On Thursday, six medical experts close to the White House published three op-eds in the Journal of the American Medical Association, arguing that the time had come for a new approach to the pandemic—one that sets aside the campaign for eradication in favor of living with the disease. covid-19, one op-ed argued, should no longer even be tracked on its own but monitored together with other respiratory viruses, such as the flu—the sort of thing that might be done by epidemiologists rather than by all of us refreshing graphs on the Times’ Web site day and night. The argument was particularly notable because the six experts had all been advisers to President Joe Biden’s covid-19 transition team. “A ‘new normal with COVID’ in January 2022 is not living without COVID-19,” Ezekiel Emanuel, of the University of Pennsylvania, Celine Gounder, of N.Y.U., and Michael Osterholm, of the University of Minnesota, wrote. But they believed that the long era of emergency—the one defined by a wartime feeling and frequent briefings from Anthony Fauci—should draw to a close.
“The Biden Administration’s intentions are usually quite good, but it's messaging is often contradictory,” the epidemiologist William Hanage said.
Even as the Omicron wave spikes, some outside experts believe that the time has come for Anthony Fauci and the White House to declare a new phase in the pandemic.
“A ‘new normal with COVID’ in January 2022 is not living without COVID-19,” Ezekiel Emanuel, of the University of Pennsylvania, Celine Gounder, of N.Y.U., and Michael Osterholm, of the University of Minnesota, wrote. But they believed that the long era of emergency—the one defined by a wartime feeling and frequent briefings from Anthony Fauci—should draw to a close.
That same morning, I spent half an hour interviewing Fauci by Zoom, to try to understand how the Administration saw the current state of the pandemic. Lately, he had been dropping some hints that his view might not be too different from that of the JAMA experts: on ABC last Sunday, he’d said that it might make sense at some point to focus not on covid cases but on hospitalizations, a change that would organize policy around the medical effort to identify and treat the very sick rather than a social campaign to stop the spread of the disease. I asked him what time line he had in mind. “It’s not necessarily something that we’re going to do—or even seriously consider doing—tomorrow,”
Fauci said. But eventually the Omicron wave would come to an end,
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