It is? Maybe someone should tell, um … Joe Biden. The president dropped this declaration in the middle of the same 60 Minutes interview Jazz noted in the previous post, surprising everyone from his own White House to the attorneys fighting to reinstate his pandemic mask mandate on airplanes:

JUST IN – Biden: "The pandemic is over."pic.twitter.com/iS1gq31MD1

— Disclose.tv (@disclosetv) September 19, 2022

“If you notice,” Biden remarks, “no one’s wearing masks. Everybody seems to be in pretty good shape.” That’s no thanks to Biden’s own administration, which has imposed mask mandates and then fought in court to keep them imposed. His HHS started off the school year by imposing a ridiculous mask mandate on toddlers in Head Start programs, even though no one believes toddlers can be effectively masked for more than a few minutes — and every bit of science on COVID-19 we have shows that they’re not at risk for seriously acute cases. Biden’s Department of Justice is still currently appealing a federal court ruling in Florida that struck down the transit mandate promulgated by the CDC.

Like his Taiwan remarks, Biden’s declaration on the pandemic apparently took his handlers — er, his advisers — at the White House by surprise, Politico reported overnight. And not pleasantly, either:

“The pandemic is over,” the president told Scott Pelley as they talked last week at the Detroit Auto Show. “We still have a problem with Covid. We’re still doing a lot of work on it … but the pandemic is over. if you notice, no one’s wearing masks. Everybody seems to be in pretty good shape. And so I think it’s changing.” …

Biden’s insistence on Sunday night that the pandemic is over caught several of his own health officials by surprise. The declaration was not part of his planned remarks ahead of the “60 Minutes” interview, two administration officials familiar with the matter told POLITICO. …

Biden’s statement was the most definite one he has made about the pandemic since assuming the presidency in January 2021. He was less definitive when asked whether he planned to seek reelection.

“Is it a firm decision that I run again? That remains to be seen,” Biden said, saying he would make his decision after the November midterms.

One has to wonder just how enthusiastic his handlers — ADVISERS! — will be about a second run after this disaster of an interview. Biden just undercut their primary excuse for emergency governance and interventionist policies right out from underneath them. The appeal at the Eleventh Circuit on the transit mask mandates relies on an argument that the CDC has emergency authorities in pandemics, including the power to set terms for accessing public transit facilities. The president himself, however, just declared the emergency over along with the pandemic. The DoJ and CDC were likely to lose this case anyway, but now there’s no chance that the appellate panel will reverse that April ruling.

And while we’re at it, let’s point out that the world didn’t end when the transit mask mandate got thrown out, too. Biden’s team and progressives gnashed their teeth over the explosion of COVID transmissions that would follow when people flew without masking, an explosion that never occurred. Five months later, Biden’s busy remarking about how normal everything seems instead — no thanks to his own authoritarian, unconstitutional, and failed mandates. If Biden had had his way, no one at the Detroit Auto Show would have been admitted without a mask — and the Auto Show would likely have looked more like a ghost town.

Will the mainstream media now adopt Biden’s new line and make it his “mission accomplished” moment? Or will they cheerlead for more authoritarianism? The answer will likely be “whatever helps Democrats most in the election,” but at least NPR is opting for the authoritarian rah-rah:

The National Institutes of Health defines a pandemic as “an epidemic of disease, or other health condition, that occurs over a widespread area (multiple countries or continents) and usually affects a sizable part of the population.”

So are we really in the clear?

Globally, there have been about 612 million cases of coronavirus. The number of new daily cases peaked in January for many countries, including the U.S. (806,987), France (366,554) and India (311,982), according to Our World in Data, an international organization of scientists.

We’ve come a long way since then – on Saturday, there were about 493,000 cases worldwide – but there are still thousands of cases being detected every day, and many estimates could be off, as many cases are going unreported.

They’re going unreported because the variants have become far less dangerous as the US population has gained exposure to COVID-19. Delta was the last significantly dangerous variant, and that came and went last year. The pandemic passed months ago in the US; we have succeeded to the endemic stage for a moderately significant viral infection that’s as risky as the flu. The issue isn’t how many people get exposed to it, but how many become sick enough from the virus to require hospitalization and other medical resources. The CDC has utterly failed to measure causative hospitalizations and deaths, but even correlative hospitalizations and deaths have barely budged for most of this year.

The pandemic has been over for half of Joe Biden’s presidency. Unfortunately, the authoritarianism lives on.