President Biden Prematurely Saying Covid-19 ‘Pandemic Is Over’ Is Called ‘Reckless’

Healthcare President Biden Prematurely Saying Covid-19 ‘Pandemic Is Over’ Is Called ‘Reckless’ Bruce Y. Lee Senior Contributor Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own. I am a writer, journalist, professor, systems modeler, computational and digital health expert, avocado-eater, and entrepreneur, not always in that order.

Following New! Follow this author to stay notified about their latest stories. Got it! Sep 19, 2022, 08:13pm EDT | New! Click on the conversation bubble to join the conversation Got it! Share to Facebook Share to Twitter Share to Linkedin During a 60 minutes interview at the Detroit Auto Show, U. S.

President Joe Biden (seen here on . . .

[+] September 15, 2022. at the White House) claimed that the “pandemic is over,” which isn’t consistent with what many scientists and public health experts have been saying. (Photo by MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images) AFP via Getty Images It ain’t over until it’s over.

And the Covid-19 pandemic is not over with an average of over 460 Covid-19-related deaths and over 31,000 Covid-19 hospitalizations each day, according to the New York Times . Yet, guess what U. S.

President Joe Biden told interviewer Scott Pelley on last night’s episode of 60 Minutes ? Biden said not once but twice that “The pandemic is over,” as you can see in the following tweet from 60 Minutes : The pandemic is what? Over? Oh, no. As Murray Head once sang, say it ain’t so, Joe. Umm, who said that the pandemic is over? Certainly not the WHO, as in the World Health Organization.

In fact, just two days prior, Maria Van Kerkhove, PhD, the WHO Covid-19 Technical Lead, had posted a tweet that essentially stated the opposite: MORE FOR YOU CDC: Salmonella Outbreak Has Left 279 Ill, 26 Hospitalized In 29 States Canadians End Up In ICU After Attending ‘Covid Party’ White House Mandates Pfizer Vaccines for Millions of Citizens . . .

Before the FDA Clinical or Safety Reviews Have Been Made Public As you can see, Van Kerkhove emphasized the need to persevere, to keep going, and to continue to put in the hard work so that the world can actually end the pandemic. Quite different from Biden’s over easy statement. Look up the definition of a pandemic, which I covered for Forbes in 2020 .

It’s when a novel pathogen, that’s a virus or other microbe completely new to humans, is being transmitted simultaneously in multiple countries. Until either of these conditions changes, you can’t really declare the pandemic over. This may occur sometime in the near future, perhaps 2023, but hasn’t been achieved yet.

But there was the President of the U. S. , who’s not a scientist or medical expert, at the Detroit Auto Show, which was not a scientific setting, making a statement about something that should have been left for real science and real scientists to decide.

What could have motivated Biden to say such a thing? Well, Lucky Tran, PhD, an organizer for the March for Science and a science communicator at Columbia University, seemed to suggest that it could have been “ME,” where “ME” stands for midterm elections: If you haven’t heard, November is when the mid-term elections will be occurring in the U. S. , when many Congressional, State government, and local government positions will be decided.

In lifting Covid-19 precautions and putting on the illusion that things have returned completely to normal, could some politicians be angling to be able to say, “look we took care of the pandemic, things are back to normal, so vote for us in November?” That may seem all well and good from a political perspective, except that it is not well and good from a life perspective. In fact, it could end up making a whole lot more people unwell and not good. You can’t freaking play with people’s lives and well-being just to score political points.

This didn’t seem like just another of Biden’s gaffes like when he once talked about honoring “the bravery and selfishness” of troops or said that “there has never been one” Senator from Delaware. No, Biden told Pelley that the pandemic is over and then went on to emphasize, “We still have a lot of problem with COVID. We’re still doing a lotta work on it.

It’s—but the pandemic is over. ” Biden didn’t quickly correct himself by saying, “did I say ‘over’? I really meant Grover from Sesame Street. The pandemic is Grover from Sesame Street.

” No, Biden essentially went all in, re-emphasizing his problematic assertion, even though it went against, you know, that thing called science. Speaking of science, what evidence did Biden give for the pandemic being over? Let’s see, he continued with the following rationale: “If you notice no one is wearing masks. ” Umm, that’s no indication of what’s actually happening with the virus and the pandemic.

The virus won’t say. “oh, no one is wearing face masks so we gotta just stop spreading. ” Aren’t people not wearing face masks largely because the Biden Administration and others have essentially lifted all face mask requirements? Claiming that the pandemic is over because people are not wearing masks is sort of like claiming that you don’t have pimples because you covered them up with makeup.

