"The Pandemic is Over?" The Mind Boggles

This nonsense didn't come from the Trump campaign. It wasn't uttered by one of the president's surrogates out on the campaign trail. And it wasn't insinuated into one of the vice-president's answers during last week's debate.

This came from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy! Granted, they are part of the Executive Office of the White House, but their website offers this self-description: 

In 1976, Congress established the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) to provide the President and others within the Executive Office of the President with advice on the scientific, engineering, and technological aspects of the economy, national security, homeland security, health, foreign relations, the environment, and the technological recovery and use of resources, among other topics. [emphasis added]

So imagine the surprise when, according to The Washington Post, "the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy wrote that it considered 'ending the covid-19 pandemic' to be one of the president's major first-term accomplishments." More:

Four officials told The Daily Beast they viewed the White House statement as a personal slight and a public rebuke of their efforts to try and get control of the virus.

“It’s mind-boggling,” one official said of the White House’s assertion it had ended the pandemic. “There’s no world in which anyone can think that [statement] is true. Maybe the president. But I don’t see how even he can believe that. We have more than 70,000 new cases each day.”

Today's paper identified one source of the actual, true facts: HHS's Under-Secretary of Health and the administrations "testing czar," Adm. Brett Giroir, M.D. :

Data show a resurgence of the pandemic across the country, despite President Trump’s repeated claims to the contrary, Adm. Brett Giroir, the White House’s coronavirus testing czar, said Wednesday.

In a tweet Monday, Trump blamed the rise in novel coronavirus infections on increased testing. But in an interview, Giroir broke with the president and emphasized that the surge is real, citing climbing case numbers, hospitalizations and deaths across the country.

“It’s not just a function of testing,” Giroir said on NBC’s “Today” show. “Yes, we’re getting more cases identified, but the cases are actually going up. And we know that, too, because hospitalizations are going up.”

Reality check: The country is setting daily records of new cases, most recently 78,000-80,000 per day. And the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health's Vice-Dean Joshua Sharfstein says projections of 2,000 deaths per day are "not unrealistic."

Public-health law requires three things to work: truth, transparency, and trust. Anthony Fauci and Brett Giroir understand this. They are men of science. They hold (for the time being, anyway) two of the most critical public-health positions in the federal government. They can be trusted to tell us the truth. The Office of Science and Technology Policy, alas, cannot.