The CDC Wrecks The US Open

Here are four words I never thought I’d utter:

I miss Jen Psaki.

Yes, the White House mouthpiece with the stringy red hair, who dripped with condescension as she tried valiantly to defend the worst president in history was so much better than the empty vessel who took her place.

Karine Jean-Pierre is not only a dissembler, she’s terrible at it. It’s painful to watch press briefings where she spends most of the event flipping wildly through a thick binder of notes to find her prepared misdirection to questions.

Witness yesterday’s attempt not to answer Peter Doocy’s perfectly reasonable question about why migrants can stream across our southern border without being vaccinated against Covid, but those arriving by air cannot.

WATCH: Fox’s Peter Doocy grills Karine Jean-Pierre as to why unvaccinated people can't fly into the United States, but unvaccinated people can walk across the borderpic.twitter.com/wmoUirgsMf

— TV News Now (@TVNewsNow) August 29, 2022

Case in point, of course, is the idiotic decision to bar Serbian national Novak Djokovic entry to the U.S. because the superbly heathy 35-year-old refuses to be injected with a vaccine. One that we all know neither stops infection nor transmission of Covid. 

Fresh off a win of the men’s singles at Wimbledon, arguably the best tennis player in the world would be poised to win his 22nd Grand Slam title if the Centers for Disease Control would give up the last gasp of its failed and increasingly laughable Covid policies.

At this point forcing people into a vaccine they’ve had two years to take is a demand for obedience to the government rather than a public health measure. 

Yet the agency that has been slapped around repeatedly by the courts for exceeding its authority won’t budge on this nutty regulation.

Bloomberg asked a virologist why the CDC won’t back down.

Epidemiologist Katrine Wallace said she worries that eliminating the vaccine requirement for foreigners would send the wrong message to US citizens about the importance of getting shots.

Seriously?

Abolishing a vaccine mandate for foreigners would undermine efforts to get Americans to roll up their sleeves?  How about the fact that the shots don’t work as promised? That’s definitely not helping.

And as far as the vaccine preventing serious illness and hospitalizations, even that argument recedes as the virus appears to have mutated to a much milder version of itself.

Frankly, the danger posed to young athletes by Covid is minuscule.

Time for the CDC to admit that its rules make no sense. Unvaccinated air travelers pose no more danger to the American public than unvaccinated illegals do at the southern border.

By stubbornly holding on to a nonsensical regulation that’s keeping one of the best athletes in the world away, the CDC has damaged its tattered reputation even more in the U.S.

As for the president’s spokeswoman, will someone please tell her that simply repeating “That’s not how it works,” over and over is not how a competent press secretary would answer questions.