COVID, Biden, And The Fuddy-Duddy Factor

The annoucement that the First Fuddy-Duddy has caught the 'rona was accompanied by wags on social media who reminded us that one of the symptoms is brain fog. The White House issued the photo above that looks like it was carefully composed to show that Brandon is hydrating properly. has his whole dysfunctional family in his thoughts, and, apparently, is even about to read some books. That in itself should show how phony the whole tableau is.

Contrast this with Franklin Roosevelt lending his prestige to finding a cure for polio via the March of Dimes, even though his administration normally kept the fact that he'd had the disease himself very quiet. A big problem for his successor is that he insisted throughout last year that if you're vaxxed and boosted, you can't catch COVID. So instead of being the champion of the cure, Brandon is the case in point that the health authorities have had it wrong throughout. Biden himself variously said duriing a July 22, 2021 town hall,

If you’re vaccinated, you’re not going to be hospitalized, you’re not going to be in the IC unit, and you’re not going to die. . . . You’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations.

When challenged after the event, he said,

It may be possible, I know of none where they’re hospitalized, in ICU and or have passed away so at a minimum I can say even if they did contract it, which I’m sorry they did, it’s such a tiny percentage and it’s not life threatening.

So now, fully vaxxed and fully boosted, he's the poster boy for his own bloviation. Roosevelt was the man of fortitude and foresight, Biden is the man of fuddy-duddy and brain fog. Roosevelt is to polio as Biden is to COVID, which says a great deal about both Biden and COVID.

The problem goes beyond Biden, the problem is that the public health authorities have been losing prestige over their pronouncements that have been overtaken by events throughout the pandemic. The gradual recognition during 2022 that the vaccines and boosters now have no efficacy in preventing infections, while at the same time infections are less and less serious, vax or no, is only the most recent blow to the authorities' credibility. That began with "15 days to flatten the curve", after all.

"Dr" Barbara Ferrer, the Los Angeles County public health director, has been threatening to reimpose indoor masking for the last two months.

Mandatory indoor mask-wearing could return to Los Angeles County in a matter of weeks, possibly by the end of June, absent a downturn in the rate of new COVID-19 cases and virus-related hospitalizations, the county's public health director said Thursday.

But the end of June came and went with no new indoor masking order. And while she's been threatening to reimpose indoor masking at the end of this month now, she may be about to let this deadline pass as well:

Los Angeles Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer today gave Angelenos a ray of hope on the looming prospect of a universal countywide mask mandate next week.

While caveating her statement with “I think it’s highly likely we could stay in High” — meaning the CDC’s High community category — “should we start seeing steep declines in our [case] numbers next week, because we know hospitalizations are this lagging indicator, we are likely to want to take a pause on moving too quickly on indoor universal masking. Because if our cases start a steep decline, it’s likely that our hospitalizations will take a steep decline [two weeks later].”

. . . Earlier in the day, an alliance of Los Angeles County business groups today called on health officials to abandon plans for the mask mandate, saying the move would be “heavy-handed” and a burden on businesses that will be forced to enforce the rule.

It would, of course, be absurd for health officials to order indoor masking, only to see any justification for it disappear in a matter of weeks. Beyond that, it'd become more and more accepted that most masks are ineffective in stopping transmission, while each new COVID variant is more contagious but less dangerous. And whatever LA County does is unlikely to be emulated elsewhere, while states like Texas and Florida continue to show that masking has no effect on the disease.

The public health authorities are finding there are limits to crying wolf, and COVID is no longer sexy. That Biden would contract it this late in the game is the best possible indication of that.