(Headline USA) President Joe Biden has set many undesirable records in his 11 months in office.
This week he appeared to set another—surpassing his predecessor in the number of coronavirus deaths on his watch in record time, despite the presence of several vaccines that ostensibly prevented the virus and authoritarian, Constitution-violating mandates for much of the population.
The U.S. death toll from COVID-19 topped 800,000 on Tuesday, about equal to the population of Atlanta and St. Louis combined, or Minneapolis and Cleveland put together.
A closely watched forecasting model from the University of Washington projects a total of over 880,000 reported deaths in the U.S. by March 1.
Biden on Tuesday noted what he called a “tragic milestone.” That milestone is particularly significant because the virus’s US death toll had just reached the 400,000 mark on Tuesday, Jan. 20, when he took office, according to WebMD.
Biden’s failure to meaningfully address the pandemic also has continued to suppress any economic recovery, while his policies have severely exacerbated the economic woes of many.
His administration’s unprecedented gaslighting about the pandemic and other policy failures has been an unprecedented violation of political norms, despite his early pledges of bipartisanship and a ‘return to normalcy.’
On Tuesday, Biden again called on unvaccinated Americans to get shots for themselves and their children, and urged the vaccinated to get booster shots.
“I urge all Americans: do your patriotic duty to keep our country safe, to protect yourself and those around you, and to honor the memory of all those we have lost,” Biden said. “Now is the time.”
But Biden’s “us versus them” rhetoric, notoriously declaring the problem a “pandemic of the unvaccinated” flies in the face of reality, preventing any meaningful progress by further politicizing the issue.
About 200 million Americans are fully vaccinated, or just over 60% of the population. That is well short of what scientists now claim is needed to keep the virus in check.
“Almost all the people dying are now dying preventable deaths,” claimed Chris Beyrer, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “And that’s because they’re not immunized. And you know that, God, it’s a terrible tragedy.”
Along with Biden’s polarizing rhetoric, the scientific community’s credibility on the issue has been marred by its constant goalpost shifting, much of it driven by COVID czar Anthony Fauci.
Mixed messaging has continued as authorities attempt to panic-monger yet again over the omicron variant, a new strain that is considered to be “extremely mild” but may yet lead to new lockdown policies.
Some studies suggest that the variant is ineffective—if not altogether resistant—with the existing vaccines.
When the vaccine was first rolled out, the country’s death toll stood at about 300,000. It hit 600,000 in mid-June and 700,000 on Oct. 1.
The U.S. crossed the latest threshold with cases and hospitalizations on the rise again in a spike driven by the highly contagious delta variant, which arrived in the first half of 2021 and now accounts for practically all infections.
Beyrer recalled that in March or April 2020, one of the worst-case scenarios projected upwards of 240,000 American deaths.
“And I saw that number, and I thought that is incredible—240,000 American deaths?” he said. “And we’re now past three times that number.” He added: “And I think it’s fair to say that we’re still not out of the woods.”
But such projections again seem a manipulative gimmick in the scientific community. The scourge has fallen well short of early predictions hyped by media that imagined millions of deaths in the span of a year.
The actual number of COVID-related deaths, as compiled by Johns Hopkins University is roughly equivalent to how many Americans die each year from heart disease or stroke.
The United States has the highest reported toll of any country. The U.S. accounts for approximately 4% of the world’s population but about 15% of the 5.3 million known deaths from the coronavirus since the outbreak began in China two years ago.
The true death toll in the U.S. and around the world is believed to significantly higher because of cases that were overlooked or concealed.
