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Biden To End US COVID-19 Emergency Declarations on May 11 (arstechnica.com) 221

Posted by msmash from the moving-on dept.
President Joe Biden plans to end two national emergency declarations over the COVID-19 pandemic on May 11, which will trigger a restructuring of the federal response to the deadly coronavirus and will end most federal support for COVID-19 vaccinations, testing, and hospital care. From a report: The plan was revealed in a statement to Congress opposing House Republicans' efforts to end the emergency declarations immediately. "An abrupt end to the emergency declarations would create wide-ranging chaos and uncertainty throughout the health care system -- for states, for hospitals and doctors' offices, and, most importantly, for tens of millions of Americans," the Office of Management and Budget wrote in a Statement of Administration Policy.
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Biden To End US COVID-19 Emergency Declarations on May 11 More

Biden To End US COVID-19 Emergency Declarations on May 11

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  • it's a bit high but the lowest I've seen it is 270. So around 110k dead Americans a year.

    We spent trillions on 2 wars for 4000 dead Americans, but hey, you do you.

    • Useful war (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Okian Warrior ( 537106 ) on Tuesday January 31, 2023 @02:59PM (#63254397) Homepage Journal

      We spent trillions on 2 wars for 4000 dead Americans, but hey, you do you.

      That sounds awful by itself. We could have saved a couple of trillion, and even a single trillion divided by 4000 is 250 million (dollars) per American. That seems like too much, if you ask me.

      Except... if we didn't spend the money we would still have had the 4000 dead Americans. And you also have to consider what would have happened if we *didn't* address the issue - Osama bin Ladin would still be alive and probably planning and executing more terrorist events, and lots of terrorist cells in Afghanistan working to blow up infrastructure and kill civilians. Also, 9/11 was 3000 Americans, not 4000.

      Also, the cost of the 9/11 attack is estimated to be somewhere between 2 and 3 trillion dollars. If those two wars prevented a single new attack it could easily have paid for itself.

      You have to consider the cost of doing things versus the cost of not doing them. Those trillions might have been well spent.

      I'm well aware that those wars cost a ton of money, lined the pockets of the weapons industrial complex, and was generally inefficient as hell. There were real problems with those wars, and we should address them.

      But going to war itself was likely to have been useful. There are lots of analysts online who back that position.

      • I'm well aware that those wars cost a ton of money, lined the pockets of the weapons industrial complex

        Well, it isn't like that money just disappears into thin air...

        The military industrial complex employs A LOT of hard working Americans.

        And in many cases, due to security concerns, ONLY US Citizens do this work....which keeps the money and work in the US.

      • Re: (Score:2, Troll)

        by Gravis Zero ( 934156 )

        Except... if we didn't spend the money we would still have had the 4000 dead Americans. And you also have to consider what would have happened if we *didn't* address the issue - Osama bin Ladin would still be alive and probably planning and executing more terrorist events, and lots of terrorist cells in Afghanistan working to blow up infrastructure and kill civilians. Also, 9/11 was 3000 Americans, not 4000.

        We could have put that $2T toward true energy independence so that we aren't funding Saudi terrorism. Instead, we attacked the wrong country (they were almost all Saudi) because "the free market" or some shit.

        Saudi Arabia funds terrorism and instead of using our money to shift to a new energy paradigm, we decided to attack tangentially related nations.

        • Well, we can't just stand around and have people ask us, "What are you going to do about those Saudis that attacked one of their biggest customers?" We gotta show the world that the U.S. does not fuck around, even if it requires us to attack completely wrong targets.

      • Unless we were just dropping crates of $100 bills over Iraqi and Afghanistani air space, that money went into the US economy by way of US companies selling products and services to the Department of Defense. And it was predominantly US companies getting the money, because of the laws in place surrounding military equipment manufacturing and sale.

        • The US has been actually dropping off crates of money in various places to bribe off terrorist warlords, both under Obama and under Biden. They were also caught supplying Mexican cartels and more recently both Russia, through Iran, India and China and Ukraine directly being supplied with US tax payer funding to maintain a status of war.

