September 27, 2022 – President Joe Biden’s declaration that “the pandemic is over,” made during a September 18 television interview, is premature and harmful to the country’s COVID-19 response, according to Michelle Williams, Dean of Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
Currently, around 60,000 cases of COVID-19 and 400 deaths are reported in the U.S. every week. Additionally, long COVID is preventing an estimated 4 million people from working. Biden’s remarks undercut the government’s response to COVID-19’s continuing impact, including rolling out the new bivalent vaccine boosters and obtaining funding from Congress, said Williams in an op-ed published September 23 in The Hill.
“If we accept the status quo as background noise—rather than the urgent and immediate threat it represents—it’s nearly impossible to make the case that we need to do more as a society to protect the vulnerable, respond to surges, or prepare for future crises,” she said.
Read the op-ed in The Hill: Why Biden’s premature COVID ending could help it surge