President Joe Biden has therefore urged all Americans not to panic as scientists and public health officials assess the threat of the new OMICRON coronavirus variant, asking Americans to redouble their commitment to measures that could halt the spread of virus
Biden’s Monday afternoon update on Omnicron represented the administration’s latest attempt to assure Americans that they are moving swiftly to try to contain the spread of the new variant. His first move last week was to announce new US restrictions on travel from South Africa and seven other countries that took effect Monday.
“This variant is a cause for concern, not a cause for panic,” Biden said Monday. “We have the best vaccine in the world, the best medicines, the best scientists, and we’re learning more every single day.” “We’ll fight this variant with scientific and knowledgeable actions and speed — not chaos and confusion. We have more tools today to fight the variant than we’ve ever had before, from vaccines to boosters, to vaccines for children, five years and older, and much more.”
The President also urged Americans to enahnce their level of protection with booster shots and getting fully vaccinated if they have not done so thus far.
Biden acknowledged that much is still unknown about the transmissibility of the new variant and how effective vaccines will be in protecting Americans against it, but the administration is attempting to strike a more proactive stance than they did this summer when they appeared to be caught flat-footed by the highly contagious Delta variant, which now accounts for the vast majority of cases in the United States — and blunted Biden’s efforts to speed the country back to normalcy in the first year of his term.
In his haste to turn the page from the pandemic, Biden predicted a “summer of freedom” at the same time the Delta variant was taking hold across the United States and went so far as to proclaim that America was “closer than ever to declaring our independence from a deadly virus” at a July Fourth event. With those missteps in mind, Biden huddled with health advisers both Sunday and Monday morning to track the latest developments. He moved rapidly to announce the new travel restrictions Friday after the World Health Organization labeled Omicron a “variant of concern,” a signal that the White House was taking the new variant first identified by scientists in South Africa seriously.
The travel bans, however, may offer little comfort to Americans given the widespread debate among public health officials about their effectiveness. Anxiety over this new Covid threat is particularly high after a week of heavy travel and a Thanksgiving holiday that had offered a fleeting sense that the nation was returning to normalcy. On Sunday, Americans set a new pandemic-era air travel record with the Transportation Security Administration reporting that it screened 2.4 million passengers at airports. Overall the TSA said it screened 20.9 million travelers during Thanksgiving week — about 89% of the level of pre-pandemic travel during that period. Canadian health officials confirmed the country’s first two cases of the Omicron Covid-19 variant in Ottawa on Sunday. Omicron has also been detected in Hong Kong, Australia, Belgium, Italy, the United Kingdom, Germany, Austria, Denmark and Israel.
On Sunday, UK officials announced that face coverings will be mandatory in shops and on public transport, while all travelers returning to the UK will be required to undergo PCR testing for Covid-19.
Scientists are especially concerned about the fact that Omicron has more than 30 mutations in a part of the virus called the spike protein, a structure the coronavirus uses to enter the cells it attacks — raising fears that that it could evade the protections offered by the vaccines currently available in the United States. The uncertainty around the new variant has served as yet another setback for Biden and for the Democratic-controlled Congress given that their political success in next year’s elections will hinge in part on showing that they have successfully led the nation out of the pandemic.
Biden’s poll numbers have slumped amid concerns about the economy, rising inflation and the supply chain crisis — but the erosion of confidence among Americans about his handling of Covid-19 has been particularly notable given that it was once the area where voters gave him the highest marks. As he seeks to restore faith in his administration’s handling of Covid, Biden’s biggest challenge may be the stubborn resistance among the approximately 60 million American adults who remain unvaccinated and the political polarization around the tools at his disposal, including mask and vaccine mandates.
Public health officials expressed fresh urgency Sunday about the need for unvaccinated Americans to get their shots — and for those who are eligible for booster shots to get them. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, has warned that Omicron could already be present in the United States. On NBC’s “Meet The Press” on Sunday, Fauci called the threat of the new variant “a clarion call” for the country to “put aside all of these differences that we have and say if you’re not vaccinated, get vaccinated; if you’re fully vaccinated, get boosted; and get the children vaccinated.”
Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, acknowledged that many Americans feel a sense of exhaustion with pandemic mitigation strategies like masking and social distancing, but he said it was time to redouble those efforts and guard against complacency in the face of the new threat. “We have to use every kind of tool in our toolbox to keep (Omicron) from getting in a situation that makes this worse,” he told CNN’s Dana Bash on “State of the Union” Sunday, adding that officials are working with vaccine manufacturers to try to assess their effectiveness against the new strain. “There’s no reason to panic. But it is a great reason to go get boosted.”
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