Despite government vaccination mandates, members of the Biden administration and reporters were among the 72 prominent people who tested positive for COVID-19 after attending the annual Gridiron Dinner in Washington, D.C.
The infected included Attorney General Merrick Garland; Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo; New York Mayor Eric Adams; Reps. Joaquin Castro, D-Texas, and Adam Schiff, D-Calif., the chairman of the Intelligence Committee; Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine; Vice President Kamala Harris’ communications director, Jamal Simmons; first lady Jill Biden’s press secretary, Michael LaRosa; and Valerie Biden Owens, the president’s sister, NBC News reported.
Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, who has been fully vaccinated and boosted, tested positive on Friday, NBC noted. His office emphasized that the secretary experienced only mild symptoms.
Last week, the spokesman for Nancy Pelosi, who was not at the Gridiron event, said the “fully vaccinated and boosted” House speaker was asymptomatic after testing positive for COVID-19 and “is thankful for the robust protection the vaccine has provided.”
The ability of the vaccines to reduce the severity of illness has been the last argument of promoters of the shots, after acknowledgements by CDC Director Rochelle Walensky and others that they have failed to stop infection and transmission. However, the dominant omicron variant and a recently discovered subvariant have presented with mild symptoms among both the vaccinated and the unvaccinated.
And there is government data indicating there are more infections as well as deaths and hospitalizations among the vaccinated than the unvaccinated.
Meanwhile, Biden’s COVID-19 tsar, Dr. Ashish Jha, said the federal government is not “excessively concerned” about the new omicron subvariant.
“We don’t have to let it dictate our lives anymore,” he said.
CNN medical analyst Dr. Leana Wen expressed that view in a column for the Washington Post titled “The Gridiron Club outbreak shows what living with covid-19 looks like.”
In a series of tweets promoting her column, she said that accepting that COVID-19 infections “will be part of our lives doesn’t mean that we are giving up.”
“Rather, it means acknowledging that we finally have the tools to live with it, and that people will make different choices from our own.”
In contrast, Mother Jones reporter Tom Philpott’s wrote a piece titled The Gridiron Club Superspreader Event Shows We Can’t Just Go Back to Normal.”
EDITOR’S NOTE: Last year, America’s doctors, nurses and paramedics were celebrated as frontline heroes battling a fearsome new pandemic. Today, under Joe Biden, tens of thousands of these same heroes are denounced as rebels, conspiracy theorists, extremists and potential terrorists. Along with massive numbers of police, firemen, Border Patrol agents, Navy SEALs, pilots, air-traffic controllers, and countless other truly essential Americans, they’re all considered so dangerous as to merit termination, their professional and personal lives turned upside down due to their decision not to be injected with the experimental COVID vaccines. Biden’s tyrannical mandate threatens to cripple American society – from law enforcement to airlines to commercial supply chains to hospitals. It’s already happening. But the good news is that huge numbers of “yesterday’s heroes” are now fighting back – bravely and boldly. The whole epic showdown is laid out as never before in the sensational October issue of WND’s monthly Whistleblower magazine, titled “THE GREAT AMERICAN REBELLION: ‘We will not comply!’ COVID-19 power grab ignites bold new era of national defiance.”
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