Biden's 'pandemic is over' remark questioned

Declaring the COVID-19 pandemic "is over" now in the United States could have worrying consequences, experts said days after US President Joe Biden made such a declaration in an interview, which was contradicted by many public health professionals as well as European Union's drugs regulator.

In an interview that aired Sunday on CBS' 60 Minutes, Biden said, "We're still doing a lot of work on it. But the pandemic is over."

The fallout over the president's remarks was in full swing over the past few days, as major US media outlets, from The Washington Post to The New York Times, pointed out that the pandemic is "surely not over" when at least 400 people were dying daily of the infection during the first half of September.

David Dowdy, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, said that he worried that saying the pandemic is "over" can lead to a sense of complacency.

Dowdy cautioned that there are uncertainties about what will happen in winter, and the country should prepare for a new wave in the future as a result of new variants in the months ahead.

"We know that respiratory viruses like the flu often get worse over the winter. The same factors that work to make that happen could also cause a wave of COVID-19 in the winter as well," Dowdy told China Daily on Wednesday.

"It's unlikely that wave would be quite as severe as seen the last two winters — but it's still very possible that we will see an increase in COVID-19 (and other respiratory viruses) over the winter," he said.

Dowdy noted that while it is "reassuring" that there hasn't been a major wave in the past six months, it is important to continue to consider the possibility of bouts of infection in the future, either from a new variant or from waning immunity as people get further away from their last infection or vaccination.

He said that people generally respond more to local epidemic conditions than the language of the president.

"If cases start to go up again in the country, I think people will react to that," he said.

Another expert, Eric J. Topol, the founder and director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute based in California, noted that declaring the pandemic "is over" is a fantasy right now, as all the data point to the fact that the virus is not contained in the US.

"A daily toll in the hundreds is a tragedy, because most COVID deaths could have been prevented by vaccinations, boosters and early treatments," the professor of molecular medicine at wrote in an opinion piece.

The virus is still fulfilling its principal objective of finding a huge number of new or repeat hosts to help spread and perpetuate itself, as there have been more than 2 million confirmed new coronavirus infections in the last month, according to Topol.

"Considering the untested and unreported cases, the real number is a multiple of that, most probably at least fivefold," he wrote.

A new Omicron-spawn COVID strain, named as BF.7 by scientists, started to create waves among virus trackers this week, outpacing nearly all other variants of interest scientists are tracking in the US this autumn, the Fortune media organization reported on its website on Wednesday.

BF.7 is only beginning to grow off in the US, but it's already taken off in other countries, including Belgium, which has seen the lion's share of BF.7 cases identified globally at 25 percent, and other European countries like Denmark, Germany, and France have each seen 10 percent of the world's identified cases so far, according to the report.

Asked to comment on Biden's remark that "the pandemic is over" at a briefing on Tuesday, the European Medicines Agency's Chief Medical Officer Steffen Thirstrup said, "I cannot obviously answer why President Biden came to that conclusion."

"We in Europe still consider the pandemic as ongoing. and it's important that member states prepare for rollout of the vaccines and especially the adaptive vaccines to prevent further spread of this disease in Europe," Thirstrup said.

Leana Wen, a public health professor at George Washington University, noted that Biden's off-the-cuff comment that "the pandemic is over" has sparked outrage from all sides, with Republicans accusing him of hypocrisy as he asks Congress for more COVID-19 funding, while some on the left point to the disease's continued death toll as evidence that the pandemic is far from its finish line.

But Wen, a former Baltimore City health commissioner, argued that Biden was right.

"By multiple definitions, the pandemic is over. That doesn't mean that the coronavirus is no longer causing harm; it simply signals the end of an emergency state as COVID has evolved into an endemic disease," she wrote in an op-ed, which she retweeted Wednesday.

A Biden administration official has said that there are no plans to lift the public health emergency, which has been in place since January 2020 and is slated to expire on Oct 13 unless it is renewed, according to a CNN report.

The emergency declaration has been renewed multiple times, stating that "a public health emergency exists and has existed since January 27, 2020, nationwide", according to information posted on the US Department of Health and Human Services website.