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?
Forgive me a personal note. In Minnesota, it seemed a tad late to me when Minnesota Governor Tim Walz brought the 16-month era of one-man rule to an end on August 1, 2021. He declared the emergency a tad early too, on the basis of a back-of-the-envelope calculation made by a few grad students over a weekend. He falsely presented their findings as the sophisticated modeling of experts — i.e,, the science. It was a bitter foretaste of the many crocks to come.
He wasted a lot of money and did a lot of damage in the exercise of arbitrary power, though he took great care not not to pick on anybody his own size (he’s a large). It was almost funny when he drew on state funds to buy a refrigerated warehouse to be used as a backup morgue. When it proved a farcical waste, he bristled if anyone had the temerity to ask him what he was thinking.
Walz made sure his Commissioner of Health was surrounded by a fawning press by colluding to exclude the likes of me from her daily telephone briefings at the outset of the “emergency.” He wanted to protect her from critics. He said I wasn’t really a member of the press and wasn’t impressed by my inclusion in the Minnesota federal courts press. It nevertheless served me well in the lawsuit I had to bring to cover the Minnesota Department of Health for the duration of the “emergency.”
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