The Persistent Pandemic

Today on TAP: It ain’t over till it’s over.

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President Biden has been on a roll lately. As a crowning achievement, you can understand why Biden would want people to believe that the pandemic is over, as he told CBS’s 60 Minutes in a Sunday segment.

Except it isn’t over. The U.S. has recorded over 379,000 cases and 2,490 deaths in the last seven days as of Tuesday, according to CDC data. We may be headed to an endemic state, and we’re certainly better equipped to handle a future outbreak given medical advancements. But that doesn’t necessarily mean COVID is done with us.

Biden tried to walk back his remarks when he appeared at a campaign event in New York on Tuesday. “By the way, if you haven’t gotten your boosters, get them,” Biden said, according to Bloomberg.

Biden’s blurted assertion that the pandemic is behind us is another in a series of impromptu misstatements that give his staff extreme anxiety whenever the president is speaking off-script. And it does damage—in three distinct respects.

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First, the new vaccine booster, engineered to work against the omicron variants, apparently works even better than hoped. But far too few Americans are getting it. And if the pandemic is over, why should they?

“We are not where we need to be if we are going to quote ‘live with the virus,’” Anthony Fauci, Biden’s chief medical adviser, pointedly said on Monday.

Second, the president’s gaffe gives Republicans ammunition to refuse the administration’s request for more COVID money in the upcoming vote on the continuing resolution to keep the government funded. “If it’s over, then I wouldn’t suspect they need any more money,” Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) told CNN.

And third, Biden is likely to be a defendant in an upcoming lawsuit challenging his order to cancel student debt. The order is based on the president’s special powers in a national emergency, namely the COVID pandemic. While the law in question allows the president to redress harms triggered by the emergency and doesn’t necessarily require the emergency to be ongoing, it gives an entry point to a right-wing judiciary to use the president’s words to claim no emergency exists. At the least, it weakens the argument in the court of public opinion.

Joe Biden is the only president we have. He’s doing a lot better than many of us expected, and we have to wish him well. Biden’s occasional misstatements based on wishful thinking are in a different moral universe from Trump’s cynical lies. But Joe, if you can’t resist damaging blurts, do the country and yourself a favor and stay on script.

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