OPINION:
With his poll numbers cratering, it’s painfully clear that President Biden needs our fear for his administration to function. More appallingly, Mr. Biden and co. want us to fear each other. The president’s statement this week that “For the unvaccinated, you’re looking at a winter of severe illness and death for yourselves, your families and the hospitals you may soon overwhelm,” was outrageous morbid hyperbole.
What could be more antithetical to the Christmas spirit than giving people a strong dose of vilification wrapped in colorful lies?
The omicron variant now accounts for nearly 75% of all COVID-19 cases. That’s a good thing. Hospitalization and death rates in the U.K. and South Africa, for instance, both remain low despite climbing case rates. Instead of driving fear and panic, Mr. Biden should be admitting that we’re heading into a new phase of virus management that requires more than forced masking and vaccination. He’s not.
The government cost countless lives by shunning prevention techniques and therapeutics. It’s also been routinely inaccurate about who was at risk and the causes of deaths and hospitalizations.
Mr. Biden failed to mention the reality that if you’re under 45, your survival rate from COVID-19 is 99.993% — and that’s without treatment or vaccination. Amid his push to vaccinate children, he declines to mention again that the mortality rate for those under 18 is 0.00016. That’s all part of the fear and panic strategy.
The president is adding 1000 troops to help hospitals deal with a phantom surge, but that won’t backfill thousands of health care workers fired over nonsensical vaccine mandates he encouraged. A day after even the odious Dr. Leana Wen admitted on CNN, “cloth masks are little more than facial decorations,” Mr. Biden doubled down on masking.
His home-testing kits should have been delivered a year ago and may not make it to homes until after omicron has peaked.
What that leaves us with is Mr. Biden’s dissonant two-note symphony, composed by White House Chief Medical Adviser Anthony Fauci, that hasn’t “stopped the spread,” “beat the virus,” or whatever other speechwriter’s tagline you want to insert.
He mentioned vaccination a total of 77 times during his Tuesday remarks. The words, prevention, therapeutics, even the successful monoclonal antibody treatments, not once.
Despite mountains of CDC and other medical data to the contrary, the White House continues its dangerous game of villainizing the unvaccinated to make up for the administration’s failures.
In July, the president told a national audience during a CNN Presidential Town Hall event that if you get the vaccine, you won’t get COVID-19. He said during another appearance that the vaccine would keep other people safe. He was wrong on both counts. Yet he continues to suggest that if we forcefully vaccinate the entire population — over and over — we will emerge from the pandemic.
The president offers simply more of what we’ve come to expect from the left: Use COVID-19 as an excuse to throw more money around while driving so much fear among the population. COVID-19 is becoming more dangerous as a psychosis than a virus.
Like we see with immigration, the time has come for states to abandon the Biden model and step in with their own more sensible approaches.
As we enter the winter months, America is not in a desperate situation; its president is. His COVID-19 strategy puts him first and the rest of us second.
A real leader would have given the gift of truth this year: If you want to minimize your risk from COVID-19, lose weight, stop smoking, exercise to strengthen your lungs, get your diabetes in check, ensure your heart is healthy, try out a treatment like ivermectin and, if you are high risk, get vaccinated.
Mr. Biden was never going to stop the virus. Despite the pathological optimism of Democrats that government can do everything, it can’t. The president proves time and again that perhaps they don’t want to either. Fear is a strong political motivator.
The Christmas season is about the capacity of humanity to aspire to be so much more than we ever thought we could be. It’s a time to take steps forward, embrace our God-given liberty and resiliency, not succumb to Mr. Biden’s anxiety, divisiveness and fear.
• Tom Basile is an author, a former Bush Administration official and the host of “America Right Now” and “Wake Up America Weekend” on Newsmax Television.
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