(Ben Sellers, Headline USA) Under normal circumstances, a president going off script in an interview to threaten war with China would be a scandal of the utmost proportions.
For President Joe Biden, it was just another day on the job, with media outlets like the Associated Press dismissing Biden’s remarks from Sunday’s 60 Minutes by saying the president had engaged in such saber-rattling before, only to see it walked back by his White House handlers.
But another verbal blunder by Biden during the interview could pose a far greater threat to the liberal world order than a mere war against a Russia-allied nuclear superpower of 1.4 billion people that controls much of the U.S. supply chain.
“We still have a problem with Covid. We’re still doing a lot of work on it … but the pandemic is over,” Biden told 60 Minutes interviewer Scott Pelley as the two surveyed the Detroit Auto Show.
“If you notice, no one’s wearing masks,” he continued. “Everybody seems to be in pretty good shape. And so I think it’s changing.”
Joe Biden: "The pandemic is over"pic.twitter.com/ME1dUY1TmU
— Citizen Free Press (@CitizenFreePres) September 19, 2022
Biden’s casual decree that the coronavirus pandemic was officially over sent his top health advisers and other policymakers into a panicked frenzy due to the legal and political implications.
It could require Democrats and globalist leaders to yield much of the power they’ve spent the past three years trying to consolidate since the idea of unleashing a weaponized virus from the Wuhan Institute of Virology was first conceived.
Normally obedient news outlets like NPR suddenly flew into fact-check mode.
CNN on Monday cited an anonymous official in the Biden administration saying there were no actual policy changes and that the public health emergency proclamation, which has been in effect since January 2020, would remain so through at least Oct. 13 after having recently been extended in July.
In Illinois, Democrat Gov. JB Pritzker, who relished in his authoritarian “emergency” powers, pointedly renewed them in spite of Biden’s remarks.
One academic even borrowed a favorite term of Biden himself, calling his statement “malarkey.”
Is the pandemic DIFFERENT? Sure.
We have vaccines & infection-induced immunity. We have treatments. We have tests (while they last). The fatality rate is way down. And so we respond to it differently.
But over?! With 400 deaths a day?!
I call malarkey. https://t.co/KpLUfeMgBj
— Megan Ranney MD MPH 🌻 (@meganranney) September 19, 2022
COVID czar Anthony Fauci, meanwhile, dusted off his old Trump-era habit of second-guessing the president he was supposed to be regularly consulting and advising.
“We are not where we need to be if we are going to quote ‘live with the virus’ because we know we are not going to eradicate it,” Fauci said in a chat with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, according to Politico.
“The next question we ask: ‘Are we going to be able to eliminate it from our country or from most of the world?’ and the answer is unlikely, because it is highly transmissible and the immunity that’s induced by vaccine or infection is also transient,” Fauci added.
While one would expect the retiring virologist to want to ride into the sunset on a note of victory, Fauci is widely expected to continue his work as a consultant for pharmaceutical companies after he leaves his public posts in December.
However, Fauci’s risk of seeing his golden parachute fail to deploy may be the least of the government’s concerns in needing to extend the emergency indefinitely.
To begin with, the Biden administration earlier this month asked Congress to appropriate $22.4 billion for COVID funding, which includes stockpiling vaccines and tests (which often have a limited shelf-life), as well as working on research and development toward a global pandemic response.
To top it off, Biden’s massive student-loan amnesty program, expected to cost somewhere between $500 billion and $800 billion, is legally predicated—albeit tenuously—on the basis that there is an ongoing pandemic emergency.
And several state and federal agencies are involved in ongoing lawsuits about vaccine and mask policies—including New York, which just dismissed another 850 teachers for vaccine noncompliance.
Most alarming of all for Democrats may be the possibility that blue states relying on “emergency orders” to control voting procedures might, in some cases, have to yield power back to state legislatures or courts who would disallow controversial practices like mass mail-in ballots and ballot harvesting, as well as extended voting deadlines.
Thus, while Biden’s pronunciation might have been a quixotic bid to score cheap political points, Democrats are likely to see net losses at the polls as a result.
Biden’s own pandemic posturing might also hurt him on the immigration front. After having waged a legal battle to give him the authority to withdraw from former President Donald Trump’s Title 42 policy, which required immigrants to remain in Mexico during the pandemic, Biden reportedly has backpedaled, asking Mexico to once again honor the Trump policy as red-state governors threaten to send more illegals to blue enclaves like Martha’s Vineyard.
But with the pandemic having already ended, Mexico may be in no rush to comply.
The president was lambasted on Twitter for his shortsighted remarks, according to Twitchy, which compiled several of the noteworthy reactions:
Biden reportedly complains that he looks weak. This is why. His own administration undercuts him every time he opens his mouth. Is he in charge or not?
— Stephen L. Miller (@redsteeze) September 19, 2022
One thing I think America must accept:
This means the pandemic emergency is over.
I mean, the President was clear. He took his time and said so.
There is no way for the West Wing to legitimately walk this back. This is as decisive as it gets. https://t.co/aAo9rPx3fW
— Pradheep J. Shanker (@Neoavatara) September 19, 2022
Wait, so that's TWO big reveals on the 60 Minutes interview that they've now walked back.
— Jarvis (@jarvis_best) September 19, 2022
Ron Klain, Susan Rice, Barack Obama, Eric Holder, Valerie Jarrett, John Kerry, James Clapper, etc. The band is back together.
Joe Biden is nothing more than an ink pen to sign their legislation.
— JamieRJN (@JamieRJN) September 19, 2022
It's going to be comical when he shows up next wearing a mask
— John Sears (@slboy) September 19, 2022
Ben Sellers is the editor of Headline USA. Follow him at truthsocial.com/@bensellers.
