'The truth is the truth': Biden's chief of staff Ron Klain doubles down on morbid White House statement saying the vaccinated have 'done the right thing' and the unvaccinated are 'looking at a winter of severe illness and death for you and your families'
White House chief of staff Ron Klain doubled down on the White House's doomsday warning for the unvaccinated on Monday.
'We are intent on not letting Omicron disrupt work and school for the vaccinated. You've done the right thing, and we will get through this,' said White House coronavirus response coordinator Jeff Zients in a press briefing.
'For the unvaccinated, you're looking at a winter of severe illness and death for yourselves, your families, and the hospitals you may soon overwhelm.'
'Who is this for? Unvaccinated Americans are not going to be persuaded by messaging like this,' New York Magazine writer Olivia Nuzzi questioned on Twitter.
'The truth is the truth,' Klain wrote back.
White House chief of staff Ron Klain doubled down on the White House's doomsday warning for the unvaccinated on Monday
Elsewhere in the briefing, Zients insisted that vaccines are effective, even against the highly transmissible Omicron variant.
'Our vaccines work against Omicron, especially for people who get booster shots when they are eligible,' he said. 'If you are vaccinated, you could test positive. But if you do get COVID, your case will likely be asymptomatic or mild.'
'One hundred sixty thousand unvaccinated people have already needlessly lost their lives just since June, and this number will continue to go up until the unvaccinated take action.'
The White House has attempted to shift messaging away from case counts and towards severe illness.
'We're getting to the point now where ... it's about severity,' said Xavier Becerra, the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, in a meeting with reporters this week. 'It's not about cases. It's about severity.'
'There's a degree of difficulty that now comes in trying to decide what means it's severe and what you have to do to stay out of that threshold of severity,' Becerra said. 'But I think that's where we're heading, is to try to be able to tell the public that.'
Republicans were quick to criticize the dire message from the White House.
'This is what Joe Biden has given America, a climate of fear and recrimination - all to augment his power and cover over his epic failures of leadership,' Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., wrote on Twitter.
'We are all in this together unless you are in the outgroup in which case you gonna die,' wrote Federalist publisher Ben Domenech.
'“They deserve to die.” - President of the United States,' Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, wrote on Twitter.
'President Biden’s warning of a “winter of severe illness and death” makes President Jimmy Carter’s “malaise” speech urging Americans to lower expectations seem a cheerful upper by contrast. How do Democrats run as the party of “severe illness and death”? This is madness,' wrote former House GOP speaker Newt Gingrich on Twitter.
Moderna Inc. said on Monday that a booster dose of its COVID-19 vaccine appeared to be protective against the fast-spreading Omicron variant in laboratory testing - and that the current version of the vaccine would continue to be Moderna's 'first line of defense against Omicron.'
As of Dec. 19, the daily average case count in the US was up to 133,012, up 21% from two weeks ago. The number of people hospitalized with Covid-19 was up to 69,387 per day on average, a 16% increase from two weeks ago. Deaths were up 9%, to 1,296 per day.
As cases rise across the nation, the fastest spread is currently in the Northeast. While the Delta variant continues to be the dominant strain, Omicron cases are rising quickly and health officials believe soon the Omicron variant will become dominant.
About 61% of Americans are fully vaccinated against Covid-19.
Klain has become the White House's dominant public defender on Twitter, and even former chiefs of staff have questioned how he has the time to be so active on social media given the demands of the job.
Josh Bolten, who served as chief of staff to President George W. Bush, said in a recent discussion at American University's Sine Institute of Policy & Politics: 'Frankly I don't know how he does it – how he actually keeps up with what he's supposed to be focused on, which I think he is keeping up, and doing all this public communicating at the same time.'
He spoke of how 'an errant tweet from Ron Klain can throw a news cycle spinning off in a bad direction.'
'I'm both impressed and sort of unimpressed that he gives a significant amount of his time to that,' he added.
Former Barack Obama Chief of Staff Jack Lew also argued against the idea, telling interviewer Tara Palmeri he doesn't maintain a Twitter account.
'I don't think that's a good way for public policy to be made,' he said of Twitter generally.
'I personally think senior officials should have mediated social media presences, if they have them at all, and avoid getting into the back and forth,' said Lew. But he noted that Klain has schooled numerous Democratic presidential candidates in debate prep sessions and that 'Ron is as good of a debater as you're going to find.'
He said he was as good as anyone at 'not making mistakes - but you don't get to make any mistakes.'
Klain landed his boss in hot water last month when a federal judge upheld a stay on the president's vaccine order for private businesses, citing Klain's retweet of an MSNBC host's thoughts on the new OSHA rule.
'OSHA doing this vaxx mandate as an emergency workplace safety rule is an ultimate work-around for the Federal govt to require vaccinations,' MSNBC anchor Stephanie Ruhle posted.
One member of the bench, Judge Kurt Engelhardt, ruled that Klain's retweet was an 'endorsement' of the phrase 'work-around.'
Engelhardt wrote in the court's opinion that public interest is 'served by maintaining our constitutional structure and maintaining the liberty of individuals to make intensely personal decisions according to their own convictions.
Appearing to refer to Klain he added, 'Even, or perhaps particularly, when those decisions frustrate government officials.'
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