Wait, the pandemic’s over?

Just like that? Nothing about this pandemic, or the science behind it, or the vaccines that have stopped it, tells us that something changed suddenly and magically for vaccinated people yesterday. But today we can finally lose our masks, as President Biden’s CDC finally announced a full loosening of mask restrictions other than crowded indoor spaces and public transportation. Joe Biden wants you to believe that this day arrived by the good graces of science and his administration’s tireless work, but that would be incorrect. The public has been getting vaccinated since early January and we are now five months into 2021. It’s the same vaccine, yet we are supposed to buy the idea that today, May 13, 2021, will go down in history as the day the pandemic suddenly ended.

Perhaps Joe Biden and Anthony Fauci finally found Florida and Texas on a map and that is why they chose today to lift CDC mask recommendations. Or, more believably, perhaps the Biden administration found itself on the back end of its most disastrous week since taking over on January 20 and needed to apply an emergency brake as the news cycle spun out of its control. The Biden administration was faced with skyrocketing inflation, a catastrophic jobs report that shows the country sliding backwards, the news that Russian hackers shut down a pipeline which led to fuel shortages throughout most of the eastern and southern US — and just this morning, dodging questions on if the administration helped in any way facilitate a $5 million ransom payment, as well as a growing conflict between Israel and Gaza. Biden was hitting a 10 on the 1 to Jimmy Carter scale. For the first week since his presidency began, Joe Biden was in free-fall.

Other questions about the timing arise from the fact that this morning American Federation of Teachers Union President Randi Weingarten, who has been facing public backlash for her stances on school closures, suddenly came out and declared that schools must reopen in the fall of 2021. Dr Anthony Fauci echoed this sentiment during a cable news interview. This is a stunning reversal that suggests perhaps administration internal polling is playing a part. The further out we get from January 20, the harder it becomes to blame Biden’s stalled agenda and economic recovery on his predecessor. The Biden administration was heading into a weekend full of Sunday shows poised to talk about the administration’s current struggles. Now those programs will undoubtedly adjust their calculus to talk about the end of the pandemic, as the administration attempts to take a victory lap, one that several states like Florida and Texas have been taking since August of last year.

President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris were photographed smiling victoriously outside the White House, both maskless for the first time. But Biden, Fauci and Weingarten aren’t following the science: they are following Ron DeSantis — and presumably some disastrous internal polling.