Benjamin Mateus
At yesterday’s White House COVID-19 press briefing, Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre declared, “As we have said, almost everyone is going to get COVID and because of the hard work we have done since day one turning around the disjointed COVID response we had inherited, we have the tools to ensure that people can go about their daily life and work.”
Biden’s spokewoman then added, “The president is fully vaccinated, twice boosted, and taking Paxlovid. His current health speaks to how Americans should avail themselves to boosters and treatments.”
This is a remarkable admission in that it explicitly states that the Biden administration has washed its hands of any attempt to stem a pandemic that has already killed a million people in America and 20 million around the world. “Everyone is going to get COVID” should be read as a statement of intent. It confirms that a policy of mass infection, mass death and mass murder is the agenda of the US president and the ruling class for which he speaks.
Hospitalizations and deaths continue to climb as BA.5’s dominance grows. Nearly 450 people are dying every day from COVID-19. This translates to 164,000 a year, five times the average killed by influenza and a toll that would have been considered inconceivable before the beginning of the pandemic. And this does not take into account the predictions by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention of another massive surge of infections this fall and winter.
Beyond the immediate death toll, one in five of those who are infected and survive will experience Long COVID, and a third of these can suffer from debilitating disease. Yet, with $1.3 billion given to the NIH (National Institutes of Health) to study the Post-Acute COVID Syndrome (the formal title of Long COVID), there is not a single therapeutic trial up and running. The press secretary was not asked about this and would have had nothing to say.
Meanwhile, study after study has documented that even mild COVID-19 infections can accelerate the aging process in adults and children. Allowing everyone to get infected means a generation of children and teenagers who will be deliberately crippled even before they have ventured into the world on their own.
Hospitals across the country are facing drastic and unprecedented staffing shortages, which are further compounding worker burnout. Infections and reinfections are causing health care workers to fall sick and forcing them to choose between staying home to care for themselves or coming in to work and infecting their patients. Many hospitals are considering eliminating routine COVID-19 testing to cut wait times in overcrowded emergency rooms.
Federal funding for addressing staff shortages is being exhausted. An article published in Politico yesterday reported, “As of July 22, hospitals in nearly 40 states reported critical staffing shortages, while hospitals in all 50 states said they expected to within a week.”
Nancy Foster, vice president for quality and patient safety policy at the American Hospital Association, told Politico, “There is growing concern that this money has run out. It’s not really getting sufficient attention. While we have previously experienced staffing shortages, we’re keenly aware of the staffing shortages at virtually every kind of position within the hospital right now. If we have a large influx of COVID patients, it will be [a] much more challenging surge to meet those demands that ever before.” How will everyone catching COVID-19 avail themselves of therapeutics and treatments when the entire health care system is on the verge of collapse?
The Biden administration is keenly aware of the crisis in health care but chooses to ignore the implications. Over the past 10 days, there has been a deliberate shift by the Biden administration to force the population to accept the consequences of living and dying with COVID-19.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the longtime head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), announced in an interview with Politico last week that he would retire before the end of Biden’s first term.
Asked if he was staying in his role at age 81 out of a sense of obligation, Fauci replied, “We’re in a pattern now. If somebody says, ‘You’ll leave when we don’t have COVID anymore,’ then I will be 105. I think we’re going to be living with this.”
This was an astonishing statement, implying that the COVID-19 pandemic would continue to plague the world for another quarter century. There have already been three Omicron waves since December, ultimately producing the highly contagious BA.5 subvariant. What does a scenario of 25 years of global pandemic mean for the human race?
Clearly his statement was not a slip of the tongue. Such interviews are rehearsed and prepared in advance by the administration, and the occasion was used as a test of the public response to the declaration that COVID-19 was here to stay.
When news of Biden’s positive COVID-19 test broke on Thursday, the media response amounted to a celebration of the health care available to the US president, including Paxlovid, a drug which is out of reach for many working class victims of SARS-CoV-2. Biden’s recent world travels, with multiple maskless photo ops, were more than just careless. The president and his staff allowed nature to take its course and dropped all mitigation measures for him. In short, they allowed him to get infected.
Given his age and understanding the airborne nature of the disease, his staff and medical doctors would have demanded protecting him from contracting a virus that has killed millions and pushed life expectancy down by more than two years. Additionally, the risk of Long COVID and the impact it has on nearly every organ system despite vaccination status would have ensured his well-being was guarded carefully. He takes blood thinners and cholesterol-lowering medications which place him in a high-risk category.
The Wall Street Journal wrote on the occasion, “The President’s infection demonstrates how hard it is to avoid the new highly transmissible COVID variants. The White House has gone to great lengths to protect Mr. Biden, but there’s only so much staff can do if the President is going to do his job.”
The sub-headline of the editorial read, “His infection shows that everyone will get the virus eventually.” This was echoed nearly word for word by Ms. Jean-Pierre three days later.
The other major aspect of official COVID-19 policy was spelled out by the White House COVID-19 Response Coordinator Dr. Ashish Jha. In a press briefing Friday on Biden’s condition, he said, “This virus is going to be with us forever.”
Biden ran for president on the promise that he would carry out the measures necessary to bring an end to the pandemic. Now his administration has officially adopted the policy that everyone will get COVID-19 and the virus will be with us forever. While the Trump administration advocated “herd immunity,” claiming everyone would become immune if the virus was allowed free rein, Biden drops any pretense of a strategy: SARS-CoV-2 has conquered, and his administration has surrendered.
This policy is not unique to the American ruling class. In every country, with the significant exception of China, the financial aristocracy has decided that nothing should be done to fight COVID-19. The elderly, the sick and immunocompromised, working people and their children will pay the price, while those in the most privileged positions, like Biden and the billionaires he serves, will have unlimited resources to survive the deadly pandemic.
The American people have not “learned to live with COVID;” they have been coerced into it. They have been lied to, as they elected a president who claimed to “follow the science” but has actually followed the money. The measures necessary to fight the pandemic are in complete conflict with the profit interests of the financial elite, so public health will be sacrificed to private wealth.
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