Washington Post Medical Columnist Rejects Paper’s Editorial Board to Side With Biden: ‘The Pandemic is Over’

CNN medical analyst and Washington Post columnist Leana Wen concurred with President Joe Biden, contradicting a recent Post editorial, in saying that the Covid-19 pandemic “is over.”

During Sunday’s 60 Minutes on CBS, Biden said that “the pandemic is over.” The following day, the Post editorial board rebuked Biden in a piece headlined “No, President Biden, the pandemic is not over.”

“The pandemic is still raging — in the sense that a dangerous virus is infecting, sickening and killing people, mutating to survive and haunting the globe. The pandemic has shifted — and normalcy has returned in many ways — but it is not over,” stated the editorial.

The piece mentioned that the “seven-day moving average of daily deaths in the United States is nearly 400 and has plateaued at this terrible level since April” and that “the average of new daily cases is 60,000, way higher than in the spring.” The editorial also noted that “Biden has not ended the official pandemic emergency.”

However, Wen, a contributing Post columnist, wrote an opinion piece on Monday for the outlet dissenting from the editorial board and concurring with Biden.

“He’s right. By multiple definitions, the pandemic is over,” she wrote. “That doesn’t mean that the coronavirus is no longer causing harm; it simply signals the end of an emergency state as covid has evolved into an endemic disease.”

Wen also wrote:

For most of the country, the pandemic is effectively over because it is no longer altering people’s day-to-day lives. To them, covid has evolved from a dire deadly disease to one that’s more akin to the flu. It’s still something people want to avoid, and they’ll take basic steps to do so, such as getting an annual vaccine. Some might choose to take extra precautions, such as masking in indoor settings. But the societal end of the pandemic has already arrived, a sentiment reflected in Biden’s comment.

Wen noted that despite the almost 30,000 hospitalized people with Covid and more than 400 daily deaths due to the disease, “deaths globally from covid-19 have fallen to their lowest level since March 2020.

“The actual numbers may be far lower. Some researchers have argued that reported Covid death counts are substantially overestimated because hospitalized patients are tested routinely regardless of symptoms, and being hospitalized with covid is different from being ill because of it.”