Excessive caution and unrealistic goals drive inflation up.
When it rains bad news, it pours. With Americans giving low marks to President Biden in two crucial areas — handling of Covid and the economy — news broke about Omicron, a new variant from South Africa that the WHO has said will take several weeks to understand. For White House economic advisors, Omicron was terrible news. In a trial balloon piece in the New York Times on Wednesday, they had argued that inflation had reached record highs because consumers, driven by pandemic fear, spent more on goods than services. A daily drumbeat of negative Omicron news would exacerbate their worst fears. President Biden’s strategy has been to listen blindly to Dr. Anthony Fauci, Science’s Ubermensch, even though Dr. Fauci’s stewardship has been mixed with numerous inconsistencies in his positions, including the origin of the novel coronavirus. By July 1, nearly 42% of Americans were fully vaccinated, and the number of Covid deaths, at 8,789, was the lowest since April 2020. Thousands of stores started to post signs that if customers were fully vaccinated, they did not have to wear masks while shopping, the surest sign that things were getting back to pre-Covid days. But Dr. Fauci’s original target of getting 70% to 85% of the population becoming immune through full vaccination alone placed President Biden in an untenable position, unable to declare that the country was returning to normal. Dr. Marty Makary, a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, wrote in the Wall Street Journal as way back as June 8: If one adds those who had developed immunity through infection, some 80% to 85% of American adults were immune to the virus. The Wall Street Journal published a story about how immunity achieved through prior infection can be as potent as vaccination. «It is complicated, but… we’re at a state in the world where [vaccination and prior infection] seem equally protective,» said Dr. Monica Gandhi, professor of medicine and associate chief of the University of California San Francisco’s division of HIV, infectious diseases and global medicine. President Biden, instead, has gone the other way. At the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit on Tuesday, where it continued to push its OSHA vaccine mandate, the Justice Department said that «the threat to workers is ongoing and overwhelming.» There are other benchmarks that Dr. Fauci has set to which the administration blindly adheres. In Aug 2020, Dr. Fauci floated the idea that the virus could be deemed to be contained when there were «fewer than 10 cases reported per 100,000.» He hasn’t budged from this standard despite substantial amounts of new data since then and nearly 8 billion doses of vaccines being injected worldwide. The Mayo Clinic tracker this week shows an average of 30 cases per 10,000. It is little wonder that President Biden’s record on handling the virus is worse than President Trump’s, a point that the Wall Street Journal made this week.
