The Biden administration’s top medical advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci has declared the United States is now ‘out of the pandemic phase’ of Covid-19, as cases and hospitalizations associated with the disease remain low.
Fauci, who has been one of the most vocal proponents of draconian Covid measures such as mask and vaccine mandates throughout the pandemic, made the statement during a PBS broadcast yesterday.
‘We are certainly right now in this country out of the pandemic phase,’ he announced on air.
‘Namely, we don’t have 900,000 new infections a day and tens and tens and tens of thousands of hospitalizations and thousands of deaths. We are at a low level right now.’
But he insisted the virus could not be stamped out completely and that long-term vaccination programs may need to continue.
‘We’re not going to eradicate this virus. We can keep that level very low, and intermittently vaccinate people… That might be every year, that might be longer, in order to keep that level low,’ he continued.
‘But, right now, we are not in the pandemic phase in this country.’
The chief medical advisor’s comments come as mask mandates have been lifted in most areas of the country as the number of new infections per week nationwide sits at around 50,000 – just 6 per cent of the peak according to Reuters.
Yet Fauci’s monumental declaration – news which the American public has clamoured for since the advent of the pandemic – was buried in the back-end of a PBS interview and has not been repeated since.
And so the question remains: Why did Fauci, who has for more than two years acted as the government’s foremost mouthpiece on Covid, not make an official announcement to inform the American people that the pandemic is no longer a major threat to public health?
Fauci, who has been one of the most vocal proponents of draconian Covid measures such as mask and vaccine mandates throughout the pandemic, made the statement during a PBS broadcast yesterday
Though most Covid restrictions such as mask mandates have been lifted across the country, some egregious examples of unjustifiably strict pandemic controls still remain.
There are no longer any states which generally require people to wear masks in public places, while the federal government’s nationwide mask order for public transit, commercial flights and transportation centers was dismissed by a federal judge earlier this month.
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) also revised its face-covering guidance in February, recommending that indoor masking only remain for communities thought to be at high risk for Covid, and mask mandates at large public gatherings such as sporting events are no longer in force.
But despite this widespread relaxing of Covid controls throughout the nation, children under five years of age in the New York City public school system are still subject to ‘close-contact restrictions’ including mask wearing.
The mandate has remained in place there, despite medical experts and virologists widely agreeing that the risk of children becoming seriously ill or dying from Covid is extremely low.
