Today comes news that President Biden has acceded to a congressional resolution ending the national Covid emergency — “weeks before it was set to expire alongside a separate public health emergency, as the AP puts it. The AP adds that Biden signed the measure behind closed doors.

It seems to me a moment to look back in anger, first at China, then at the American public health authorities, and then at the administrations that extended “15 days to slow the spread” to three years. The Biden administration in particular has used the “emergency” to undertake an illegal eviction moratorium, to impose an illegal vaccine mandate, and to crank up the printing presses to facilitate more gushers of government spending. The damage continues. Accounts have not been reckoned, not by a long shot.

Does the end of the “emergency” seem a tad late?

[The “emergency” should have ended in spring of 2020, when we figured out most of the mitigation needed for COVID and ramped up the medical resources needed for it. Various red states ended their “emergency” statuses by late summer and early fall of the same year without any appreciable negative effects. By the time the vaccines came out, it should have officially ended. And yet more than two years later, a Republican Congress had to force the issue with Joe Biden. It’s been a power grab, and a purposeful power grab all along. — Ed]