Democrat President Joe Biden’s administration is pushing the president to change his messaging on the COVID-19 pandemic as the pandemic has persisted despite Biden claiming numerous times that he would “shut down” the virus if he was elected president, according to a new report from CNN.
As Fox News reported, “Biden routinely promised on the campaign trail that he would ‘shut down’ the virus if elected. Biden regularly asserted that it was former President Trump’s ‘ineptitude’ that ‘caused the country to have to shut down in large part,’ and assured voters that his administration would take care of the pandemic more efficiently.”
Since President Biden’s inauguration day nearly 400,000 Americans have died from COVID-19, and multiple new variants of the virus have swept through the United States – with the most recent Omicron variant currently set to follow the same pattern.
“The emergence of the Omicron variant has thrust the nation — and the White House — back into an uncertain pandemic reality, posing both public health and political challenges for a leader whose ultimate success depends almost entirely on his ability to contain the virus,” CNN reported. “Already, cases and hospitalizations are surging in some parts of the country, leading to a 31% increase in cases and a 20% increase in hospitalizations from two weeks ago.”
“Some of Biden’s advisers are encouraging the administration to begin discussing publicly how to live alongside a virus that shows no signs of disappearing, a potentially stark shift in messaging for a White House that once touted ‘freedom from the virus,’” the report added. “Steering public attention away from the total number of infections and toward serious cases only — as some Biden advisers have encouraged — could prove a challenge after nearly two years of intense focus on the pandemic’s every up and down. It is a part of a growing conundrum that Biden faces as the Covid-19 pandemic refuses to abate.”
The news comes shortly after President Biden wrote an op-ed in USA Today in which he appeared to already be shifting his language on COVID-19 and warned that the United States was about to see another spike in cases.
“Experts say that COVID-19 cases will continue to rise in the weeks ahead this winter, and that we will see more omicron cases here in the United States in the days, weeks and months ahead,” Biden’s USA Today op-ed said. “I know that Americans are exhausted from COVID-19 and want to know when it will end, and the new variant is adding to that unease.”
