Since winter's Omicron surge, the Biden administration has been trying to normalize the COVID-19 pandemic. In February, Biden remarked that "our country is taking everything that COVID has to throw at us, and we've come back stronger." Even more audaciously, at the State of the Union Address, he claimed "COVID need not control our lives anymore."
Yet it is seeming less and less likely that the administration will conclusively deliver on its campaign promise to "beat COVID-19." Instead, the goalposts are being shifted. As a news report revealed earlier this month, the Biden administration has deliberated internally on how to"gauge what the American public would 'tolerate'" in terms of pandemic deaths per day. This is a disturbing deviation from responsible public health policy, which requires breaking chains of transmission, driving case numbers down, and treating deaths as preventable — not inevitable.
