Battenfeld: Biden declaration that COVID emergency over is a decoy

President Biden’s declaration that the COVID-19 emergency is over is a political decoy – designed to get the nasty problem out of the way and claim victory before his 2024 re-election campaign.

More than 500 people a day in the U.S. continue to die from the coronavirus so good luck telling those suffering families that the pandemic is past. And Democrats don’t really believe the emergency is over. They would still be ordering precautions and restrictions if they had the chance or the political will.

Biden is doing what most politicians do – taking credit for something that’s not really his and shifting blame to others, like Donald Trump.

Remember it was Biden who inexplicably said COVID was over last year, so it was no big stretch for him to make it official this week.

Biden was so desperate to get the issue past him that he signed the bill terminating the national emergency one month earlier than he was supposed to.

And the bill was actually authored and passed by Senate Republicans, so really they should take a bow for making it happen.

Nearly 200 Democrats in the House voted against it when the Senate passed it in February.

The White House initially claimed the bill signed by Biden would “create wide-ranging chaos and uncertainty throughout the health care system” and called it a “grave disservice to the American people.”

Maybe that’s why Biden chose to sign the legislation on Monday behind closed doors and didn’t hold a public ceremony like with most other major legislation.

In fact, on the day Biden signed the measure ending the emergency, the World Health Organization announced that the health emergency posed by Covid is not in fact over.

WHO cited new variants of the virus and a low vaccination rate as reasons for continuing the emergency.

In fact, a new variant dubbed “Arcturus” is responsible for a new surge of infections in India.

The sub-variant of Omicron caused India’s Health Ministry to start mock drills to see if the country’s hospitals are prepared to handle an influx of new cases. And some states in India have again mandated that people wear face masks in public.

There’s no chance Biden will do the same thing in America or do anything to cause people to believe that Covid is still a dangerous emergency.

It would be political suicide now for Biden to go back to pandemic-era restrictions that most of the country hated.