The COVID-19 pandemic is over, or is it?
President Joe Biden is back in the public eye after holding few public events during the month of August. And if you thought the White House and Biden would use those weeks to revamp their communications strategy to avoid the pitfalls from the past year, it seems you would be wrong.
During an interview on CBS News’ “60 Minutes” that aired on Sunday, Biden made the bold declaration that the coronavirus pandemic is “over.“
“The pandemic is over. We still have a problem with Covid. We’re still doing a lot of work on it. But the pandemic is over,” Biden said, adding, “If you notice, no one’s wearing masks. Everybody seems to be in pretty good shape. And so I think it’s changing. And I think this is a perfect example of it.”
However, he received significant backlash on Twitter, as IJR reported.
And as Charles C. W. Cooke of National Review pointed out, the pandemic being over would essentially blow a hole in the administration’s defense of Biden’s student loan cancellation plan.
After the interview, CNN published an article with the headline, “White House says Covid-19 policy unchanged despite Biden’s comments that the ‘pandemic is over.'”
If the pandemic is over, why is there not a policy change?
That led to an avalanche of mockery.
Conservative commentator Stephen Miller shared a screenshot of the story and wrote, “He is not in charge.”
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) wrote, “Like clockwork. Biden’s handlers are out in force.”
Check out some of the other reactions below:
This is not the only walk back stemming from the “60 Minutes” interview. Biden also said the U.S. would defend Taiwan if China invaded it. But White House officials said there was no policy change. The U.S. has historically adopted a policy of strategic ambiguity on the question of whether it would defend Taiwan.
White House officials have previously had to clean up the president’s comments about whether the U.S. would defend Taiwan.
Biden and his White House aides had a repeated battle earlier this year where the president would make some pronouncement that appeared to be a policy change, which was then quickly walked back.
This has not helped his image at all. While misspeaks happen to anyone, they can have massive consequences when they happen with the President of the United States, who is supposed to set policy.
And it makes Biden look confused or as though he is not really in control when he makes a declaration on the policy issue, only to have some White House staffer release a statement that says there is, in fact, no change to policy.