COVID-19 is becoming endemic and will be part of everyone's lives for a long time, former Housing and Urban Development director Ben Carson, also a renowned neurosurgeon, told Newsmax on Saturday.
"We have to learn how to control it, and not let it control us," while not allowing politics to play a role in health decisions," Carson told "Saturday Agenda."
"We're going to have variations for several years to come. We can either let those control our policymaking, and there are certain politicians who would like to do that so that they can use things to their advantage."
Or, he said, the decision can be made to remove politics from public healthcare and do what is good for the American people, and "use the tremendous advantages we have in this nation and our scientific and medical community for the purposes of helping the people, not for the purposes of helping political agenda."
Carson's comments to host Joe Pinion come after the Biden administration enacted several travel restrictions and other guidelines this past week after the omicron variant surfaced. He called it a "sad situation" for President Joe Biden to order travel restrictions from southern African nations after the new variant was discovered because that could "encourage other nations to hide things rather than to be forthright."
Meanwhile, the American people are "more observant" than people in the government think they are when it comes to observing the inconsistencies that are happening with COVID policy, according to Carson.
"And when it comes to natural immunity, you know, a few weeks ago, the CDC admitted that they didn't have data on natural immunity," he said. "Why don't they have data on that immunity? Because they're not collecting it. Why aren't they collecting it? I guess because they don't want to know the results."
In real science, he added, "you look at everything and you would take all the avenues that are available to us."
"You wouldn't be making mandates to individuals," he said. "You would be saying we have the best medical system in the world. We want you to have this information, and we want you to discuss it with your health care professional.
"One size does not fit all."
All of the confusion is causing people to be "very hesitant" when it comes to how they deal with the whole issues surrounding COVID, particularly when new variants pop up.
"We also need to teach people about viruses," Carson said. "Viruses mutate. That's what they do. It's sort of like if you go into a copying office, and you start copying a lot of things. Some of them are going to be defective and then when those are copied that defect is carried on. That's the same thing that happens with viruses, and it's to be expected and we're going to continue to have variations."
The good news is, the variations "seem to be coming in less and less virulent," Carson added.
"That means it's less likely to kill you," he concluded. "It's very serious. We need to take it seriously, but we need to do it in a logical way and not in a political way."
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Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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