There’s no denying it: Covid is rocking Washington right now. Days after Saturday’s annual Gridiron Club dinner, multiple attendees of the boujee 600-seat confab have come down with it — including Commerce Secretary GINA RAIMONDO, A.G. MERRICK GARLAND and Reps. ADAM SCHIFF (D-Calif.) and JOAQUIN CASTRO (D-Texas).
By Wednesday afternoon, another high-profile attendee — JAMAL SIMMONS, comms director to VP KAMALA HARRIS — revealed that he, too, tested positive. That test result came just a day after he shook former President BARACK OBAMA’s hand at the White House’s Obamacare party, where President JOE BIDEN and 200 other high-level officials hobnobbed maskless while celebrating the health care law…
The Gridiron dinner isn’t the only likely superspreader event piercing the This Town bubble. As Eugene, Sam Stein and Steven Overly reported Wednesday, “a number of individuals who attended a prominent antitrust conference in Brussels last week also came down with Covid … Additionally, a number of reporters who attended a going-away party for National Security Council spokesperson EMILY HORNE have tested positive for Covid.”…
— Why the risk, you ask? Here’s the W.H. calculus, per Restuccia and Siddiqui: “Administration officials acknowledged that the president’s regular contact with advisers and supporters could expose him to Covid-19. But they said it was important for Mr. Biden to project a sense of semi-normalcy as many Americans are opting to leave their homes, return to work and socialize with friends. With midterm elections scheduled for the fall, a Wall Street Journal poll in March found that Democrats held an 11-point edge on which party would best handle the pandemic, down from a 16-point edge in November.”
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