Over

Last night, 22 months into his disastrous presidency, Joe Biden announced on CBS 60 Minutes that "the [COVID-19] pandemic is over." After 22 months in which he:

• stated that vaccines would stop the spread of COVID [they have not]
• promised to end deaths associated with the virus [the elderly with co-morbidities still die]
  
• endorsed scientifically unsupported vaccine mandates [that unnecessarily removed people from their jobs (including those in the military)
  
• silently accepted insane and unscientific school closures that did nothing to stop the spread
• endorsed mask mandates that accomplished nothing [except virtue signalling]
• repeatedly invoked "emergency" powers driven by the virus to do things like cancelling student loan payments
• pushed hundreds of billions of dollars in "COVID relief" in late 2021 and 2022 when those funds were unnecessary and inflationary
  
• continued to support Anthony Fauci [a man who advocated catastrophically bad policy and now, we learn, was less than honest about his involvement with both China's Wuhan lab and the drug companies who developed vaccines].
  

So, the pandemic is now "over." 

Of course, Biden's trained hamsters in the media stopped their COVID score boards as soon as he ascended to the presidency and showed a remarkable lack of curiosity about growing concern associated with vaccine side effects among younger people who have been vaccinated and boosted.* His social media allies, after a year and a half of censorship associated with the notion that lock downs and school closures simply don't work, now turn a page, providing the impression that the "really smart" people were always against lock downs, masking little kids, and closures (they were, in fact, rabid proponents of these disastrous policies).

Except for those blue checks who insist on hiding in their basements indefinitely, the American people have put COVID-19 behind them and have the common sense to move on with their lives. In my free state of FL, this happened in mid/late 2020. Others took longer, but move on they did. 

As is the case with most things, poor Joe Biden seems to be the last one off the train.

I guess the real cure for the virus isn't the vaccines or the authoritarian mandates, or the hand-wringing by government officials. It's a mid-term election that is less than two months away. Joe's anonymous handlers must have done some internal polling and decided that being pro-catastrophist is a bad political strategy.

FOOTNOTE:

* A lack of curiosity that also extends to the Chinese origins of the virus, the White House's involvement in social media censorship of medical experts who disagreed with government policy (e.g., the Great Barrington Declaration), Anthony Fauci's involvement in gain-of-function projects with the Chinese, and the the alleged payment of royalties to NIH staffers who worked with big pharma to push through emergency authorization for vaccines.

UPDATE (9/20/2022):

COVID bitter-enders have become apoplectic over Joe Biden's declaration that the pandemic is over. They claim (hysterically) that people are still dying of COVID related illnesses and that "long-COVID" is a threat to us all. The implication—lockdowns should continue, mask mandates are a must (particularly for little kids) and schools should stay closed. They know it's a losing battle, but their fear overwhelms both common sense and rationality.

In January of this year, University of Chicago economist, Tomas Philipson, wrote what I and many other "deniers" have been saying since April of 2020:

    ... as the pandemic’s progression has made clear, public-health officials should aim to do more than merely minimize the spread of disease. They should seek to reduce the total harm caused by both infection and heavy-handed attempts to prevent it.

    Reducing the incidence of disease isn’t necessarily desirable if excessive prevention, in the form of lockdowns or school closures, is more costly to society than the damage done by an illness. We don’t close highways to minimize accidental deaths, despite the existence of dangerous drivers... The public-health community has proved incapable of quantitatively assessing trade-offs between the harms of prevention and the harms of disease. This has hindered the development of policies that could have minimized the total harm to society from Covid-19. Economic epidemiologists, by contrast, have for decades used quantitative methods to evaluate these harms by looking at them the same way they look at taxes...

In early 2020, University of Chicago economists estimated that about 80% of the total damage from Covid came from prevention efforts that hindered economic activity, and only 20% from the direct effects of the disease itself. [emphasis mine] This analysis motivated me and others to recommend that initial efforts to stop the spread should focus on older people, who are at higher risk of severe illness and not as active in the economy as younger people. This would allow younger people to keep the economy going while limiting the spread of the disease among those most at risk from it. Some in the public-health community, like the signers of the Great Barrington Declaration... saw the light.

So ... the government idiots (and that is exactly what they are) didn't care about the massive damage they did to lives and livelihoods, as long as their authoritarian measures gave them dictatorial power over all of us. No matter that the "heavy handed"  policies they imposed failed to 'stop the spread,' no matter that they failed to reduce deaths, no matter that they just flat our didn't work—we were required to obey.

There are many lessons to be learned from all of this, but I have to wonder whether anything will change when the next pandemic comes down the road.