What President Biden Should Say About Omicron, but Won’t

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video still of vaccination site worker talking to a person
Video Still, WSJ

Monday, December 20, 2021

President Biden will address the nation on Tuesday after the CDC announced Monday that the COVID Omicron variant now accounts for 73% of all infections, with 133,000 infections and 1,300 deaths per day, a 21% & 9% increase respectively in the last 2 weeks.

First, the President should explain that COVID fully vaccinated includes boosters, not 1 or 2 shots.

Using his authority under the Defense Production Act (DPA), President Biden should dramatically increase the making of both high quality N95/KN95 masks and COVID rapid tests both of which will be provided free to all public schools, public workplaces for weekly testing, required in all federal agencies. Free weekly testing should also be available at all vaccine sites and free home tests for everyone should be given out daily at public libraries and post offices.

He should explain that only N95/KN95 masks will protect people from COVID, not cloth or other types of masks.

The President should require all federal agencies and all transportation under federal authority, including airports, airplanes, Amtrak, interstate buses, ports, ships to immediately implement NYC like Vaccination Requirements for Indoor Public Activities that require all people inside to be fully vaccinated, both workers and the public, and to wear high quality N95 or KN95 masks.

If the President listens to public health experts he will announce a massive emergency increase in federal funding to state and local public health departments and public schools to vaccinate students where they go to school, workers in the workplace, door to door vaccines, and open mass vaccination sites in park fieldhouses, libraries, post offices and religious institutions and to significantly increase state public health laboratories staff and COVID testing capacity.

The President  should declare the pandemic a national security threat and  require both Moderna & Pfizer to sign M-RNA COVID Vaccine technology transfer contracts with dozens of well-qualified laboratories in Africa, Asia and Latin America to produce the vaccines where they are most needed, as Lawrence O. Gostin, a public health law expert at Georgetown University, stated earlier this year.

Finally, the President must send $Billions in international aid to African, Asian and Latin American countries to rebuild their public health systems to deliver COVID vaccine into the arms of the hundreds of millions who have been denied access to it by the rich countries and companies they financed for private vaccine development and profits in the global north.

None Of Us Are Safe until ALL Of Us Are Safe!

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