving the states to manage things on their own.
McEnany went on to point out the fact that Biden had, in the months since, often criticized Republican governors who developed their own strategies and bucked his sweeping federal mandates, telling them to “get out of the way.”
“If you are not going to help, at least get out of the way of the people trying to do the right thing. Use your power to save lives,” Biden said months ago.
McEnany then turned the conversation over to her panel, and Fox Business host Lauren Simonetti was first to respond.
“He threw up his hands, Kayleigh, and basically said, ‘I give up,'” Simonetti began. “I don’t know if he meant to say that. I don’t know if his staffers were cringing, ‘Oh my God, the president just said this.’ That’s — it’s everything against what he said on the campaign trail and so far this year as President of the United States. They had this national solution, this federal mandate. Now he is saying we don’t.”
“But there is good news in this,” Simonetti continued. “And the good news is the way we deal with, the way we live with, the way we talk about COVID has changed. We are lessening its importance in our lives. Just deal with it. Give it to the governors to determine what to do.”
Simonetti went on to point to the coming Supreme Court arguments on Biden’s federal mandates, adding that if the federal plan was to pass things off to the governors, the mandates ought to be abandoned as well. “That could be a step in the right direction,” she said.
McEnany passed the question to former White House communications director Mercedes Schlapp, noting that in addition to claiming he had a plan, Biden had spent much of the 2020 campaign ridiculing what he said was Trump’s lack of a federal plan.
Schlapp said that the Trump administration had coordinated a federal response — namely Operation Warp Speed, which fostered the development and emergency authorization of three vaccines in under a year — and that Biden’s failure to do the same was telling.
“For Biden it’s all about promises made, promises broken,” she said. “I think it caught so maybe people by surprise saying there was no federal solution, that it’s got to be led by the states. Well, the federal government needs to work hand in hand with the states to have a strong response to combat this virus. Needless to say, President Biden and his administration, they have failed the American people.”