IN THE course of taping an interview with "60 Minutes" last September, President Biden strolled through the Detroit Auto Show with CBS newsman Scott Pelley. Noting that it was the first show to be organized since before COVID-19 struck, Pelley asked: "Is the pandemic over?"
Biden's answer was straightforward. "The pandemic is over," he said firmly. "We still have a problem with COVID; we're still doing a lot of work on it. But the pandemic is over."
The president is well known for his verbal blunders — he has even called himself a "gaffe machine" — but this wasn't one of them. For all intents and purposes, the pandemic is over. COVID has certainly not vanished, but like the rhinovirus (common cold) and the flu, it has subsided to endemic status. By now, thanks to vaccinations and previous infections, at least 80 percent of Americans have acquired a measure of immunity to the coronavirus. More importantly, infection now results in far fewer hospitalizations and deaths than it once did, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
COVID took a terrible, terrible toll. (Including in my family — both of my parents died in 2021 after being infected with the virus.) But Americans can see for themselves that the nation is no longer in the grip of a pandemic. Social distancing has ended, shops, theaters, and restaurants have long since reopened, COVID testing sites have shut down, and mask-wearing is no longer expected in most settings. At its peak in early 2021, there were more than 3,300 confirmed US deaths per day from COVID. For the past nine months, the number of daily deaths has hovered at around 400. And there is good reason to think that even that number significantly overstates the chances of dying from COVID.
![]() "The pandemic is over," said President Biden in September. |
As Dr. Leana Wen explained in a Washington Post column earlier this month, all hospital patients are tested for COVID, and some who have been admitted for reasons completely unrelated to the virus may incidentally test positive for it. "A gunshot victim or someone who had a heart attack, for example, could test positive for the virus, but the infection has no bearing on why they sought medical care," wrote Wen. "If these patients die, COVID might get added to their death certificate along with the other diagnoses. But the coronavirus was not the primary contributor to their death and often played no role at all."
The point is reinforced by Dr. Daniel Halperin, an epidemiologist at the University of North Carolina. "It has been apparent that many hospitalizations officially classified as being due to COVID-19 are instead of patients without COVID symptoms who are admitted for other reasons but also happen to test positive," Halperin writes in Time magazine. He cites UCLA research showing that "over two-thirds of official COVID-19 hospitalizations since January 2022 were actually 'with' rather than 'for' the disease." Other researchers have come to similar conclusions.
All of which reinforces what Biden (and many others) said so plainly: The pandemic is over. And if the pandemic is over, then so is the public health emergency that former president Donald Trump first declared on March 13, 2020.
Yesterday, the president finally agreed.
After balking for months at lifting that declaration of emergency, Biden informed Congress on Monday that it would come to an end on May 11. That is nearly eight months after he affirmed on national TV that the pandemic had ended is over, and even longer after many states had already ended their own public health emergency declarations.
In the end, it was Congress that forced Biden's hand.
Last November, a bipartisan Senate majority voted 62-36 to cancel the emergency declaration, but the measure went nowhere in the House of Representatives because former Speaker Nancy Pelosi refused to bring it to a vote. With the House now under GOP control, that is about to change. The House is expected to vote this week on H.R. 382, a terse directive to bring the public health declaration to an immediate end. Whether it ends at once, on May 11, or at some date in between, the state of emergency is on its way out. It's a welcome step back to normalcy, and to putting COVID with all its upheaval in the nation's rear-view mirror for good.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
The last word on Georgia's voter suppression
In a column last fall, I remarked that one of the great political libels of recent years has been the smearing of Georgia's revamped election law as an exercise in racist voter suppression.
Passed in 2021 by Georgia's Republican-majority Legislature and signed by Governor Brian Kemp, the law made a number of changes and adjustments to the Peach State's voting procedures. At the signing ceremony, Kemp predicted that the new law would expand voting access across Georgia, and that was exactly what transpired. First during the primary election last May, then in the November general election, voting turnout in the state smashed all previous records.
The surge in voting did nothing to stem the abuse heaped on Georgia officials. On numerous occasions, President Biden smeared the state's new law as a "21st century Jim Crow assault" or "Jim Crow on steroids." Last January, he traveled to Atlanta and compared the Republicans who enacted the measure to two of the most infamous racists in American history, Bull Connor and Jefferson Davis. Again and again and again, that's how the new rules were described — as a racist scheme to suppress Black votes and revive the evils of the segregationist era.
To punish Georgia for its supposed hatefulness, Major League Baseball relocated the 2021 All-Star Game from Atlanta to Denver. Two Georgia-based corporate titans, Coca-Cola and Delta, issued statements denouncing the new law. When Home Depot, which is also headquartered in Atlanta, declined to pile on, Black church officials urged a boycott of the company.
"Yet all along," as I wrote last spring, "it was the racial demagoguery about the Georgia law, not the law itself, that was obscene and immoral."
Several readers indignantly informed me that just because no Black Georgians' votes had actually been suppressed, it didn't mean that Georgia legislators weren't guilty as charged. The law was still a racist abomination, I was told, even though it led to no racial ill effects.
