Fox News’ Senior White House Correspondent Peter Doocy challenged Friday President Joe Biden on his administration’s change of course on containing the spread of COVID-19.
“[O]n COVID policy, it seems like the administration is starting to soften some of the language. There’s this new op-ed where you talk about COVID and ‘We’re going to beat it back.’ Are you no longer going to ‘shut it down’?” Doocy asked Biden after the president’s Friday address discussing the November jobs report.
“No, we got to beat it back before we shut it down. Look, it’s going to take time worldwide. In order to beat COVID, we have to shut it down worldwide,” Biden responded. “In the United States of America, we’re doing everything that needs to be done to take care of the American people within our borders.”
WATCH:
Biden then said that it would be impossible to “build a wall around” the U.S. to isolate the country every time a new strain of the virus is discovered, even though new variants disrupt the “progress” in the epidemiological situation.
The Omicron variant of the coronavirus, first discovered in South Africa, led to the Biden administration’s imposition of a travel ban on a number of African countries. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced Monday that they had identified the first known case of the variant in the U.S. (RELATED: Psaki Blames Americans For Biden’s Failure To Shut Down COVID When Pressed By Doocy)