Jill breaks White House rules to go maskless as Joe is accused of staging bizarre dancing nurses show at the White House to distract from his catastrophic failure to order enough COVID test kits
President Joe Biden was slammed on Thursday for holding Christmas festivities at the White House this week, complete with nurses singing 'We Need a Little Christmas' and a maskless First Lady, as critics claimed the event was 'tone deaf' and meant to distract from the president's COVID policy failures.
The White House invited the famous Northwell Health's Nurse Choir to perform at this year's 'Spirit of the Season' TV special Tuesday night, and many were quick to point out the poor visuals of happy nurses singing amid the current Omicron surge.
The performance also featured some singers without masks, as well as a maskless Jill Biden off to the side, despite the White House's indoor mask mandate in place.
The festivities went on as Biden comes under fire for failing to provide hundreds of millions of free rapid COVID tests to Americans in time for the COVID surge expected in January.
Northwell Health's Nurse Choir performed at this year's 'Spirit of the Season' White House TV special. Many said the use of happy, singing nurses contrasted poorly with the current health crisis amid the COVID Omicron surge
Many also criticized the fact that some of the performers did not wear masks
Jill Biden was also spotted at the scene at a distance, but not wearing a mask
The famous choir had previously appeared on the latest season of America's Got Talen
The performance of the Northwell Health's Nurse Choir, who appeared on NBC's America's Got Talent this year, has been heavily criticized by conservative news outlets for its visuals amid the pandemic.
COVID cases in the U.S. have skyrocketed by 38 percent in the last 24 hours to 238,278 new infections as the highly contagious variant continues to spread, with some states seeing cases go up by 670 percent.
The surge comes as Biden vowed to distribute 500 million free COVID rapid tests, a plan experts say comes too late and which was previously mocked by White House press secretary Jen Psaki.
Psaki was eventually forced to defend her boss on Thursday amid questions over the timing of his COVID-19 test expansion and accusations that he acted too late to stop massive delays in testing and results just two days before Christmas.
Hours later a report emerged in Vanity Fair that the Biden administration had reject a roadmap to getting at-home rapid COVID tests to every American to avoid the holiday surge currently wreaking havoc on people's Christmas plans.
The ambitious blueprint called for 732 million monthly COVID tests - far more than what Biden promised would come in January.
Psaki chalked up the president's delayed response to a lack of demand in the summer months.
The Omicron variant, now the dominant COVID strain in the US, has sent Americans running to the counter for tests as more and more breakthrough infections are reported. While it's so far shown to be milder, scientists also fear the new mutation is more contagious than the previously-dominant Delta variant.
Biden admitted on ABC News Wednesday night that he wished his plan to send 500 million Covid-19 tests to people's homes came to him earlier - despite promising nearly three months ago to increase the supply by 'nearly 300 million.'
The president told ABC News that he'd wished he came up with his plan to send 500 million Covid tests to people's homes earlier
Since his second full day in office, Biden has been highlighting the importance of expanding COVID test access - even citing a concern over new variants
Thursday's update in COVID infection numbers from Johns Hopkins University saw diagnoses climb from 172,072 for the previous day. Deaths were also up slightly, from 2,093 yesterday to 2,204 today.
Multiple US states have seen 14 day infection rates soar. In Florida, cases are up 509 per cent, in Washington DC, they're up 541 per cent, and in Hawaii they've rocketed by 670 per cent.
Hawaii saw 74 new confirmed Omicron cases on Wednesday, with Florida and DC each reporting 24 cases of the mutant strain. The US has a total of 2,625 confirmed Omicron cases, according to data scraped from individual states' figures.
New York continues to have the highest number of new Omicron cases with 442 reported on Thursday, followed by Texas with 394 cases and California, with 358 new cases.
Meanwhile hospitalizations sit just under 63,000, including almost 16,000 COVID patients receiving intensive care treatment, according to analysis by the Times.
