Lent, a penitential season in the Christian calendar, starts Wednesday. President Joe Biden, though, ought to begin his own penance tonight at his State of the Union address.
Biden’s administration and his party inflicted lengthy, significant, pointless suffering on children and families with their overbearing and overlong COVID mitigation measures, which the administration now agrees are unneeded.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was right to scrap its insanely overcautious guidelines and recommendations, but that’s just a start. Reconciliation, which is in season, involves both amending your ways and apologizing to those you have harmed.
Just ahead of the State of the Union, the Biden CDC not only changed its guidance on indoor mask mandates, but it changed its standards by which it measured whether a location was seeing high, substantial, moderate, or low spread.
To be clear, the CDC didn’t say, “Now that cases are lower, we will suggest less strict intervention.” No. They said, “At the same level of cases, we will now consider your transmission rates to be low.“
A week ago, a county of 100,000 with 51 cases was considered “moderate.” Today, that same county could have 199 cases and be considered “low transmission.”
This is almost literally moving the goalposts — in the right direction.
Why did they move? Because of politics.
After Glenn Youngkin upset Terry McAuliffe in the race for Virginia governor four months ago, a Democratic pollster interviewed suburban swing voters who voted Republican in 2021, and the most famous finding was “they felt Democrats closed their schools and didn’t feel bad about it.”
Biden knows this is dragging down his party, but instead of feeling bad about it, he wants to claim that he did the opposite. His polling memos told him to roll back mask mandates and other forced disruptions to people’s lives and take credit for it, so Biden will follow the science — sorry, the polling.
https://mobile.twitter.com/hamill_law/status/1497205184790872065Tonight, he will take credit for reopening everything and lifting mask mandates.
Again, it’s good to go from being in error to being correct, but it’s not adequate. Biden should feel bad that the party he runs ruined millions of people’s lives for a year by closing their schools. He should feel bad and apologize for it.
Biden should start by apologizing for closing schools, acknowledge all the harm it did to children’s learning, their psyche, their families, and their communities. But he shouldn’t stop there.
Then he should apologize for the schools imposing overly strict quarantine rules when they opened. Then he should apologize for attacking as neanderthals the state government officials who repealed mask mandates before Biden gave permission. Then he should apologize for requiring masks at national parks. Then he should apologize for turning the CDC into a political tool. Then he should apologize for his party’s mandates and proposed mandates requiring 5-year-olds to get vaccinated.
Since vaccines were widely available to all adults last May, nearly every high-profile COVID intervention has done more harm than good. Biden shouldn’t merely acknowledge the harm done to families, communities, and, above all, children — he should ask for forgiveness. Maybe then he can start to rebuild confidence in our public health establishment.
