This isn’t a gotcha question. Yes, Biden is the president and Fauci the head of NIAID and someone with considerable influence in the administration. But that’s not why I mention Biden and Fauci. I mention them because they are both 79 year-old men, and that alone is a significant risk factor for serious COVID (though I’m sure they both have access to excellent medical care, which always helps).

You see, over the last week, some Thinky Thought Leaders and The Substack Bois have decided We’re All Going To Get Omicron, so we might as well embrace a de facto Great Barrington Declaration (I was going to write a kinder, gentler Great Barrington Declaration, but there’s nothing much kinder or gentler about the current approach). Obviously, we need to crush the curve right now to keep society functioning, especially our healthcare system, but what’s the long term plan?

Are Biden and Fauci copasetic with getting Omicron? (and let’s not forget, we were doing a crappy job against Delta, and there are no guarantees that Delta will vanish either). Have they resigned themselves to Getting Omicron, or is there some sort of long-term plan?

I can, and I’m sure readers can too, come up with various policy responses, but I would like some journalists to commit some actual journalism and ask each of them if they expect to contract COVID (Omicron), especially since the official line is that it’s just a bad cold (‘bad’ is doing a lot of work here, and we also have no idea what this will mean for long COVID, which ‘we’ are just pretending doesn’t exist). Because if they don’t expect to contract COVID, then what’s their plan? Boosters every few months? Never leaving the house? And does it ‘scale’ to the rest of us?

Whatever it is, hopefully, it involves firing COVID czar Zients.