WH goes into damage control mode after Kam...wait for it

[Counselor706]

The White House issued a statement Saturday clarifying remarks that Vice President Kamala Harris made one day earlier in which she admitted the Biden administration did not anticipate waves of COVID-19 variant infections.

While speaking with the Los Angeles Times, Harris admitted the Delta and Omicron variants of COVID-19 caught the Biden administration by surprise.

"We didn't see Delta coming. I think most scientists did not — upon whose advice and direction we have relied — didn't see Delta coming," Harris said. "We didn't see Omicron coming. And that's the nature of what this, this awful virus has been, which as it turns out, has mutations and variants."

Source

 

[pecksniff]

How could anybody have anticipated the variants? It is a general principle that any virus will mutate and evolve, but nobody can foresee the details.

 

[Rightguide]

How could anybody have anticipated the variants? It is a general principle that any virus will mutate and evolve, but nobody can foresee the details.

You would have burned Trump and Pence both at the preverbal stake if either had said the same thing.

 

[WillJ8787]

How could anybody have anticipated the variants? It is a general principle that any virus will mutate and evolve, but nobody can foresee the details.

These Republitards here are clairvoyant.... didn't you know?

 

[pecksniff]

You would have burned Trump and Pence both at the preverbal stake if either had said the same thing.

Trump would have denied the existence of the variants.

 

[YDB95]

You would have burned Trump and Pence both at the preverbal stake if either had said the same thing.

No, we wouldn't. You see, Trump in particular said things that really were worth getting outraged over several times every day. Pence, of course, didn't say much of anything. If he had said this particular thing? Well, context matters: in the context of Harris' comment, nearly a year into the Biden administration, it's against the backdrop of a government that is trying to do its part to get the pandemic under control. (Not to mention that she's probably right, no one had any way of knowing exactly what was going to happen next.) If it were a year ago and Pence had said it, it would be against the backdrop of a president who told his followers to drink bleach, didn't even take the threat seriously when he himself was sick, took credit for research that he had done absolutely nothing to help along...I could go on, but we all know you prefer to just pretend context doesn't exist.

 

[LittleDixie]

How could anybody have anticipated the variants? It is a general principle that any virus will mutate and evolve, but nobody can foresee the details.

Because it is a general principle that any virus will mutate and evolve, and nobody can foresee the details.

No one is asking for anyone to forsee the details. Just that there will be variants.

 

[LupusDei]

It could be disputable should Delta been anticipated, it wasn't so surprising. It wasn't a catastrophe either. Omicron though, that's something else.

Nobody really expected a COVID-19 variant seriously rivaling measles for the crown of most transmissible disease ever. This thing replicates in airways tissues 70 times faster than Delta, and reduces two dose vaccine effectiveness to just 30% against infection/transmission (still ~80% effective prevention against critical illnesses/death; and booster restores protection to 80% against infection/transmission, 96% against critical illnesses/death). This is very likely a thing almost everyone will get in one sweeping wave, and possibly within a couple months already.

So far we really don't yet know how "mild" it would really be in older unvaccinated people, most of data so far is dominated by cases in younger and vaccinated or previously exposed patients. Even if the preliminary assumptions it causes abroad 30% less hospitalizations hold true, the sheer number of cases due the extraordinary speed of transmission will be, troublesome, to put it mildly.