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Biden on Covid: ‘There Is No Federal Solution’
During the 2020 campaign, Joe Biden promised to “shut down” Covid and blasted President Trump for letting governors make the public health decisions best suited to their states. Eleven months into the Biden presidency, the virus is nowhere close to being shut down and the White House has decided governors should handle Covid on a state-by-state basis.
“Look, there is no federal solution,” Biden said to the National Governors Association Monday via video. “This gets solved at the state level.” He was joined by Anthony Fauci, Rochelle Walensky, and White House Response Coordinator Jeff Zients.
After the President’s opening remarks, he asked the governors if they had any questions. Zients broke in, saying, “I think we’re going to clear the press first.”
Following the meeting, Biden was off to another weeklong vacation in Delaware.
NOW – Biden departs to Delaware beach house after telling governors there is "no federal solution" on COVID and it should be "solved at the state level."pic.twitter.com/Ux9RtPmb8m
— Disclose.tv (@disclosetv) December 27, 2021
The arrival of Omicron, an apparently mild but highly contagious variant, has challenged the “zero Covid” policies favored by the administration and many Democrat governors. In the past week, new cases have surged 55 percent, or more than 205,000 new infections per day, including many vaxxed and boosted Americans. Thousands of flights have been canceled due to positive tests for flight crews, bringing air travel to a crawl.
Two years of mask-lockdown-quarantine hasn’t shut down the virus, yet Fauci, et al., continue doubling down on the failed strategy. After canceling Christmas didn’t work, Fauci now wants to cancel New Year’s Eve.
“When you are talking about a New Year’s Eve party, where you have 30, 40, 50 people celebrating, you do not know the status of the vaccination,” Fauci said, “I would recommend strongly, stay away from that this year.”
He also hinted at vax mandates for air travel. “You know, there’s requirements that you might want to get if you want to get into college, where you want to go to a university or you want to work in certain places,” Fauci said. “When you make vaccination a requirement, that’s another incentive to get more people vaccinated. If you want to do that with domestic flights, I think that’s something that seriously should be considered.”
“Anything that could get people more vaccinated would be welcome,” he added.
Americans clinging to quaint notions of civil liberties and constitutional rights shudder at “anything” being welcome. But long ago, the White House decided to blame unruly citizens for the virus instead of China or their own failed policies.
The unending Covid hysteria is taking a heavy toll, especially on young people who are barely threatened by the virus itself. In early December, US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued a public health advisory to address a youth mental health crisis.
The national average of weekly emergency room visits for suspected suicide attempts among teens jumped nearly 40 percent in February and March this year compared to the same months in 2019. The report attributed the recent decline in mental health to the pandemic’s high death toll, economic instability, isolation from friends and family, and a pervasive sense of fear that marked the turn of the decade.
“It would be a tragedy if we beat back one public health crisis only to allow another to grow in its place,” Murthy wrote in the report….
Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital in St. Petersburg said it has seen a 35 percent increase in referrals to mental health services between March 2020 and now compared to the previous two-year period. Meanwhile, suicide attempts and reported eating disorder symptoms among hospital patients doubled in the same period, said Jennifer Katzenstein, the hospital’s director of psychology, neuropsychology and social work.
The constant state of panic pushed by politicians and the media bear some responsibility for these dire numbers. Two years of Covidmania ran in parallel with hysterical coverage of police brutality, climate change, white supremacy, and Trump.
Panic, by definition, is irrational and thus harms far more than it helps. Since March 2020, a few thoughtful voices have recommended calm, deliberate strategies to fight the virus while also preserving other categories of public health, constitutional rights, and the general welfare. For this, they were repeatedly attacked.
Now that President Biden is following Trump’s federalist approach to Covid, the monomania should subside. But, since Dr. Fauci still has a job, Washington’s self-destructive policies are likely to endure.
Published in Healthcare, Politics
OK, Joe, if as you finally admit, there’s no federal solution, then withdraw the mandates your “administration” seeks to force upon transportation workers, truckers, health care workers, federal contractors and subcontractors, and employers with more than 100 employees, all of which are mired in the courts, adding more uncertainty for businesses, which have to make decisions but cannot because of feckless “leadership.”
Oh, and lean on Newsom to waive the restrictions on union-only drivers and newer-only trucks to clear out the ports.
I know this isn’t an original thought, outside of Washington, D.C. and other Democrat strongholds, but why not concentrate the Covid-fighting efforts on the vulnerable — the frail and immunocompromised — and let the rest of the nation get on with life?
We live with colds and flu every winter; why not just take our normal precautions and get on with it.
(BTW, I’m not some 20-something invulnerable, I’m 84 with long-term heart failure, but am not going to stop living my normal life because of the virus. I have long been convinced that the best contagious-disease-preventative is good hygiene — wash your hands frequently, especially when returning home.)
Can’t make it a state by state decision so long as Fauci, Wollensky, OSHA, and the Surgeon General are still butting in. And you know Big Pharma wants a national solution unless they can create bidding wars between states.
And with that, they have caught up with where the Republicans were back in May, 2020.
You mean like the Great Barrington Declaration (gbdeclaration.org), issued in October 2020?