That is an 11 per cent increase in two weeks, but still sits well below the winter 2020 peak of almost 130,000 Americans in hospital, 30,000 of whom were in ICU.
The White House Christmas show, which was hosted by actress Jennifer Garner and included performances from the Jonas Brothers, Camila Cabello, the Penatonix and others, was also mocked heavily online over the dancing nurses segment.
Twitter user Danny Hellman added that the fact that some nurses and first lady Jill Biden went maskless at the event only made things look worse.
'Video of nurses dancing in the midst of a pandemic: tasteless & tone-deaf,' Hellman wrote.
'Video of nurses dancing in the White House in the midst of a pandemic while @FLOTUS nods approvingly: tone-deafness bordering on the obscene.'
One Twitter user with the handle name Pee Wee wrote, 'Nurses singing at the White House > I thought the hospitals were so overwrought with patients and a mask less Jill? Trashy.'
A Twitter user with the handle name MissieMe called it propaganda and said the administration and health officials needed to focus on stopping the Omicron surge.
'What in the Biden White House Christmastime Propaganda is really happening here. Someone needs to tell them nurses to get back to work and stop this silliness!'
Another Twitter use with the name Rising serpent expressed frustration over the celebratory tone of the show after American's went through nearly two years of the pandemic with an end still not in sight.
'Two years of your life that you will never get back, some of your children have never had a normal social interaction, and the only thing missing in this clown car circus freak show was nurses dancing at the White House. Thankfully Biden fixed that.'
People called the performance 'trashy' and a kind of propaganda to distract viewers
During her Thursday briefing, Psaki said, 'Before the Delta variant was on the rise, there was not a demand for testing in this country. There really wasn't.'
She added that the federal government had to take certain steps 'to build up the market because the market wasn't there to meet if the demand rose.'
'The president wouldn't have taken the steps he in September and October had taken if we weren't aware that we needed to have increased supply,' she said, referring to incremental investments in expanding test access and invoking the Defense Production Act to make sure more tests got to retailers.
But now it appears that Biden officials were warned that early and aggressive testing could mitigate the current surge in infections.
The 10-page plan, included a section titled 'Bold Plan for Impact,' including 'Every American Household to Receive Free Rapid Tests for the Holidays/New Year.'
But three days after the meeting, a White House official reportedly contacted the researchers behind it to say it would not be happening.
An official told Vanity Fair that the plan was simply too large to implement with the resources available at the time.
'We did not have capacity to manufacture over-the-counter tests at that scale,' they said.
At another point in the briefing, Psaki was asked by Fox News' Peter Doocy about the president's claim that nobody 'saw' Omicron coming when he defended his administration's delayed response to the current COVID surge.
People waits in long lines to be tested for Covid-19 in New York City on December 21
'First I would say that uh, nobody saw - knew there would be the number of different variants, nobody knew exactly how transmissible they would be. We of course knew that there would be additional variants at some point coming, but we didn't know what they would look like,' Psaki said.
'But we've been preparing for a range of contingencies all along throughout this process, that's why we have had ample vaccine supply, that's why we have had ample mask supply, and why we have worked to ramp up aggressively our testing over the last few months.'
Just before Christmas, Americans nationwide are still waiting in long lines for Covid-19 tests and even longer for their results amid a massive spike in demand.
Three major studies have already confirmed the Omicron variant is noticeably milder than Delta, the previous dominant strain. In the United Kingdom, Covid patients with Omicron were 20 to 25 percent less likely to need hospitalization, according to one study.
Another paper found Omicron was up to 45 percent less likely to lead to hospitalization than Delta, based on 300,000 people in England.
But Biden was forced to defend his administration's response to the highly-contagious Omicron variant as it rips through all 50 states.
He told ABC host David Muir that 'nothing's been good enough' though repeated his and his top officials' line that nobody 'saw it coming' as rapidly as it had.
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