Some health advisers to Biden’s transition team call on the administration to change its Covid strategy.

From the NY Times:

The authors are all big names in American medicine; several, including Dr. Luciana Borio, a former acting chief scientist at the Food and Drug Administration, have held high-ranking positions in government. The driving force behind the articles is Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, an oncologist, medical ethicist and University of Pennsylvania professor who advised former President Barack Obama.

They say the first thing the administration needs to do is to step back and take a broader vision, by recognizing that Covid-19 is here to stay.

Dr. Emanuel, Dr. Bright and Dr. Borio write that the first step toward the “new normal” requires recognizing that the coronavirus is one of several respiratory viruses circulating, including influenza.

I feel like I’ve heard that before, but I can’t remember where.

The authors also said that vaccine mandates should be imposed more broadly, including for schoolchildren, and that N95 masks should be made free and readily available to all Americans, as should oral treatments for Covid.

The authors write that policymakers should “retire previous public health categorizations” and “focus on a new category: the aggregate risk of all respiratory infections.” The nation, they said, needs to figure out how much hospitalization and death will overload health care systems, and then use that metric to trigger emergency measures.

Oh, so really it’s the same old plan but harder. And now including the flu. No thanks.

In other news, Lori Lightfoot is mired in a battle with the city’s teachers unions.

Mayor Lightfoot raised her voice repeatedly at a news conference with Martinez Wednesday evening – asking why the union had taken an action to go remote when the safest place for children is in school.

“The worst possible thing that we can do is abandon the science; abandon the data,” Mayor Lightfoot said.

Remember that the data has ALWAYS said that schools were safe, with or without $100 million in spending. And AFTER the $100 million in spending AND a group that’s widely vaccinated……the union claims it’s still unsafe. Hint: it’s not about teaching. The union knows they can get whatever they want because there’s really nobody on the other side of the negotiating table.