When I uploaded the image of Biden walking to the helicopter, I couldn’t help thinking of the end of “Being There.”
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Several things bother me.
1) Biden (and Harris) are not taking any major issue by the bullhorns and throwing everything but the kitchen sink to solve it, or letting Americans know a concrete plan to get to a better place. It’s “see you later, I’m on vacation, I can’t hear you, I don’t know what to do, listen to the experts (whoever they are)….” This is discouraging, to many young people trying to find a way back to normal.
2) We listened to Fauci and the experts – do this, get over the curve, the curve will flatten, get your vaccines, get the booster, more mandatory vaccines……… Well, we did all that. People who are vaccinated and boosted are getting sick, we have people wearing masks, new mutations……..and still NO answers to the origins of this “mysterious virus” that won’t go away.
3) Whose job is it to care for children’s mental health? Parents – and relatives, schools? They can’t find a way back to normal if it isn’t shown to them. Shame on this administration for not addressing this.
Another way of saying it would have been, “Trump was right.”
I believe that another president had a similar moment when he announced “It turns out that there are no such things as ‘shovel-ready’ jobs.”
Now you tell us. : )
Every Death in 2021 is Biden’s fault.
Every single COVID Death.
That is the rule they established. They should be held to it.
I expect another nosedive in his polling numbers after this “I give up” speech.
All this hatred and inconvenience and loss of freedom for “I give up.” SMH.
Y’know, if this way of thinking and speaking got to be a habit, we could eventually look back on the covid pandemic as a new birth of freedom in our country. I wonder what we could do to help make it a habit.
We also have to keep in mind that some very bad habits have been forming during the pandemic, too.
If we applied the “There is no Federal Solution” rule for most of our problems, how much better off
Exactly…… After this vax mandate for domestic air travel nonsense I am beginning to think the way we will finally be rid of him is when the major air carriers have him “disappeared”. lol
This is the first smart thing Biden has said since he took office. First, because it is basically true (although, even the states aren’t going to be able to “solve” WuFlu — they’re just going to have to adapt). And, second, it’s politically smart (or would have been six months ago) because it deflects
blameresponsibility onto someone else, namely the governors.But, I agree. As long as Fauci is running the fed’s COVID response, almost no one other than the true believers in the almighty power and goodness of government is going to be comforted by Biden’s newfound Trumpian position. It’s just more theater.
Another black eye for NeverTrump .
I don’t think Trump can be let off the hook entirely for the Covid response. I’ll grant that in the early phase, when there was more uncertainty, the cautious approach with the initial two week, then month long shut down could be forgiven. But he kept Faucci and Birx in place. I’ll give him credit for the vaccines, though proven to be not as effective as Big Pharma advertised. He was outmanuvered on Hydroxychloroquine by Faucci & Pharma. More national debt was placed on the backs of current & future tax payers.
We ‘Grandma Killers’ were admonished here as well, though proven entirely correct in our prefered response policies. Protecting the aged and immuno-compromised, getting society back to work outside those groups.
I’ll welcome the Federalist (original, Constitutional meaning) approach but that means no mandates and the FDA gets the hell out of the way. Off label use of alternate treatments. I think we’ll need to establish just what kind of latitude corporations, states and moronic mayors are given.
There’s a Reckoning coming. Hoping that it’s confined to the Dems/Left as much as possible.
President Brandon will do anything that President Bozo the fauci says. Until Bozo is gone we are doomed to burhkas in our basement.
The sin of experts is to be in love with their own intellect. Pride is always th base of the sins.
If you think about it, the First Sin was actually a grasp at power — “you will be as gods. . .” God gave us free will (which is another way of saying “choice”) and we used it to choose to disobey in order to gain “knowledge of good and evil” (which turns out to be self-deification and deciding for ourselves what is good and evil — subjectivism/relativism).
So, yes, pride is in there, but it’s closely related to the lust for power, both of which are fair characterizations of leftism. It’s hard to tease apart pride and lust for power. They seem to go together.
Jon would rather have a root canal without anesthesia than say those three words.
Except that Peter Sellers doesn’t quite have that vacant expression quite down pat. Joe could give lessons.
How about Biden, though?
But Trump was right.
👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏
I don’t remember if it was @Flicker or @Drewinwisconsin (or someone else) who posted a link to a video of Fauci at a pre-covid international conference, where a panel of participants talked about how we should be preparing for the next pandemic. I didn’t watch it to the end, but it was a scary group of people in how they wanted to uproot everything and embark on a crash program to do something, who knows what, exactly. The only person who spoke in favor of moderation, or even conservatism, in how we go about it was Dr. Fauci. I don’t know that any of the other people would ever be eligible for a job like his, but keep in mind that if you replace Dr. Fauci you could very easily get someone worse. There are plenty of worse people waiting in the wings.
The government doesn’t care about the well-being of any of its citizens, save for those who give hefty campaign contributions. If they cared then they would hold pharmaceutical companies accountable for the opoid epidemic and prevent people from getting most of their nutrition from corn syrup. The mission to fight coronavirus has always been about increasing the government’s authority over private life: where you can go, whom you can associate with, and which companies you can work for. Control. It’s the only thing authoritatians ever need more of.
Yep