Two years into the COVID-19 pandemic, the latest wave of a highly infectious subvariant of the Omicron flavor of the virus is surging across the planet–though due to the vaccines and better treatment options available in 2022 compared to two years ago, the rate of hospitalization and death is far below previous waves of the pandemic.
As CBS4 Denver reports, this reductive in the relative lethality of COVID today compared to two years ago has given politicians who have downplayed the severity of the pandemic from the beginning like Colorado’s Rep. Ken Buck a chance to make some pitifully ignorant statements–and as readers know, Buck never misses that chance:
Colorado Congressman Ken Buck tweeted that the COVID pandemic was “grossly overstated.” The Republican representing Colorado’s 4th Congressional District tweeted the comment on Saturday morning.
The tweet was part of a retweet from the White House with a picture of President Joe Biden wearing a face mask and making phone calls just days after he tested positive for COVID-19.
Buck tweeted, “If a 79-year-old man can get Covid and return to work days after, the dangers of the pandemic were grossly overstated. Our public health establishment was either systematically deceptive or systematically wrong.”
President Joe Biden is another example of the latest Omicron variant’s ability to partially evade the immunity provided by vaccines and boosters, having tested positive last week. Biden’s relatively mild case of the disease is attributed to Biden being fully vaccinated and twice boosted, as well as being treated since testing positive last week with the new anti-viral drug Paxlovid approved for emergency use in December of last year.
To get to this point where “a 79-year-old man can get COVID and return to work days after,” a “moonshot” effort to develop vaccines and effective treatments was necessary. The development of COVID vaccines with help from Donald Trump’s Operation Warp Speed was a huge missed political opportunity for Republicans, who were prevented from capitalizing on the success due to their base’s unfounded fears.
But the truth is, we don’t need to explain any of this. What we have here is a sitting member of Congress calling a pandemic that killed over one million Americans “grossly overstated.” In 2020, when the death toll from COVID-19 was still mostly hypothetical, maybe you could get away with this.
But how can anybody say that now over the bodies of a million dead Americans?
It’s not the first time Ken Buck has left us with our jaws agape. The only question is how low can Buck go in the moral freefall of today’s Republican Party, and Buck keeps breaking his own personal records.
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Not that people outside of America matter, but COVID's claimed at least 6.4 million lives worldwide. That's more than the entire population of Colorado!
Judging by that shirt, we all know how low Bucko can go. The real blame lies with the Whacko Weld County Commissioners who have adamantly denied the pandemic threat to the point of silencing their County health office. One of those former Commissioners is now running for Congress in CD8. Let's not spare her the shame!
So more than twice the number of American deaths as WWII American deaths is overblown. Got it, Qen
"Our public health establishment was either systematically deceptive or systematically wrong."
The CDC site now says 90 million cases, 1.2 million deaths; The calculation of "excess deaths" because of COVID is now 1,135,577.
He could look up the number of deaths in the counties he represents on the state public health department's site here.
Or he could take a look at the data being tracked by Charles Gaba, who tracks COVID numbers since May 2020, when vaccines were more widely available and began to provide protection. Gaba notes a county by county correlation between the 2020 vote percentage for Trump, the extent of vaccination, and the number of deaths. On July 15, 2022; Gaba concludes "There's still a clear and dramatic correlation between how much of the population has been 2-dose vaccinated and its COVID death rate since last May. The least-vaccinated decile has a death rate ~3.3x higher than the most-vaccinated decile."
I suspect that some of the counties Buck represents are among those high Trump %, low vaccination, and higher death rates.