#Biden’s ‘crisis’ crisis and other commentary

From the right: Biden’s ‘Crisis’ Crisis

White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki claims President Biden didn’t mean to describe the border crisis as “a crisis,” yet that’s precisely the term he used, notes the Washington Examiner’s Byron York. This shows how “determined the Biden White House is to deny that there is a crisis on the border.” And it’s clear why: It’s “a crisis of Biden’s own making.” This White House “has no problem at all talking about crises, as long as it can blame them on other people.” Indeed, Psaki & Co. use the word “virtually every day”: the “climate crisis,” the gun-violence “crisis,” the “child-care crisis created by COVID-19,” the “maternal-health crisis.” They’re “happy to talk about crises — as long as they haven’t been created by Team Biden itself.”

Pandemic journal: The Feds’ Foolish J&J Pause

The feds’ Johnson & Johnson vaccine pause “will cost American lives,” fumes Marc A. Thiessen at The Washington Post, but “their deaths do not factor” into bureaucrats’ calculations “because no one will ever know the names of those who perished” from being denied the vaccine — while health officials “are held to account” for those who die from it. “These perverse incentives are costing lives.” Brown University’s Ashish Jha calculates “each unvaccinated day the risk of death is 1 in 100,000. The risk of death after taking the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, by contrast, is 1 in 7.4 million.” Because COVID can cause blood clots, even the possible J&J side effect of causing clots doesn’t hurt your chances. But politicians only jump on bureaucrats for wrongly approving drugs, not delaying needed ones.

From the left: Listen to the Workers

Workers at Amazon’s Bessemer, Ala., warehouse “voted by a margin of more than two to one not to join a union,” and pro-labor groups “should be listening to the message,” advises ex-Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg at Bloomberg Opinion. “Workers are better positioned to assess their own employment situation than elected officials in Washington, or anyone else for that matter,” and those at Amazon failed to see the value of paying union dues. Instead of coming up with “a more attractive deal,” unions have simply “rejected the result and attacked the process.” A competition between management and unions would benefit Amazon employees, but for now, the company seems to be offering them “what the union could not: a better deal.”

Social-media watch: Twitter’s Silence on LeBron

At the Daily Caller, Mary Margaret Olohan reports that Twitter won’t say whether LA Lakers star LeBron James violated its terms of service by tweeting “YOU’RE NEXT” along with a picture of the cop who shot Ma’Khia Bryant as she tried to stab another teen. Twitter forbids users from targeting and harassing people or inciting others to do so, but the company didn’t respond to a query before James deleted the tweet, then later claimed its “teams do not evaluate Tweets that have been removed.” Meanwhile, Twitter itself “sparked a backlash through its description of Bryant’s death” on Wednesday “that made no mention of the fact that Bryant had a knife and was attempting to stab another black woman.”

Libertarian: Enough Hygiene Theater

The 9/11 attacks gave us security theater, “and now we have pandemic hygiene theater to give uninformed people a false sense of control and sustain their fear,” scoffs Veronique de Rugy at Reason. Consider the endless wiping down of surfaces at restaurants and other public businesses, a relic of our early misunderstanding of the virus. Or temperature checks of schoolchildren, though Dr. Anthony Fauci admitted last August “checks ‘are notoriously inaccurate’ ” and “up to 40 percent of Americans with COVID-19 are asymptomatic.” Some of these behaviors may merely seem silly. “But hygiene theater has huge costs and wastes precious resources. It also keeps Americans unjustifiably scared,” while pushing the delusion of “a world free of risks.”

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board