The News Page Politico published a report Monday that offered a glimpse into the Biden administration’s ruthless and cynical attempts to convince the American people that the coronavirus pandemic was officially over. According to three sources for the newspaper, Biden’s advisers have been discussing internally what would be a “common metric” for daily deaths that would be acceptable to the public and allow the pandemic to be declared over.
Such discussions are taking place under a president who declared last summer that America had entered an age of “freedom” from Covid-19. This was followed by a massive spike in infections and deaths that shook the population and once again brought the healthcare system to the brink of collapse. Vaccinations were presented as the crucial means to get the country out of the corona pandemic. While effective, they brought only limited relief.
Because this is an explosive topic and the publication of these calculations harbors a high potential for conflict, the three people spoke to each other Politico anonymous. Noisy Politico “Discussions that have been taking place across government, the outcome of which has not yet been made public, involved a scenario in which 200 or fewer Americans die every day. This figure was already being put forward before government officials decided against including it in pandemic planning.”
Politico reports: “The discussions were at least a first attempt to create the framework for a post-Covid world. According to one of the three people involved in last year’s talks, it was an attempt to gauge what the American public would ‘tolerate’. The person explained: ,500 deaths a day is too many. You still have as many deaths in one week as from the September 11 attacks. People would generally turn 100 [pro Tag] or less okay, or maybe 200.’”
What is behind these discussions?
These cold-blooded calculations show how White House officials — who are said to have sworn to protect and defend the populace — like insurance executives, weighing their income and expenses. The casual nature of these discussions makes it clear that such barbaric calculations are part of everyday life in the highest circles of the Biden administration.
And while tens or hundreds of thousands of corona deaths are calculated, an open war against the nuclear powers Russia or China would claim millions or billions of victims.
The White House discussions are reminiscent of a scene from Stanley Kubrick’s satirical film dr Strange or: How I learned to love the bomb. There, General “Buck” Turgidson, played by George C. Scott, advocates a preemptive nuclear strike against the Soviet Union and explains to the President: “I’m not saying that we won’t lose feathers. But we will have no more than 10 or at most 20 million dead. Depends on how fast the bombs come.”
Apparently, the Biden administration is trying to rid itself of the corona pandemic by presenting it as an ordinary seasonal virus and distracting attention from the fact that Covid-19 remains a major threat, with almost 110,000 infections every day and more than 300 deaths.
During the course of the pandemic, the number of deaths in the US has never dropped below 200 a day. Even the lowest daily number of deaths recorded so far would equate to 100,000 deaths per year. Even 200 deaths per day would mean more than 73,000 corona deaths per year, 12,000 more deaths than during the worst flu season in the last decade of 2016-2017. During the omicron wave, 40 percent of the 170,000 deaths were vaccinated.
One has to wonder how these lackeys trying to figure out what is an acceptable threshold for declaring Covid over can reconcile their calculations with the White House’s dire forecast that it will hit 100 this fall and winter Millions of infections could occur, including significant deaths among the elderly and the most vulnerable groups.
For children, who continue to be the group with the lowest vaccination rate, Sars-CoV-2 is much more deadly than the flu. Few children have died from the latter in the last two years, but more than 1,500 from Covid-19. even dr Ashish Jha, a staunch supporter of school reopening, recently admitted that Covid-19 is “far more dangerous to children than the flu”.
However, few have mentioned that the limited measures taken to contain the coronavirus in the last two years have all but eliminated the flu. However, without efforts to build the necessary infrastructure such as ventilation and air filter systems in public spaces and a mask requirement to reduce respiratory diseases, the population will be exposed to numerous pathogens, including a coronavirus that is increasingly bypassing the immune system.
In a way, the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the deplorable state of the entire public health infrastructure, which has put people at risk of unnecessary illness for years, not to mention the impact of poor air quality and high CO2 levels on students and their respiratory systems.
Of greater urgency for the Biden administration and the entire bourgeois political apparatus are the deepening economic crisis, growing class struggles, the social crisis pathologically manifested in near-daily rampages, and the growing threat of nuclear war between the US-led NATO and Russia. This is all being exacerbated by the ongoing pandemic, which continues to take a toll on people’s health.
The characterization of the pandemic as a trigger event in world history, as formulated by the WSWS, is repeatedly confirmed by the deep crisis of capitalism, especially in its center, the USA. The deaths of more than a million people, the contagion of nearly 60 percent of the population and the millions of cases of Long Covid are a reminder of the consequences of criminal policies based on the mantra that the cure must not be worse than that Illness.
Declaring the pandemic officially over makes Sars-CoV-2 an integral part of everyday life and gives up public health care as a social institution to improve the health of the population. The effects of repeated corona infections will lead to a drastic deterioration in the health of the population. The US health agency CDC has already admitted that one in five working-age adults will develop Long Covid after being infected.
It is not yet known what impact this will have on their mortality long after they have been declared infection-free. It will probably increase considerably. The figures are checked by the financial statisticians of the banks and insurance companies, but they are not concerned with a serious reaction to the risk of infection. They just want to inform the markets and their CEOs about the future of their workforces and the direct and indirect costs of their financial holdings.
The grotesque pronouncements by members of the Biden administration about the level of deaths tolerable should not come as a surprise to the working class. This is what is meant when talking about normalizing dying and forcing the population to face this supposed reality. However, there is an alternative to this bankrupt nihilistic perspective. Covid-19 can be eliminated, this has been scientifically proven and demonstrated in practice by China. But the end of the pandemic internationally is a political issue that requires the struggle of the working class for a socialist perspective.
:quality(85)//cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/infobae/FMT7UOH36FANLNU72RJLLM7SDI.jpg)
/data/photo/2022/07/29/62e376eda8d7d.jpg)