I might have given such responses more credence if they had come from Black voters in Georgia writing about the trouble they ran into when trying to vote. But none of them did. And for good reason: Black voters in the state didn't run into any such trouble.
We know this from a just-released survey by the School of Public & International Affairs at the University of Georgia, which found that more than 96 percent of Black voters in the state had an "excellent" or "good" experience when voting last year. Slightly more than 3 percent characterized their voting experience as "fair." And 0 percent said they had a "poor" experience voting. That isn't a typo: Zero.
In addition, more than 99 percent of Black respondents said they felt safe while waiting to cast their ballot, 99.5 percent said they encountered no problem while voting, 69 percent waited less than 10 minutes to vote, and only 0.8 percent rated the performance of election officials in their county as "poor."
As for whether it was easier or harder to vote in 2022 (after the new law was in force) than it had been in 2020 (before the new law), the overwhelming majority of Black voters surveyed (72.5 percent) said it made no difference at all, and 19 percent said it made voting easier.
This is what was demonized so ferociously as "voter suppression" and a racist assault on the right to vote.
Even by the political standards of our depraved, dishonest era, the torrent of lies about Georgia's voting law was disgraceful. Those who denounced it in such poisonously racial terms have been proven conclusively wrong. It's time they had the decency to say so.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Just nix 'Latinx,' already
Librerals were quick to mock Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders when, on her first day in office, she signed an executive order barring the use of the term "Latinx" in official state documents. The governor's order described the term as "culturally insensitive" and declared that the new administration's policy would be to use "ethnically appropriate language."
One columnist derided Sanders for engaging in "performative anti-wokeness for the MAGA base." Another snorted that she was "making up problems that don't exist." Several commentators, pointing out that Arkansas is among the worst-performing states in fields ranging from health care to education, wondered why Sanders would make a ban on Latinx a Day 1 priority.
![]() On her first day in office, Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders banned the use of 'Latinx' in government documents. |
I would say those are reasonable criticisms. But I would also say the critics are hypocrites who wouldn't think of mocking a governor for issuing an order requiring the use of "Latinx" by the state.
That hypocrisy is underscored by the well-documented fact that virtually no people of Latin American or Spanish-speaking ancestry identify with the "Latinx" label and some find it offensive.
As a matter of respect, progressives often instruct us, individuals ought to be described by the racial, ethnic, and gender terms they prefer. That is why, for example, the once-ubiquitous "Negro" and "colored" came to be shunned as disrespectful terms for Black people. It is why conscientious liberals make a point of referring to transgender people by their announced pronouns. So why do left-wing pundits, academics, and journalists continue to push "Latinx"?
In a 2021 survey conducted by the Democratic outreach organization Bendixen & Amandi International, respondents of Latin American descent overwhelmingly said that they describe their ethnic background as either "Hispanic" or "Latino" ("Latina" if female). "Hispanic" was the term preferred by 68 percent; "Latino/Latina" by 21 percent. Only a microscopic 2 percent said they wanted to be called "Latinx." Four out of 10 respondents said that they are bothered or offended by the term and 30 percent said they would be less likely to support a candidate or political organization that uses it.
As those numbers suggest, it isn't only conservative Republicans like Sanders who have a problem with "Latinx." US Representative Ruben Gallego, an Arizona Democrat, shuns the term. In an interview with Vox last September, Gallego dismissed the word as something "imposed upon the community" for ideological reasons "mostly from white progressives." In 2021 he banned his staff from using "Latinx." So did Domingo Garcia, who heads the nation's largest Hispanic civil rights organization — the League of United Latin American Citizens. Staffers have been instructed not to use the word in official LULAC communications, Garcia told NBC News. "There is very little to no support for its use," he said, "and it's sort of seen as something used inside the Beltway or in Ivy League settings."
It may well be that the governor of Arkansas was mostly concerned with scoring culture-war points when she issued her order banning the use of "Latinx." But a lot of Hispanic people clearly agree with her.
Including Hispanic residents in oh-so-progressive Massachusetts.
In a survey of the Bay State's Hispanic community released last month by MassINC, a left-leaning Boston-based think tank that emphasizes its commitment to "diversity, equity, and inclusion," respondents were asked what words they prefer to describe themselves. Forty-six percent of those surveyed chose "Latino," 36 percent picked "Hispanic" — and only 5 percent said they want to be called "Latinx."
Despite its own survey results, however, MassINC can't bring itself to stop using "Latinx" as its default term for Hispanic people. The very poll containing those findings was released with the title "Statewide Survey of Latinx Residents." What do you call it when you ask members of an ethnic group how they prefer to be known — but then insist on tagging them with a label that almost all of them reject? I'd call it disrespect.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
The Last Line
"The great American republican experiment is still the cynosure of the world's eyes. It is still the first, best hope for the human race. Looking back on its past, and forward to its future, the auguries are that it will not disappoint an expectant humanity." — Paul Johnson, A History of the American People (1997)
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe).
-- ## --
Follow Jeff Jacoby on Twitter.
Discuss Jeff Jacoby's columns on Facebook.
Want to read more Jeff Jacoby? Sign up for "Arguable," his free weekly email newsletter.