A number of former health advisers to Joe Biden’s transition team on Thursday called for a major shift in the nation's COVID-19 response strategy to one that recognizes the virus as a “new normal” for society, an idea that the president pushed back on Friday, promising more improvements to the state of the pandemic.
The three doctors penned an opinion article in the American Medical Association's journal about the need for a new national approach to COVID-19 that does not make its goal zero cases.
They noted that the emergence of the omicron variant sparked concern about a “perpetual state of emergency.”
“A ‘new normal with COVID’ in January 2022 is not living without COVID-19,” they wrote.
But Biden on Friday pushed back on the idea that COVID is "here to stay," highlighting mitigation tools and ongoing research.
"Having COVID in the environment here and in the world is probably here to stay. But COVID as we're dealing with it now is not here to stay," he said.
"We have so many more tools we're developing and continuing to develop that will contain COVID and other strains of COVID," he added, pointing to the fact that schools had learned to operate in-person during the pandemic and that his administration has made recent investments in at-home testing.
"We're going to be able to control this. The new normal is not going to be what it is now. It's going to be better," he concluded.
Biden's former advisers in their article wrote that the United States must come up with an appropriate expectation for coronavirus deaths and hospitalizations in a given year as the virus becomes endemic, or regularly found among the population, like the flu.
“What constitutes appropriate thresholds for hospitalizations and death, at what cost, and with what trade-offs remains undetermined,” Drs. Ezekiel Emanuel, Michael Osterholm and Celine Gounder warned.
Without an updated plan, they said, more Americans will “unnecessarily experience morbidity and mortality, health inequities will widen, and trillions will be lost from the US economy,” they explained. “This time, the nation must learn and prepare effectively for the future.”
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the president’s chief medical adviser, has also echoed their perspective in recent interviews, including with Spectrum News.
If more people get vaccinated in 2022, Fauci said last week, COVID cases and hospitalizations will decrease “until we don't eradicate it or eliminate it but as it gets to such a low level that it doesn't interfere with our function as a society.”
Asked on Thursday whether Americans will need to get a coronavirus booster shot every year, as they do for the flu, Fauci said it was still unclear.
“I think we need to wait to see what the durability of protection of the third shot is,” he said. “The jury is out on this.”
But the White House spokeswoman on Thursday said that President Biden’s goal for the virus had not changed.
“The president’s ultimate goal continues to be to defeat the virus,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said, pointing to measures the administration has taken such as expanding vaccinations, purchasing tests and aiding hospitals.
She also said she wasn’t aware of whether the president had been advised by his health advisers about the indefinite existence of COVID-19.
“I don’t believe the president has,” she said. “The president’s goal and objective now is to save as many lives as possible. And we know what works.”
The group of health experts, led by former Biden adviser Emanuel, also published two proposed national strategies for a ‘new normal’ with COVID-19, one focused on vaccines and therapeutics and another focused on testing and mitigation.