Excessive caution and unrealistic goals drive inflation up.<\/b>
\nWhen 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\u2026 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. There have been more pandemic deaths in 2021 since the inauguration than in 2020, «despite the benefit of vaccines, better therapies, and more clinical experience.» Regarding messaging, President Biden should have begun selling Americans earlier in the summer to «live with the virus,» as Singapore did, relying more on managing hospitalizations than aiming for virus elimination. In September, even New Zealand abandoned its zero-Covid strategy when Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern acknowledged that the Delta variant is «a tentacle that has been incredibly hard to shake.» But the White House has been relentless in communicating a message of fear and making the best an enemy of the very good. In the November IBD\/TIPP Poll, only 40% give President Biden an A or B for his handling of Covid, his formerly strongest point. And 30% give him good grades for his handling of the economy. The initial news about Omicron as a potentially dangerous variant will further wear out Americans sick of the pandemic. President Biden’s single-trick-pony strategy is to call for more vaccinations. It was time that he began talking to other scientists, such as Dr. Makary. Until America reopens, Americans will continue to resist buying services as they used to, and the inflation headache will continue. Omicron just pushed out the reopening date into the future, made the inflation picture worse, and upset Americans even more about the pandemic. President Biden’s caution served him well in winning the election, but it has been disastrous in governing, with more deaths than Trump despite vaccinations and a much worse economy with inflation. Rajkamal Rao is a columnist and a member of the tippinsights editorial board. He is an American entrepreneur and writes the WorldView column for the Hindu BusinessLine, India’s second-largest financial newspaper, on the economy, politics, immigration, foreign affairs, and sports. Professor Calum Semple, a microbiologist from the UK government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE), struck a note of caution on the worldwide headlines around the new B.1.1.529 variant detected in South Africa. The new potentially highly-transmissible variant of COVID-19, named Omicron by the WHO, is not a disaster as vaccines are still likely to protect against the serious disease from it, a UK scientist, who advises the government, said on Saturday. The UK imposed travel restrictions on six southern African countries \u2013 South Africa, Botswana, Lesotho, Eswatini, Zimbabwe, and Namibia. Health authorities said they are investigating the «most significant variant» that could be potentially more infectious and vaccine-resistant. «This is not a disaster, and the headlines from some of my colleagues saying ‘this is horrendous’ I think are hugely overstating the situation,» Professor Semple told the BBC. «Immunity from vaccination is still likely to protect you from severe disease. You might get a snuffle or a headache or a filthy cold but your chance of coming into hospital, or intensive care or sadly dying are greatly diminished by the vaccine and still will be going into the future,» he said. Talks between Iran and world powers aimed at reviving the 2015 deal that gave Tehran sanctions relief in return for curbs on its nuclear program are scheduled to resume on Monday. The head of the UN nuclear watchdog warned Wednesday that his inspectors are close to being unable to «guarantee» they know the size of Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium. A stark alarm after his trip to Tehran produced no results, AP said. Rafael Mariano Grossi’s words sharply contrasted with the optimistic tone his Iranian hosts offered the day before. They signal the Islamic Republic’s harder line as renewed talks over Tehran’s tattered nuclear deal with world powers resume on Nov 29. The International Atomic Energy Agency’s inspectors remain unable to access surveillance footage and face greater challenges in monitoring Tehran’s rapidly growing uranium stockpile, some of which is now enriched up to 60% purity \u2013 a short technical step from weapons-grade levels of 90%. Israel is «very worried» that world powers will remove sanctions on Iran in exchange for insufficient caps on its nuclear program, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett said on Sunday ahead of the resumption of negotiations in Vienna. «This is the message that we are relaying in every manner, whether to the Americans or to the other countries negotiating with Iran,» he told his cabinet in televised remarks. Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said Saturday that Japan would strengthen its necessary defense power and consider all options, including acquiring enemy base strike capabilities. In a speech at a Ground Self-Defense Force base, Kishida expressed concern about North Korea’s rapid development of missile technology and China’s military expansion. New Zealand Member of Parliament Julie Anne Genter got on her bicycle early on Sunday and headed to the hospital. She was already in labor, and she gave birth an hour later. The island nation of 5 million already has a reputation for down-to-earth politicians. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern famously took maternity leave while in office and brought her three-month-old to a United Nations meeting as she was still breastfeeding. «Amazingly, now we have a healthy, happy little one sleeping, as is her dad,» said Genter, a dual New Zealand-U.S. citizen who was born in Minnesota and moved to the Pacific country in 2006. Genter — her party’s spokesperson for transport issues and whose Facebook profile includes «I love my bicycle» — also biked to the hospital in 2018 to give birth to her first-born, local media said. President Biden Sees Climate Change As A National Security Issue, But What Do Americans Think? Overall, economic confidence is gloomy as we enter the holiday season.<\/p>\n