The corporate media and U.S. politicians didn’t miss a beat jumping from the drawn-out Covid panic of the past two years to panicking about impending war with Russia over Ukraine. But while media distracts with war in Europe, Democrats from the White House to American cities have been quietly adopting the common-sense Covid policies that conservatives have championed this whole time, and which the Covid panic cabal shamed and censored us for ad nauseam. They don’t deserve to get away without a massive “we told you so.”
After blaming Covid on the unvaccinated and threatening them with a “winter of severe illness and death,” Biden used his State of the Union address Tuesday night to pretend it wasn’t himself and his fellow Democrats making Covid a partisan issue all along. “Let’s stop seeing each other as enemies, and start seeing each other for who we really are: Fellow Americans,” he said.
He also invoked the opening of schools and businesses, a position many conservatives have held for at least a year and a half. “Tonight I can say we are moving forward safely, back to more normal routines,” said the president, two years into ruined businesses, schooling, and other consequences.
Biden’s hogwash speech came just days after his Centers for Disease Control and Prevention conveniently updated their guidelines. “The new guidelines suggest that 70 percent of Americans can now stop wearing masks, and no longer need to social distance or avoid crowded indoor spaces,” reported The New York Times, noting the new rules only recommend masking in high-risk areas, and would allow eased restrictions in most schools. The Capitol physician also abandoned Capitol Hill’s mask mandate — just in time for Biden’s speech.
Washington D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser let her vaccine mandate for indoor venues expire mid-February, and the indoor mask mandate expired on Tuesday. While students are no longer required to wear masks outside at school, the classroom mask mandate remains.
The mayor of New York City on Sunday announced plans to lift school mask mandates and the vaccine mandate for restaurants, gyms, and entertainment venues. By the next day, California, Oregon, and Washington all announced they were relaxing mask mandates in schools and other indoor settings. This all comes right after Biden’s polling firm Impact Research advised Democrats to take “the win” on Covid or “risk paying dearly for it in November.”
I’m all for letting the poor constituents of blue state autocrats breathe again, but this is not a win critics of lockdowns should accept quietly. These are the same people who spent the greater part of two years demonizing everyone who championed the very policies they’re now adopting.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis was an especial target of the Covid panic police, as he spearheaded policies that reopened the economy and pushed back against mask and vaccine mandates. CNN, The New York Times, The Washington Post, MSNBC, CBS, and other outlets spun sob and scare stories making the governor out to be a child-killing villain.
Joy Reid called DeSantis a “maniac” and claimed she was “in horrified disbelief that any Florida governor would condemn his own state’s citizens to sickness and death, purely for his own political ambition.” Six months later, she had no criticism for governors of her own political stripe following suit.
Charles Blow of The New York Times unsatirically wrote that “there have been multiple peaks in the G.O.P.’s utter disregard for public safety — even the safety of their own supporters,” adding, “It isn’t a single mountain but a range. The death dealing of Covid amounts to the Appalachians of ignorance.”
It’s not just conservative political leaders they’ve villainized and blamed. You’ve probably encountered dirty stares — or worse — too for just trying to get your life back to normal. Maybe your kids have been ostracized or denied entry to school for refusing to comply with mask theater. Or maybe you’ve lost your job for wanting medical autonomy over your own body, or know someone who did.
Suddenly, the same people who derided you as selfish, anti-science rubes are trying to sheepishly align with what you’ve said all along. To top it off, they’re trying to claim that as a win.
It might be one thing if Covid restrictions actually worked (they don’t), and Covid numbers were at their sky-highest when Republicans championed freedom-minded policies and had actually dropped off to minuscule levels now (not what happened either). But a quick look at the numbers will show that hasn’t been the case.
There were fewer than 100,000 average new daily Covid cases (96,138) when Blow wrote his “Appalachians of ignorance” line in August 2021. That number was 60,335 in October 2020 when Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf posted his tweet lambasting Republicans for their “irresponsible” “lack of concern.”
When the CDC posted its updated guidance this past Friday, the new daily average was 68,661. (It’s also worth considering that fewer people are probably getting tested now, as Covid panic subsides.) Less than two months ago, the nation hit its all-time high for new Covid cases, over 800,000 every day, dwarfing any previous numbers. Yet, on the heels of that spike, Democrats are declaring that Covid is more over than it ever was when some Republicans tried to ease restrictions.
You’ll hear them claim that transmission risk levels are “lower” now, per the CDC. Funny enough, the CDC has changed its parameters for what qualifies as low, moderate, and high community transmission levels.
The agency used to count 0-9 new cases per 100,000 people in the past seven days as “low,” 10-49 new cases as “moderate,” 50-99 as “substantial,” and 100 or more as “high.” But new guidance released in the past week suddenly considers anything less than 200 new cases per 100,000 — twice the previous threshold for the “high risk” category — as “low risk,” provided hospital admissions and the number of beds occupied by Covid patients are below a certain number.
So suddenly, places that would have been labeled “high risk” a month ago can suddenly be lumped into the “low risk” category. Meanwhile, the Democrats declare victory over Covid.
Don’t let them do it — not until they admit it was their power-hungry policies that drove young people to suicide, damaged kids’ learning, stole jobs, left patients dying in facilities without their family members present, and pitted Americans against their neighbors. They’re two years too late in adopting the policies they berated us for, and they don’t deserve to get away with it.
