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President Joe Biden has announced he will begin wearing a mask again after first lady Jill Biden tested positive for COVID-19 again.
The decision was announced by White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre.
“President Biden tested negative last night for Covid-19 and tested negative again today,” she told reporters on Tuesday. “He is not experiencing any symptoms. As far as the steps that he is taking, since the president was with the first lady yesterday, he will be masking while indoors and around people in alignment with CDC guidance.”
“As has been the practice in the past, the president will remove his mask when sufficiently distanced from others indoors and while outside,” she noted further.
A vaccinated and boosted Jill Biden will be “monitored by the White House medical team,” CNN reported.
Meanwhile, the administration has pushed Congress to provide funding for additional vaccines as two new variants of the disease, said to be far less potent, spread around the country.
“I signed off this morning on a proposal we have to present to the Congress, a request for additional funding for a new vaccine that is necessary, that works,” Biden told reporters at Lake Tahoe in August.
WATCH:
Karine Jean-Pierre says Biden will be wearing a mask indoors again pic.twitter.com/3NZqnP36N2
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) September 5, 2023
The DC Inquirer added: “In addition to this, the Department of Defense and Veteran Affairs have taken out multi-million dollar contracts for COVID safety equipment spurring many to speculate that the administration is attempting to move America back to pandemic-era policies in the run-up to the 2024 election.”
In a 419 – 0 vote the House voted in March to declassify all intelligence reports on the origins of the COVID pandemic, CBS News reported.
The legislation was introduced last week by Republican Sens. Josh Hawley and Mike Braun and passed the Senate with unanimous consent.
“Now the American people will be able to see what their government knows about COVID origins – and those who lied about it can be held accountable,” Hawley said at the time.
Democrat Rep. Raul Ruiz, a doctor and the ranking member of the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, said that the legislation was needed.
“Understanding the root causes of the COVID-19 pandemic is important to help prevent a future pandemic,” he said. “Under President Biden’s direction and leadership, the intelligence community has been hard at work gathering information to answer the question of whether COVID-19 started as a lab leak or animal transmission. The evidence, as of today, is inconclusive. It is important that the American people have as much objective information as possible without extreme partisan rhetoric.”
Ohio Republican Rep. Mike Turner, chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, told to Fox News at the time: “The American public deserves answers to every aspect of the COVID-19 pandemic, including how this virus was created and specifically, whether it was a natural occurrence of was the result of a lab-related event.”
He added: “The House intelligence committee, which oversees our intelligence community, is aware of classified information that could help inform the public why COVID-19 as a lab leak theory is not just a possibility, but approaches the idea that it is likely.”
The vote came after the U.S. Department of Energy handed a classified report to the White House and key members of Congress that said it came to the conclusion that the pandemic was the result of a lab leak due to new intelligence, The Wall Street Journal reported.
The outlet noted further:
The new report highlights how different parts of the intelligence community have arrived at disparate judgments about the pandemic’s origin. The Energy Department now joins the Federal Bureau of Investigation in saying the virus likely spread via a mishap at a Chinese laboratory. Four other agencies, along with a national intelligence panel, still judge that it was likely the result of natural transmission, and two are undecided.
