The Biden administration formally decreed last week that America’s COVID “emergency” continues. That proclamation was tricky to reconcile with President Biden’s announcement last month on 60 Minutes: “The pandemic is over.” Apparently, that was malarkey—perhaps part of the Democratic messaging for the midterm congressional elections.
Americans have officially been living under a state of COVID emergency since President Trump issued the first declaration in early 2020. The latest extension of came via a bureaucratic form letter posted online: “As a result of the continued consequences of the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, on this date and after consultation with public health officials as necessary, I, Xavier Becerra, Secretary of Health and Human Services… do hereby renew” the emergency for another 90 days.
By this standard, as long as there are any “continuing consequences” from the pandemic, Biden can perpetuate the emergency that gives him vast additional powers. Administration officials warn that COVID cases could increase in the coming months. Plus, another asteroid might pass within 100 million miles of earth, so better safe than sorry.
Biden’s emergency perpetuation seeks to provide a legal whitewash for his $500+ billion student loan bailout charade. Biden justified the bailout by citing the HEROES Act of 2003—a law passed to assist soldiers and their family members during the Global War on Terror. Law professor Jonathan Turley wrote, “Biden had promised to wipe out tuition debt in the [2020] campaign and simply hijacked the Act for that unintended purpose.” Biden previously admitted that the law would not justify blanket forgiveness of college loans but he and his advisors decided to force Americans to pay any price for Democratic votes in the midterm elections. The administration provided no evidence that the beneficiaries (who earn up to $250,000) have suffered any financial harm from the pandemic. College graduates are doing much better financially than other Americans who will get stuck with the bill for their schooling. Lawsuits are challenging Biden’s debt cancellation and the Supreme Court might nullify Biden’s decree.
Extending the emergency also enables the federal government to continue providing Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program benefits to 15 million people who would not otherwise qualify. As CNBC noted, “The emergency declaration gives federal agencies broad authority to expand certain programs without congressional approval.” In other words, the Constitution’s checks and balances continue to be a relic in the age of COVID.
Biden’s emergency extension was a non-issue for the vast majority of the press. Since the start of the pandemic, much of the nation’s elite media have gone to the barricades to demand ever more destruction of Americans’ rights and liberties. The tone was set in the first months of the pandemic by Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter Donald McNeil. He urged politicians to “go Medieval” on COVID-19 with tactics “from the era of the Black Death…pen terrified citizens up inside their poisoned cities…Harsh measures horrify civil libertarians, but they often save lives, especially when they are imposed in the early days.” For more than two years, the corporate press has been far more likely to condemn politicians for respecting freedom than for pointlessly placing tens of millions of Americans under house arrest.
The media cheered the most intrusive emergency dictate of them all—Biden commanding every American working for a large company to get injected with the COVID vaccine, or forfeit their job. The Supreme Court slapped down that edict but disgracefully approved Biden’s vax mandate for health care workers, resulting in thousands of hard-working nurses being fired.
One of the most outrageous and least recognized COVID power grabs is the Food and Drug Administration’s continuing use of “emergency” authorization for COVID vaccines and boosters. That legal category means that pharmaceutical companies have zero liability for any harm—injuries, deaths, sterility—resulting from the COVID vaccines that politicians forced upon Americans. The FDA rushed its approval of the COVID vaccine, spurring resignations of its top vaccine experts. The failures of the original COVID vaccines have resulted in an endless series of boosters, each of which is rubber-stamped by federal bureaucrats with little or no evidence. Biden administration officials are out whooping up the latest COVID boosters but never mention that the FDA approved Pfizer’s application based on zero evidence that the latest injections were effective for humans. Instead, Pfizer provided “evidence” from testing the boosters on eight mice. That was enough to justify forcing everyone in the nation who must get vaccinated and boosted to get re-injected.
The FDA is championing injecting young children with emergency use COVID vaccines, even though the Center for Disease Control estimated that 75% of children and adolescents had already had COVID infections as of February and thus have natural immunity to subsequent infections. Despite no reliable safety data for the boosters, politicians continue to pretend that mass submission to mindless edicts magically guarantees public health. The CDC website blithely declared: “Any side effects from getting the [COVID] vaccine are normal signs the body is building protection.” Yet COVID vaccines spurred more than a million reports to the FDA Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS)—vastly more than for any prior vaccine in history.
A recent survey revealed that 40% of Americans admitted lying about their COVID vaccine status or adherence to health dictates. Unfortunately, there is no chance of getting honest responses from politicians and government health officials about how often they deceived the public with their promises of “safety through endless submission.” Remember when Biden promised that people who got vaccinated would not get COVID or spread the disease? Remember when Biden said he wouldn’t impose a vaccine mandate? Remember when the Center for Disease Control ludicrously promised that wearing cloth masks would protect people from getting sick? Remember when Fauci…alas, space limitations preclude listing all the brazen flip-flops from “America’s scientist.”
Biden’s emergency extension should spur Americans to recognize how fighting COVID with a political iron fist is an unmitigated disaster. A virus with a 99% survival rate spawned a 100% presumption in favor of despotic remedies. Governors in state after state imposed lockdowns that former Attorney General Bill Barr aptly called “the greatest intrusion on civil liberties” since the end of slavery. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito lamented that the pandemic “has resulted in previously unimaginable restrictions on individual liberty.”
But ravishing freedom failed to prevent more than 200 million Americans from becoming infected with COVID. Amazingly, the failure of repressive COVID decrees has done nothing to humble the political class. Instead, Biden and many state and local officials continue to behave as if merely reciting a single word—Covid—entitles them to tyrannize other Americans. Many repressive policies are simply Political Science 101, using deceit and demagoguery to seize more power.
In his raging Philadelphia speech last month, Biden declared, “Today, COVID no longer controls our lives.” But Biden has no intent to forfeit any control over Americans that he unjustifiably seized during the pandemic he says no longer exists. Nothing in Biden’s oath of office entitled him to turn the Constitution into COVID road kill.
