COVID pandemic isn’t over, says Missouri Democrat Busch Valentine in break with Biden
Trudy Busch Valentine, the Missouri Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate, said last week the COVID-19 pandemic isn’t over, breaking with President Joe Biden’s stance.
Busch Valentine’s comments, in a Thursday interview with The Star’s editorial board, come as she faces a Republican opponent, Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, who has built a reputation fighting mask and vaccine mandates.
“I don’t think it’s over. I think people are still dying,” Busch Valentine said.
Busch Valentine, a nurse and heiress to the Anheuser Busch beer fortune, said keeping COVID-19 under control is important and emphasized the importance of talking about vaccination booster shots. The federal government has made boosters available to all adults, through the fall, but are waiting on more funding from Congress to purchase more doses. Hundreds of people continue to die each day from the virus.
“And we have to be respectful of each other enough that if we have COVID or if we’re around somebody who’s susceptible to COVID or … has an immune disorder that they feel that they need more protection, we just have to be respectful and wear a mask,” she said.
In the editorial board interview, Busch Valentine defended mask mandates early in the pandemic, but she indicated they aren’t necessary now. The mandates were important in the beginning, she said, “because people didn’t realize how deadly it was and people would not have masked up without a mandate.”
Biden attracted criticism from some public health experts after his stark declaration the pandemic was “over” in a “60 Minutes” interview broadcast last week.
Some Republicans reacted with a certain amount of schadenfreude, saying Biden had acknowledged what many people effectively already believed. Earlier this week, a federal judge blocked the Biden administration’s vaccination and mask mandates for Head Start facilities.
“We were right,” Schmitt tweeted alongside a screenshot of an Atlantic article about the candidate with the headline, “The Unmasked Avenger of Missouri.”
The White House moved quickly to qualify his remarks, saying the president has made clear that COVID-19 remains a problem.
“What he believes is we can acknowledge that, the massive amount of progress that we have made,” said White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre on Tuesday. “Just think about where we were when this President walked into this administration.”
His comments complicated an effort to get additional funding to address COVID-19 as Congress negotiates the latest version of their government funding bill. The administration is pushing for more money to get more booster shots to help prevent the spread of the Omicron variant of the virus.
U.S. Sen. Roger Marshall on Thursday introduced a resolution that would declare the end of the national state of emergency for COVID-19. Marshall has long pushed for an end to the national emergency, which expands power for the executive branch.
He got a similar resolution through the Senate in March on a 48-47 vote when there weren’t enough Democrats present to block the resolution. The House has not acted on the bill and, at the time, Biden pledged he would veto it.
“Since President Biden used his appearance on 60 Minutes to declare COVID is over, he must immediately terminate the COVID-19 national emergency declaration and wind down other emergency authorities that his Administration continues to force us to live under,” Marshall said.
Should Marshall succeed in forcing an end to the national emergency, which remains unlikely in a Congress still controlled by the Democratic Party, it would also have implications for the Biden administration’s proposal to forgive up to $20,000 in student loan debt.
The proposal relies on powers granted to the president during a national emergency that allow the administration to make changes to the country’s federal loan program.
