President Biden signed a Republican bill yesterday that ended the national COVID-19 emergency after more than three years. DailMail.com has more.
Despite having strong objections to the bill earlier in the year, Biden announced in March he would not veto the legislation. It passed the Senate 68 to 23.
The legislation is a simple one-line measure saying that national emergency declared on March 13th 2020, “is hereby terminated”.
At the same time Biden signed the bill, the White House announced it is allocating $5 billion to create ‘next generation’ COVID-19 vaccines. The funding will be taken from money put aside by the Department of Health and Human Services for Covid tests and PPE.
Former President Trump first declared a national emergency that March to allow federal funding to be freed up for vaccines and testing centres.
It’s the third bill the President has signed into law since Republicans took the majority in the House – behind a GOP-led bill rescinding Washington, D.C.’s criminal justice reform and one that ordered the intelligence community to declassify information on COVID-19 origins.
The bill signed Monday was among the early bills the new House GOP put forward at the start of the year.
At the time, the administration warned the proposal would cause chaos.
More than 197 Democrats in the House voted against it.
“An abrupt end to the emergency declarations would create wide-ranging chaos and uncertainty throughout the health care system – for states, for hospitals and doctors’ offices, and, most importantly, for tens of millions of Americans,“ the administration said in a formal statement of administrative policy.
It was the second time House Democrats voted against a bill to get behind what they thought the President’s position was only for him to reverse course. House Democrats roundly voted against the D.C. crime bill, then Biden said he wouldn’t veto it – giving Senate Democrats cover to vote for the bill.
Does this mean unvaccinated people like me can finally travel to the United States? More on that soon, I hope.
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Does that mean I can take my mask off now and leave the house.
Not if you are transphobic, or a denier of the Climate thingy. Stay home. Stay diapered. Stay safe.
Just in time for his election campaign, a cynic might observe.
Derrrr, what an effing plonker!
Surely, it would better for the $5 Billion earmarked for COVID-19 vaccines to be returned to the US taxpayer instead.
End of the $camdemic? The $tabbing. The Lockdown$. The Diaper$. The Fear porn. Locked borders for the un$tabbed, but not for the invading armies heading across the Rio Grande?
Surely the $cience will concoct another US DoD-CIA event?
Estimated that 500 K died from the $tabs. Rona death rate same as the flu or 150 K or so dead….obviously an emergency…
Excellent stuff!
Apropos nada: was at local hospital today. Hardly a mask in sight in corridors or in the burn/lop/poison areas (clinical). The front desk of (very kind) volunteers didn’t quite know what the masking policy is. I think they are hoping it will just wither on the Jeremy.
Wither on the Jeremy, I will be borrowing that.
Oh I just posted a similar fresh comment above! I finally went in to the belly of the beast Sunday night.
Why not move on to that other great money spinner, the War on Terror?
The War on Terror is hereby terminated.
The DOD is hereby terminated.
etc.
Why quit now?
The military and the DoD are where this all started.
Read Paula Jones’s 5 part article at The Conservative Woman:
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/anatomy-of-the-sinister-covid-project/
it’s very interesting.
For Jones, please substitute Jardine, this tired old brain misfired.
I spent 6 hours in A&E Sunday night.
Just under half of the patients in the waiting room when I arrived were masked, by the time I left it was 98% unmasked. I like to think I helped turn the tide as a few took theirs off after looking around.
No comments from any staff, who were the usual mix of uncovered nosers and frequent adjusters/touchers.
Cue the music, Maestro! HALLELUJAH! HALLELUJAH! HALLELUJAH, HALLELUJAH, HALL….wait a minute. This emergency should have been declared over LONG ago, the moment it was determined not to be an existential threat. Better late than never, I guess.
There never was an emergency for one to be declared.
According to Katherine Watt, it is not as it seems.
https://bailiwicknews.substack.com/p/biden-rescinding-trump-biden-proclamation?utm_medium=email
‘…the PHE powers are not terminated on May 11.
There are at least three interlocking frameworks for the consolidation of power in executive hands during declared emergencies: the 1976 National Emergencies Act, the 1988 Stafford Act, and the 1944 Public Health Service Act as amended in 1983 to add the Public Health Emergencies (PHE) program.
Congress and Biden have rescinded the emergency proclamation issued under the 1976 National Emergencies Act, but the Public Health Emergency declaration issued by then-HHS Secretary Alex Azar on Jan. 31, 2020, effective Jan. 27, 2020, remains in force, along with the Stafford Act determination Trump issued on March 13, 2020.’
See the above link for more information.
( I confess, a lot of the article went over my head.)
Now that is very interesting, from the 4th part of Paula Jardine’s article (who I mistakenly referred to as Paula Jones in a senior moment):
“The HHS Secretary Alex Azar, to whom ASPR’s Kadlec reported, was the senior legal counsel at HHS when the PREP Act was passed in 2005. Azar co-operatively declared a public health emergency on January 30, 2020, backdating it to January 27.
He then made a PREP Act declaration on February 4, enhancing liability protection for any person or firm involved in developing countermeasures, including Innovio and Moderna.
The announcement said: ‘The world is facing an unprecedented pandemic. To effectively respond, there must be a more consistent pathway for Covered Persons to manufacture, distribute, administer or use Covered Countermeasures across the nation and the world.’
HHS Secretary determinations are unreviewable by the US courts.”
So the quite new position of HHS Secretary, who appears to be above at least a good part of the law, was involved in this whole suspension of normality.
Intriguing.
Did he use crayon?
“Does this mean unvaccinated people like me can finally travel to the United States?”. You wonder why that wasn’t explicitly stated in the bill. If there’s no more emergency, there’s no more reason for *any* measures or restrictions, including this one.