      • Also, the cost of the 9/11 attack is estimated to be somewhere between 2 and 3 trillion dollars. If those two wars prevented a single new attack it could easily have paid for itself.

        So you agree, spending 2 to 3 trillions dollars to save another 4,000 terrorist victims is a worthwhile expenditure? Can you remind me, how many 4,000s of people died due to COVID? I'm asking so I can extrapolate how many 2 to 3 trillions of dollars we should spend for every 4,000 person cohort of COVID deaths.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by ranton ( 36917 )

        Also, the cost of the 9/11 attack is estimated to be somewhere between 2 and 3 trillion dollars.

        There is no way the 9/11 attack cost us 2-3 trillion dollars. The 9/11 wars cost us that much, but that was because of our reaction to the attacks, not the attacks themselves.

        Even a $10 million cost per death would be about $30 billion. I found one analysis [iags.org] which seems to put the cost in the ballpark of $250 billion total.

      • Except... if we didn't spend the money we would still have had the 4000 dead Americans. And you also have to consider what would have happened if we *didn't* address the issue - Osama bin Ladin would still be alive and probably planning and executing more terrorist events, and lots of terrorist cells in Afghanistan working to blow up infrastructure and kill civilians. Also, 9/11 was 3000 Americans, not 4000.

        Also, the cost of the 9/11 attack is estimated to be somewhere between 2 and 3 trillion dollars. If those two wars prevented a single new attack it could easily have paid for itself.

        You have to consider the cost of doing things versus the cost of not doing them. Those trillions might have been well spent.

        Direct price tag is closer to $150 billion dollars. Ten times less than what you are asserting. You only get into multiple trillions by including the preemptive wars and homeland security intelligence police state bullshit.

        The other problem is one of perspective. Even if your numbers were correct that is one hell of an insurance policy. It's like getting homeowners insurance that requires you to give the insurance company the full cost of your home to receive insurance. What a steal. The Afghan and Ir

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Tailhook ( 98486 )

      How much money would solve COVID-19 to your satisfaction?

      • One measure I would support continuing is free vaccination (all the broadly accepted ones). That ends up benefiting everybody and the cost/benefit ratio is too good to pass up.

        (There are issues, like Pfizer's profit margins, which are not specific to covid.)

    • Trump and Biden each spent $2trn totaling over $4trn in "stay your ass home, while government funds you" stimmy bills. They also direct deposited me child care credits for no apparent reason which I had to pay back in 2021 tax filing since I didnt ask for it or quality for it.
      • Lining the pockets of his 1% buddies. But again you do you.

        Other nations have single-payer healthcare systems that cost significantly less and have better outcomes. And for the love of fuck please do not point to Canada and cardiologists. They have fewer cardiologists than us. That's a quirk of their education system and ours not of their healthcare system.

        Other nations also gave substantially more money to their citizens to weather the global economic collapse that was happening. Had better health

    • For the record: There were more than 75,000 people in the towers when the first plane hit. That does not include the Pentagon or the White House.

      • Yeah but the death toll was still around three or four thousand. I think the 4000 number includes people who died from smoke inhalation after the fact.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by CEC-P ( 10248912 )
      How many died from car accidents and obesity? Maybe we should respond to those proportionately...OH WAIT, Pfizer doesn't make money of those two.

    • Re:7 day average is 446 deaths (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Virtucon ( 127420 ) on Tuesday January 31, 2023 @04:43PM (#63254761)

      We spent trillions on trying to reorder society into a dystopian vision of a "green new deal" with more gov't control to "protect us" and have instead brought a ton of chaos, civil unrest, destroyed strong economic growth, damaged lives everywhere including that of school aged kids and to the foothills of WWIII.

      If we questioned where this virus came from, we were censored. If we questioned "the science" we were ridiculed as "anti-vaxxer" or "anti-science" even though now the real science is taking over showing that yes, there are problems [nih.gov]

      Fortunately, we have sound, rational people working in Big Pharma who will see us through, right? [youtube.com]

      #FTFY

      • What are you talking about? Regressive policies harm society the most, sponsored by Republicans who "proclaim" to believe in smaller government, but really just want more money in their own personal pockets.

