Jen Psaki has gotten vaccinated three times for the coronavirus, and in accordance with White House protocol, the president’s press secretary had worn a mask while at work until the end of last month.
She also just got COVID-19 for the second time in exactly 140 days.
Psaki says that her infection, which she only detected with a PCR test in preparation for her (since-canceled) plan to join Biden’s trip to Europe, has only resulted in mild symptoms. And considering that fewer than 7% of all COVID-19 deaths documented by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention occurred among those younger than 50, an apparently healthy 43-year-old would likely be safe from any severe illness from the virus, even if she hadn’t been vaccinated, much less boosted.
In any sane world, a fully vaccinated young person contracting COVID-19 wouldn’t be worthy of note, and because President Joe Biden’s approval rating finally dipped below 40% in February, The Experts decided that it no longer is. But it does give the lie to the frenetic nature of The Science and specifically just how inane the Biden administration’s pandemic paranoia ultimately proved in practice.
Biden entered office with three vaccines (all extraordinarily successful at stopping severe disease, hospitalization, or death from COVID-19) ready for the entire adult population of the country. By the spring of his inaugural year, he could have claimed success on the most obvious, meaningful, and sensible metric: the coronavirus death rate among those who chose to get the vaccine. Instead, the White House pursued pandemic safetyism with no limiting principle, forcing fully vaccinated folks and unvaccinated children (the two groups with negligible risk of dying from COVID-19) to wear masks to protect the unvaccinated people who evidently didn’t care about the virus anyway.
As evidenced by the saga of Psaki, all that insanity didn’t even pay off in the end. The thrice-vaccinated and perennially-masked spokeswoman caught COVID-19 anyway, and despite her assertion that she doesn’t constitute a “close contact” with Biden under the CDC’s ever-shifting standards, she could have given it to anyone anyways.
None of this should matter, and none of it should have mattered since this time a year ago. At best, only medical-grade masks such as N95s, not the pieces of Kleenex required on airplanes and preschools, prevented the transmission of the pandemic over long periods of time, and in practice, it was the viral vaccines, miracles of modern medicine man only dreamed of centuries ago, that protected people from actually getting sick from the coronavirus. Hell, I got the Johnson & Johnson vaccine (the supposedly crappy one, according to The Experts) and haven’t masked willingly since, much less avoided weekends of packed bars and parties, and I haven’t caught COVID-19 once.
Psaki did everything right by the politically perilous metrics the White House decided to hinge its reputation on. She got COVID-19 anyway. At long last, the rules are catching up to meet the reality that these cases themselves are not, and never were, what mattered to begin with.
