SHAPIRO: Debunking Biden’s COVID Lies

Conservative News DailyMarch 22, 2021

So you keep hearing that Joe Biden is doing a magnificent job on COVID. That he inherited a mess, and now we’re on the right track.

Here’s the problem: That’s not true. They’re not following the science. They’re lying about the plans. They’re setting unattainable standards for reopening.

And they are doing all of this for political gain.

Throughout this pandemic, the media particularly have been in the bag for the Democrats. The media routinely said that Donald Trump was lying when he said that within the year there would be a vaccine.

Here’s the thing: he was right.

In fact, they only announced the efficacy of the vaccine one week after the election. I don’t think that’s a coincidence, actually.

The vaccines had already been developed. The U.S. government was always going to buy these vaccines. It is states that have been tranching out the vaccines.

By the end of February, here is how many sites Joe Biden’s administration had set up: seven.

According to Bloomberg News, his administration’s distribution of vaccines so far looks little different from that of its predecessor.

Biden and White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said repeatedly that their goal was 100 million shots in 100 days.

Well, here’s the thing: America was already injecting a million people per day by the time Biden took office.

In reality, here’s what the Biden administration did: they got elected. That’s the whole thing.

The media kept claiming over and over and over that on the eve of the pandemic, Trump cut the CDC budget.

That’s not true, even according to FactCheck.org. Trump may have proposed cuts; the cuts never happened. In fact, the CDC budget increased. By the way, citing people’s budgetary proposals is actually the basis for failure. It is itself a fail. Budgetary proposals never make it into law.

Then there’s the claim Trump said coronavirus was a hoax.

He never said that coronavirus was a hoax. Trump instead said that the way that the media was treating him over coronavirus was a hoax. That’s what he actually said.

And by the way, he was right about hydroxychloroquine being a treatment that has now been authorized for emergency use.

The insane hatred for hydroxychloroquine just because Trump mentioned the drug? It was indeed a crazy thing.

One of the areas where the Trump administration should have done better was in ramping up testing very early. But the reality is that as the pandemic progressed, testing was not chiefly the issue because once we had moved into community spread phase, there was no way to do testing and tracing. It just was not possible once you had tens of thousands of cases — hundreds of thousands of cases — simultaneously across the United States.

At that point, we were not going to test our way out of the pandemic. The only solution was a vaccine.

There’s no question: the Biden administration is more pro-mask than the Trump administration. But we are now a year into the pandemic and masking is no longer the chief issue. Yet, that still seems to be the thing that Biden talks about the most, which suggests that a lot of this is about optics, not about efficacy.

Trump was right about schools. He said early on that schools should be opened. He was consistently right about that. Democrats are still insisting that many schools should not be open.

Now, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky has pointed out that schools could open safely without teachers being vaccinated.

One of the most robust findings in science is that schools — particularly for elementary school students — do not increase risks to teachers. In fact, studies show that the baseline level of risk to teachers is no different from the baseline level that all adults in a society experience from COVID.

But the White House didn’t like that because it suggested that schools should be open. Teachers unions don’t want the schools open.

According to Joe Biden, “reopening schools safely will be a national priority for the Biden-Harris administration. They need to open safely under the circumstances.” That sentiment was echoed by White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki, who said “We can reopen them… but we want to do it safely.”

“Safely” can mean literally anything because you can always say that schools are just not safe enough.

Here’s the thing. Well over half of schools are already open.

The Biden administration — which is a lockdown administration — is doing this entirely in contravention of the available data.

Florida and California took precisely the opposite tacts. California shut down forever; Florida stopped the shutdown in the middle of last summer. They have a very similar death per million rate. The only difference is that Florida is the second oldest state in America; California is the fifth youngest state in America. California wrecked its economy, wrecked its freedom, wrecked everything.

Dr. Anthony Fauci says we can never go back to normal until there is no risk.

There is no such thing as no risk. There will always be risk when it comes to COVID, so long as COVID is with us.

The actual disappearance of the disease is not likely. So the question is risk assessment. The Biden administration does not want to do risk assessment. Instead, it would like to prolong the feeling of crisis.

Deaths are down precipitously. Cases are down precipitously. Vaccinations are up precipitously. And yet we keep hearing that we’re still in crisis mode — “maybe we’ll get back to normal next year.” The truth is there’s been an entire cottage industry dedicated to the idea that COVID should make you afraid for your life at all times.

The reality is that we have been living with this virus for a year. Many Americans have been going out, have been going to work. Many Americans who are younger have been participating in everyday life. Many Americans have already gotten COVID and recovered from it because the death rates on COVID are not 10%. They’re not 5%. The death rates on COVID — for the bulk of the American population overall — total 5 in 1000.

Why are they doing all this? Because they have an agenda. They want to spend $1.9 trillion in COVID relief.

By the way: that $1.9 trillion in COVID relief? That includes hundreds of billions of dollars for state and local bailouts. A huge majority of states didn’t even lose tax revenue during 2020 because of the bailouts we already did, but Biden wants to bail out those states anyway. Which states does he want to bail out? The blue states, of course, because those are the states that have systemic debt problems.

The actual financial shortfall this year from COVID is gonna be about $450 billion in terms of GDP. So he’s gonna spend $1.9 trillion, which is crazy.

All of this is just a political agenda.

The views expressed in this opinion piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

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