White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki is running major damage control for the Biden administration’s top Covid doc Dr. Anthony Fauci after he issued deeply conflicting evaluations of the Covid “pandemic.”
On Wednesday, Psaki responded to reporters’ questions about Covid-19 in light of Dr. Fauci backing out of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Watch:
“Covid isn’t over and the pandemic isn’t over,” Psaki claimed.
Dr. Anthony Fauci told CBS News on Wednesday he will not attend the upcoming White House Correspondents’ Dinner out of purported concern for the risk of COVID-19.
“We certainly cannot say the pandemic is over,” Fauci told CBS News. “It is not over.”
But Fauci has drastically changed his tune within the last 24 hours, raising serious concerns about his grasp of the Covid “pandemic,” as well his forthrightness with the American people.
On Tuesday, PBS News Hour’s Judy Woodruff asked Dr. Fauci about his views on the current state of Covid-19 in America.
“Dr. Fauci, let me broaden this out and ask you,” Woodruff said. “Here we are. It’s the end of April. It’s the spring of 2022. How close are we to the end of this pandemic?”
“Well, that’s an unanswerable question, for the following reason,” Fauci said. “And I don’t want to be evasive about it, but let me tell you why I’m giving you that answer, Judy.”
“We are certainly right now in this country out of the pandemic phase,” he continued. “Namely, we don’t have 900,000 new infections a day and tens and tens and tens of thousands of hospitalizations and thousands of deaths. We are at a low level right now.”
“So, if you’re saying, are we out of the pandemic phase in this country, we are,” he added. “What we hope to do, I don’t believe — and I have spoken about this widely — we’re not going to eradicate this virus. If we can keep that level very low, and intermittently vaccinate people — and I don’t know how often that would have to be, Judy.”
“That might be every year, that might be longer, in order to keep that level low,” he went on. “But, right now, we are not in the pandemic phase in this country. Pandemic means a widespread, throughout the world, infection that spreads rapidly among people.”
“So, if you look at the global situation, there’s no doubt this pandemic is still ongoing,” he went on.
Dr. Fauci did damage control after the interview to further the notion that the U.S. is only out of the “full-blown” phase of the pandemic.
“In speaking with The Washington Post after this interview, Dr. Anthony Fauci expanded on his remarks, saying that the U.S. was out of the ‘full-blown explosive pandemic phase,’ but that the virus still posed a threat,” PBS noted.
“We’re really in a transitional phase, from a deceleration of the numbers into hopefully a more controlled phase and endemicity,” Fauci told the Post.
The mixed messages from the Biden administration once again raise the prospect that public health officials and spokespersons are once again playing politics with Covid.
A federal investigation into Health and Human Services, National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) found that public health officials suppressed Covid study findings for political reasons, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) has revealed in a 37-page report.
GAO investigators inteviewed at least a dozen directors and managers who were involved in the agencies’ Covid guidance. The government watchdog found evidence of “political interference” in scientific reports.
“A few respondents from CDC and [Food and Drug Administration] FDA stated they felt that the potential political interference they observed resulted in the alteration or suppression of scientific findings,” GAO investigators found.
“Some of these respondents believed that this potential political interference may have resulted in the politically motivated alteration of public health guidance or delayed publication of Covid-related scientific findings,” they added.
That may be exactly what the Biden administration is doing with its everchanging evaluations of the Covid-19 “pandemic” on a day-to-day basis.
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OPINION: This article contains commentary which reflects the author's opinion.