        • You're a deep thinker who has solved countless social ills with your facts, logic, reasoning, cold hard data, and scientific approach to all that ails society.

          Kudos to you!

    • We spent trillions on Covid and it's still killing people. But hey, you do you.

  • How can they forecast? (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    How in the world can they know what COVID will look like in 4-5 months from now? Maybe there will be a big spike in some weird new variant by then. If the emergency is over now, end it now. If it's not over now, evaluate what it looks like later. Don't tell me that you know now that it will be able to be ended later.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by crow ( 16139 )

      This isn't a forecast. This is saying we're ready to end now, but giving everyone involved time to plan for a smooth transition.

    • Nope, the emergency is over.

      That's not to say that COVID is over and done with. Now we're in it for the long haul. COVID-19 has become endemic. It's here, it's here to stay, and we'll get all sorts of variations like we do with the flu. Just like the flu the health departments are going to have to make educated guesses about which strains will be worst six months from now so they can formulate the appropriate vaccine and ramp up production in time for this year's COVID season. Sometimes they'll get it ri

  • Mission accomplished! (Score:4, Funny)

    by S_Stout ( 2725099 ) on Tuesday January 31, 2023 @03:07PM (#63254433)
    We survived! I remember the first months of Covid and there were bodies everywhere.

  • There is literally zero rationale for keeping the emergency in place today.

    Oh, except for giving 100% immunity to big pharma.

    I forgot about that.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by dougmc ( 70836 )

      The VICP [hrsa.gov] and PREP Act [wikipedia.org] already protected vaccine manufacturers against liability claims and were in effect long before COVID hit, and will continue after the declared emergency is over.

      That said, it's not 100% immunity and never has been, though it's fairly close -- willful conduct is not covered, for example.

      • Please respect the boundaries of the FFZ ("Fact Free Zone"). Do not stifle discourse with simple statements of fact.

        I mean, the parent actually used "literally zero", which clearly means that the point being made is almost certainly a bald-faced lie, but true in the Merriam-Webster sense.

        "literally: adverb; in effect : VIRTUALLY —used in an exaggerated way to emphasize a statement or description that is not literally true or possible"

    • Oh, except for giving 100% immunity to big pharma.

      That has nothing to do with the emergency declaration. Do you have any other ways you want to demonstrate to us you have no idea what you're talking about?

  • Congressional push (Score:5, Interesting)

    by slack_justyb ( 862874 ) on Tuesday January 31, 2023 @03:19PM (#63254493)

    The thing is, Congress has two bills about to hit to override the President's declaration and this was the President trying to get in front of that. It wasn't going to go well for the President if those two bills did actually hit. Like in Ohio Governor DeWine is urging all members of Congress to vote to override the President and that puts the Democrats from Ohio in a position. The COVID stuff has mostly been applied at State level, they're not trying to enshrine some right for everyone in the nation here. Democrats do still want to play ball with the State Executive and Legislature for stuff like this, so they've been calling the White House since two weeks ago on guidance from the President on what his intentions are.

    With the President putting a date on the end, that might be enough to have Republicans pull the bills to prevent a vote from happening on the floor of either chamber. But with Republicans holding the House, even in the small majority that they have, this was one of their "must do" tasks on their list and I'm sure that they had mentioned that they'd make it a voice vote for the bill so as to get everyone who was opposing the various State governments that wish for the COVID declaration to end.

    which will trigger a restructuring of the federal response to the deadly coronavirus and will end most federal support for COVID-19 vaccinations, testing, and hospital care

    More importantly, the whole educational loan payment pause that's going on is largely predicated on these declarations. The ending of the declarations gives a ton of ammo now to the States that have been against the loan pause. This has also been a thing on the Republican's to-do list. I think a lot of people want to think that Republicans want to have this COVID thing in the rear view for the optics, but the fact is, there's a ton of pending litigation that's been slow moving and in favor of the President because of the declarations. With them gone, a lot of that starts freeing up. A lot of things that were put on pause can now resume. An a lot of immigration policy that had new orders in effect will be rescinded and revert back to mostly the Trump era orders.

