Credit President Joe Biden with not hitting the panic button in his speech on the Omicron wave — but that’s about it.
The prez rightly noted this isn’t March 2020, and no new lockdowns should be necessary. But that was the closest he came to anything original.
And it serves his interests: Declaring a new crisis would highlight how badly he’s failed on his 2020 vow to “shut down the virus.” It’s now clear that he thought then that all he’d need to do was continue distributing the vaccines developed before he took office, that’s it. (Hence his declaration in July that we’d achieved “independence from COVID-19” because vaccinations were going well.)
He basically stuck to “jabs will fix it” in his last big COVID speech in August, right after the Afghanistan debacle, though he then pretended to be doing something big by announcing vaccine mandates that (for better or worse) still haven’t taken effect, months later.
Worse, “vaccines are the answer” is basically still his only idea: This address boiled down to yet another appeal to everyone to get jabbed, now with boosters as well, plus announcing a handful of minor federal actions that may help areas that get overwhelmed.
He said nothing about how the number of cases no longer tells anyone much about the actual COVID threat, let alone surprising us by, say, announcing he’d force the FDA to start approving the new treatments that it’s keeping off the market until their inventors jump through protracted and expensive hoops.
Or that he would order the CDC to review a 10-day quarantine for vaccinated people that is bringing in a “lockdown by stealth” to businesses and crippling frontline services because people who are no longer infectious are stuck at home for too long.
Heck, he barely even noted that Omicron is less deadly than past variants, though more contagious.
Even his promises to make more tests available was a dodge, skipping past the fact that his team quietly de-emphasized upping test-kit production early this year, and didn’t change course until September, after it was surprised by the Delta surge.
Plus, as John Podhoretz notes for The Post, Biden flat-out lied about no one expecting Omicron to surge: In fact, all the experts were sounding the alarm a month ago.
As to why the administration didn’t start preparing then, the answer’s surely the same as why it’s been a day late and a dollar short on COVID all year: Team Biden’s only real priority has been figuring out how to pass the prez’s huge spending bills — taking advantage of the pandemic to forward the left’s agenda, rather than actually “shutting down the virus.”
“We’ll get through this,” he closed. Yes, we will — but little thanks to him.
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December 22, 2021 at 07:11AM
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Joe Biden's Omicron speech shows he's still not on top of COVID - New York Post
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