President Joe Biden offered a seemingly contradictory response Friday when asked whether COVID-19 is “here to stay,” denying the premise of the question while also saying there would be a “new normal” for people post-pandemic.
Biden’s comments came while fielding questions from reporters following his remarks on the December jobs report.
“No, I don’t think COVID is here to stay, but having COVID in the environment here and in the world is probably here to stay,” he told NBC News’s Peter Alexander. “COVID, as we’re dealing with it now, is not here to stay. The new normal doesn’t have to be — we have so many more tools we’re developing and continuing to develop that will contain COVID and other strains of COVID.”
The answer comes as the omicron wave is causing cases to spike once again, damaging public perceptions of Biden’s management of the pandemic, which was previously a strong point.
Biden claimed that the United States is “very different today than we were a year ago.”
“Even though we still have problems, 90% of the schools are open now. It was 98. It’s down to 90, but they’re open now because we spent the time and the money in the Recovery Act to provide for the ability for schools to remain open,” he continued. “What we’re doing now is we talked about, you know, how we’re dealing with testing. Well, you know, we have been doing now, we’ve had 300 million tests per month so far, and that’s 11 million tests a day. In addition to that, we’re in the process of supporting 500 million new tests.”
“We’re going to be able to control this,” Biden declared. “The new normal is not going to be what it is now. It’s going to be better.”
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You can watch his answer in full below.
