"Biden COVID advisors call for long-term lockdowns, masking"

"The current easing of COVID-19 restrictions in the U.S. may not last long under the Biden administration, according to epidemiologist Michael Osterholm, a member of the now-dissolved COVID-19 advisory board for the Biden transition.

'As fast as we’re opening restaurants, we’re likely to be closing them in the near term,' Osterholm, former advisor to CEPI, the infectious disease group founded by Bill Gates, said on Meet the Press last week.

'The fact is that the surge that is likely to occur with this new variant from England is going to happen in the next six to 14 weeks,' he added. 'And if we see that happen … we are going to see something like we have not seen yet in this country,' Osterholm said.

'You know, we’re all loosening up right now,' but 'what we have to do now is also anticipate this and understand that we’re going to have change quickly.'

Osterholm’s call for new lockdowns reflects growing support among top Biden administration advisors for long-term, draconian COVID-19 restrictions.

'Until everybody who wants to get vaccinated can be vaccinated, we really do need to double down on the masking, the social distancing, all of the measures we’ve been talking about for months now,' Cecilia Gounder, another member of Biden’s COVID-19 advisory board, said on Friday.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, now the Chief Medical Advisor to the president, similarly told Fox News yesterday that it was 'conceivable that you might be able to pull back a bit on some of the public health measures as we get into the late fall of this year.' He added that 'there’s no guarantee of that,' however.

Senior White House COVID-19 Advisor Andy Slavitt even suggested that children, many of them still not back in school, 'should circulate less,' comparing them to 'mosquitos carrying a tropical disease.'...

Though Michael Osterholm has claimed that 'a complete lockdown, closing almost everything' was 'the only thing' that got the recent spread of COVID-19 in Europe under control, the Stanford team found no 'significant benefits' from shutting down...

'If you compare the group of countries that had less restrictive versus more restrictive orders … the very, very restrictive lockdowns did no better than less restrictive policies,' explained Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, one of the study’s authors."