On Thursday, at the conclusion of a speech regarding economic issues and the COVID-19 pandemic, Fox News correspondent Peter Doocy questioned President Joe Biden about the re-imposition by federal health authorities of a guideline for fully vaccinated individuals to wear face masks in certain circumstances. Doocy noted how Biden had previously promoted the idea that getting vaccinated against COVID-19 would hopefully lead to no longer wearing face masks, but the Fox journalist missed the point. There’s no grand conspiracy or hypocrisy here — circumstances change. Biden laid out the facts, referencing how the so-called delta variant of the pandemic-causing virus has led to a shifted approach.
Doocy claimed that Biden “made it sound like the vaccine was the ticket to losing the mask forever,” and the president pointedly replied as follows:
‘That [was] true at the time, because I thought there were people who were going to understand that getting vaccinated made a gigantic difference. And what happened was, the new variant came along, they didn’t get vaccinated, it was spread more rapidly, and people were getting sick. That’s the difference.’
Check out Biden’s remarks below:
Biden has very little patience for Peter Doocy's attempted gotcha pic.twitter.com/H9GnWl6Usa
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 29, 2021
Recently, the delta variant has fueled a significant rise in COVID-19 cases around the country, with a daily average (across the seven days ending on Wednesday) of nearly 67,000 newly reported cases across the U.S., according to The New York Times. In Florida alone, a daily average of over 7,200 people were hospitalized with COVID-19 as of the same point, making the state’s average hospitalization level significantly higher than those of all other states in the country.