    Last I checked we were still losing something like a couple of hundred people per day to COVID. That's something like 73k people a year to this. Coronary heart disease (CHD) takes out 382k a year. So COVID is taking out roughly 20% the rate CHD is taking people out. That's still an insane number to wrap one's head around. That's almost twice the number of people who die from car wrecks in the US annually.

    It's very clear, Congress has an agenda that they need to move forward with. There's been a lot of freezing in sections of the economy due to related declarations from the US Government. Now it's a debate if "college loans should fall into COVID relief", but that aside for a moment, with the removal of the declaration be it a justified or non-justified move, people are going to have to start paying their college loans soon, as one of the main arguments the Government was using for that will be gone. People are going to have to float more of their COVID related expenses. A lot of people who could have never afforded an ECMO got one in hopes it'd help them, now I think doctors are going to be less inclined to put people on an ECMO if they have to now float 100% of the cost.

    All I have to say is anyone who gets a really bad bout of COVID going forward, it's going to hurt their wallet, it's going to hurt it bad. A lot of medical insurance has been riding that Government assistance and with it gone, that DENIED stamp is going to be getting a lot of use. Maybe the upshot is that the really bad bouts are not as common with the newest strain? But yeah, bad COVID is going to be leaving a lot of people with six and seven digit hospital bills, even with insurance it might knock a digit off that bill.

    • Re:Congressional push (Score:5, Insightful)

      by avandesande ( 143899 ) on Tuesday January 31, 2023 @04:40PM (#63254745) Journal
      Last I checked we were still losing something like a couple of hundred people per day to COVID. That's something like 73k people a year to this. Coronary heart disease (CHD) takes out 382k a year. So COVID is taking out roughly 20% the rate CHD is taking people out. That's still an insane number to wrap one's head around. That's almost twice the number of people who die from car wrecks in the US annually.

      It would remain an emergency if we could do something about it, which we can't. I would wish away coronary disease if I could.

  • Endemic vs. Pandemic (Score:4, Insightful)

    by crow ( 16139 ) on Tuesday January 31, 2023 @03:32PM (#63254541) Homepage Journal

    I think this is saying that COVID is now endemic, so we're stuck with it. That means it's time to transition from treating it like a temporary emergency to dealing with it as a long-term issue. Now the question is when they drop the emergency declaration, what are the real impacts, and do we need to replace some of those temporary policies with permanent laws?

    Honestly, I don't know what exactly the federal emergency declaration actually means for this now, as I'm not in a field that deals with such things, so please comment if you have insights.

  • In a strange and of course, completely unrelated event, Pfizer's quarterly numbers and predictions come in as being "low" and they lost $43 billion in valuation.

    But, and of course, as our honest and trustworthy savior, they seem to be working on a one shot vaccine for the near future. I wonder why? It will be an annual vaccine of course. Ideally priced at less than $130USD.

  • Think of it this way: we just had a dry run of what life would be like if the feds ran our health care. What a horrifying thought.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • It'd be just like US "healthcare" if it was like that.

        When you say US health care, which state are you talking about? Because it makes a huge difference.

        For most of my life, I never understood what the complaint about health care in the US was because it worked really damn well for me and the costs were never really unmanageable, despite me having numerous medical conditions, among them a kidney transplant which literally cost me zero out of pocket, and the insurance company even paid for 100% all related expenses (including medication) for an entire year.

        Then

  • https://time.com/6249841/covid... [time.com]

    UCLA researchers who examined Los Angeles County Public Hospital data discovered that over two-thirds of official COVID-19 hospitalizations since January 2022 were actually “with” rather than “for” the disease.

    A rigorous Massachusetts assessment determined that a comparable proportion of COVID hospitalizations were in fact incidental to the coronavirus. An attending physician at Emory Decatur Hospital (and former president of Georgia’s chapter o

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