Or perhaps it’s a bit like saying, “see. everyone is peeing in the pool,” after you told everyone to pee in the pool. Biden may spend much of his time in the Oval Office but such reasoning is a bit circular, as Mehdi Hasan, host of the Mehdi Hasan Show on MSNBC , pointed out: Again you can’t simply write this off as yet another of Biden’s gaffes.

It was one thing for Biden to say that “There have not been many of the senators from Delaware, it’s a small state,” when size does not really matter. It’s something totally different to mistakenly say that the Covid-19 pandemic is over. When you are talking about health matters, precision and accuracy are important.

A doctor can’t simply say, “oh, instead of cancer, I meant that you have a canker sore. Sorry about all that chemo stuff. ” Misinformation can lead to people not taking proper precautions and not getting proper care and treatment.

This, in turn, can lead to a lot more illness and death that could have been preventable, as Jorge Caballero, MD , a Clinical Instructor in Anesthesiology, Perioperative and Pain Medicine at Stanford Medical School tweeted: Plus, you can talk about equity and reducing disparities all you want. But when you remove Covid-19 precautions across the population, you can end up putting the already disadvantaged at even greater risk. Steven W.

Thrasher, PhD , a journalist who recently published the book The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll When Inequality and Disease Collide , called Biden’s premature declaration “reckless” and “irresponsible” in the following tweet thread: Think about it. It may be easy avoid the virus when you are living in a big old house, driving around your own car, while you’ve got some management position where you can tell others to stay at the bleeding edge, think outside the box, activate, and synergize. But what if you depend on public transportation where now practically no one is wearing a mask? What if your workplace has you alongside others not taking any Covid-19 precautions? What if you live in a cramped area where it is impossible to avoid others? In these ways, lifting Covid-19 precautions in general can disproportionately make things even worse for the already disadvantaged.

It’s also akin to the U. S. saying, “we’ve been among the worst in the world at controlling the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 [SARS-CoV-2].

Here’s an idea, let’s make things worse,” as Thrasher indicated: If you recall, back in May, I described for Forbes how Science magazine’s Editor-in-Chief Holden Thorp, PhD, had called the Biden Administration approach to Covid-19 as “sheepishly waving a checkered flag on the pandemic. ” Yeah, this piece of sheep description certainly was complimenting what the Administration was doing at the time. And that was way before Biden prematurely claimed that the pandemic is over.

This latest development may put everyone at greater risk for Covid-19 and those socially, economically, and medically disadvantaged at even greater risk as indicated by journalist Erin Biba here: Science may say that it’s important to protect the disadvantaged in society. But that may not be the case with politics. Speaking of politics, Eric Feigl-Ding, PhD, an epidemiologist and Chief of the COVID Risk Task Force at the New England Complex Systems Institute , shared on Twitter a previous tweet from Biden that had said, “And I’ll always put your health and safety first— no matter the political cost,” as you can see here: This isn’t the first time that the Biden Administration may have been premature during this pandemic.

There was the premature relaxation of face mask requirements in the Spring of 2021 that immediately preceded the Delta-fueled Covid-19 surge in the Summer of 2021. Then came the premature relaxation of even more Covid-19 precautions in the Fall of 2021 that was soon followed by November 2021 Covid-19 Delta surge, further fueled later by the Omicron variant emerging. Don’t forget the further premature relaxation of face mask requirements and other Covid-19 precautions this past Spring 2022, which was soon followed by, surprise, surprise, yet another Covid-19 surge.

And now you’ve got the premature declaration that the pandemic is over. As I’ve written before for Forbes , anything premature can leave lots of confusion and a very messy situation. The timing of Biden’s statement may be particularly bad.

The weather is getting cooler and drier, which could lead to increased SARS-CoV-2 transmission. With the new bivalent Covid-19 mRNA boosters being rolled out, there are concerns that not enough people may get vaccinated because they mistakenly believe that the pandemic is over. Keep in mind that this will likely be the first Winter since 2019 where a majority of people aren’t really maintaining Covid-19 precautions.

Oh, and if you think that new versions of the SARS-CoV-2 have cancelled themselves, you’d be wrong, wrong as a bedroom gong. Variants and subvariants have continued to emerge every several months, meaning that we could be due for yet another one this Fall. All of this could lead to yet another Covid-19 surge.

And with such messages coming out of the Biden Administration, will public health experts be able to convince people to take precautions should another surge happen? Plus, there’s the “flu you” possibility. The flu season was particularly bad in Australia, as I recently covered for Forbes, raising concerns about a twindemic of Covid-19 and influenza this Fall and Winter. But all of that is science stuff, right? And who cares about science when the midterm elections are around the corner, right? Follow me on Twitter or LinkedIn .

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