That certainly seemed to be the main concern from the Washington Post’s editorial board late yesterday:

Mr. Biden has not ended the official pandemic emergency. When the official emergency ends, some 15 million will lose Medicaid coverage; the reason for a student loan repayment pause will end; the rationale for Trump-era border restrictions, still held in place by a court, will disappear. All this policy transition must not be done carelessly or hastily.

Perhaps the biggest worry stemming from Mr. Biden’s comment is that it will further undermine political resolve in Congress to keep up the fight against covid. Already, Mr. Biden’s request for additional funding for vaccines, diagnostic testing and therapeutics has languished.

As Karol Markowicz remarked on Twitter, this isn’t a scientific argument. It’s an argument for political policies that wouldn’t fly without an emergency decree. To some extent, it’s not even a coherent argument. Congress can budget for COVID tasks and actions through the normal appropriations process. In fact, that process should be finishing now, except that Congress has once again failed to produce a budget under normal order for reasons that have nothing to do with a pandemic.

Nevertheless, the emergency aspect of COVID has long since passed. It will be an ongoing issue for HHS for years, perhaps decades, so Congress can fund the necessary research and other programs as part of HHS’ overall funding. The need for emergency funding ended after the first budget cycle of the pandemic.

Similarly, Politico’s report on the reaction among Biden’s allies seems more like a lament for the end of rule — and spending — by decree:

“We are not where we need to be if we are going to quote ‘live with the virus’,” Anthony Fauci, Biden’s chief medical adviser, said on Monday. “We still must be aware of how unusual this virus is and continues to be in its ability to evolve into new variants which defy the standard public health mechanisms of addressing an outbreak.”

Biden’s pronouncement is likely to give Republicans more ammo to oppose the White House’s funding request to keep the federal Covid response afloat. The White House is seeking more than $22 billion, though Democrats’ faith they could secure that amount in an upcoming budget bill was waning even before the airing of “60 Minutes.”

It could also complicate the administration’s campaign for people to seek updated vaccines ahead of a potential winter surge — an uphill battle that health officials say will be the true determinant for whether the U.S. can emerge from the pandemic.

Democrats were not going to get that additional funding anyway. Republicans have demanded a full accounting of the spending in Biden’s American Rescue Plan, the $1.9 trillion stimulus/relief plan of March 2021 to find out where that money went. It’s not even clear that all of the money for pandemic-related tasks has been spent yet, let alone on what. The problem with emergency spending is a lack of accountability, while normally appropriated funds allow for more congressional oversight. Republicans made it clear last year — long before Biden’s 60 Minutes declaration — that they would not approve more emergency spending without full accountability on what had already gone out.

Stories like this probably don’t help, either:

California State University San Marcos expanded its “anti-racist” library collection with the help of federal COVID relief dollars, according to a recent announcement from the school.

“I am incredibly excited about the library’s tangible commitment to developing our collections in ways that wholly represent the experiences and voices of communities and groups that have been historically underrepresented and marginalized in academia,” librarian Lalitha Nataraj said in a CSUSM news release. “To me, this is a clear sign that we are moving toward a more anti-racist praxis.”

Politico tried to steer this back to the scientific realm, but failed:

More than 300 people a day are still dying from Covid-19, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and tens of thousands more are hospitalized. Biden officials and public health experts worry that a wave of cases during the colder months could once again disrupt Americans’ lives, and believe the emergence of another variant down the road is inevitable.

This is simply false. More than three hundred people a day are dying with COVID, not from COVID. Despite more than two years of demanding that the CDC distinguish correlative and causative deaths and hospital admissions, the CDC still lumps both together. Now that the variants have proven much less impactful but much more transmissible — the normal development of respiratory viruses — more people carry COVID without getting complications of COVID. That means we’re tracking normal deaths in this series with unrelated exposures of COVID, not COVID-caused deaths.

And even with correlative deaths in the mix, the CDC death rate has been stable for months now:

The same is true for correlative hospital admissions. The only segment of the population seeing any significant increase in correlative hospital admissions since the winter are seniors, and even that’s declining of late:

The new variants predictably create far fewer seriously acute cases. Hospital utilization and death caused by COVID has dropped at least to manageable levels, if not to nearly negligible counts. Vaccines and treatments now abound. The pandemic and the emergency are both over.

It’s high time we recognize that, too, writes Leana Wen in the Washington Post:

Things changed with the arrival of vaccines. Many individuals, once vaccinated, began resuming their pre-pandemic activities. Others, like my family, waited until younger kids could receive the shots. By now, the vast majority of Americans have been vaccinated or recovered from covid-19 or both. The preventive antibody Evusheld and treatments such as Paxlovid and monoclonal antibodies provide further protection against severe illness.

As a result, most Americans have turned the page and abandoned mitigation measures. By August, according to a Morning Consult poll, just 14 percent of adults viewed covid as a severe health risk. This tracks with their other findings that only 28 percent still mask in all settings, while 75 percent were comfortable with indoor dining.

For most of the country, the pandemic is effectively over because it is no longer altering people’s day-to-day lives. To them, covid has evolved from a dire deadly disease to one that’s more akin to the flu. It’s still something people want to avoid, and they’ll take basic steps to do so, such as getting an annual vaccine. Some might choose to take extra precautions, such as masking in indoor settings. But the societal end of the pandemic has already arrived, a sentiment reflected in Biden’s comment.

The scientific end of the pandemic might have arrived, too.

More to the point: the governmental end of the pandemic has arrived — and should have arrived a year ago. Instead, those in office clung to the authority granted by the emergency as a cover for their own ambitions for complete dictatorial power over how Americans live their lives. The hue and cry over the idea that this power should ever end gives a very good clue as to why we should never have allowed its use in the first place — not by either administration, but certainly not by Biden and his collectivist cronies.

The pandemic is dead. Endemic COVID will become a permanent part of our lives. COVID authoritarianism, however, does not have to be — and we should insist on ending it now.