Covid ‘not here to stay’ says Biden after dodging question five times

Responding to multiple shouted queries asking the US president if Americans should be “prepared to live with Covid forever”, Joe Biden said on Friday that he does not believe the novel coronavirus is “here to stay” — in its present form at least.

At the end of a press conference in the White House, a reporter repeated her question about the duration of the pandemic multiple times, before more reporters joined the chorus.

“No, I don’t think Covid is here to stay. But having Covid in the environment here, and in the world is probably here to stay. But Covid as we’re dealing with it now is not here to stay,” Mr Biden replied.

“The new normal doesn’t have to be. We have so many new tools we’re developing and continue to develop that can contain Covid and other strains of Covid,” he added.

The president also expressed his hope that the future would be better with improved testing.

“We are very different today than we were a year ago even though we still have problems... We are going to be able to control this. The new normal isn’t going to be what it is now – it is going to be better,” he added.

Infectious diseases experts, including the CDC director Rochelle Walensky, have said that while the global pandemic response may end, coronavirus outbreaks in some form are likely to become “endemic”.

Global vaccine inequity also risks creating new variants of the virus as long as pools of Covid remain in the population.

While over 70 per cent of people in western nations like the US, Canada and the UK have received at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine, some nations in Africa are yet to immunise even 5 per cent of their population with one jab, according to a tracker by the New York Times.

“Vaccine inequity will leave us in pandemic longer, less healthy and poorer,” infectious disease physician Jeremy Farrar, who is also the director of the global health philanthropy body the Wellcome Trust, said in a tweet on Wednesday.

“This is wrong whatever your view of the world, whether from an economic, financial, scientific or public health perspective, a moral or ethical one, whether you care about Covid or not,” he said.