To The Moon

President Biden stirred debate among health experts Monday after commenting to CBS's 60 Minutes that the pandemic is over.

Though Biden said the country is still fighting COVID-19, White House officials were nonetheless surprised by his comment: "The pandemic is over. We still have a problem with COVID. We're still doing a lot of work on it. But the pandemic is over."

Some experts took the president's statement to mean that the emergency part of the pandemic is over, while others worry that Biden's comments could thwart global efforts to combat the disease.

"I think what the president meant was that we are finished with the emergency phase of COVID-19 and we are in a better place than we were a year ago. And that's a fair point. But he didn't say that, and I'm concerned that the public will hear something very different," said Lawrence Gostin, director of the O'Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law and professor at Georgetown Law.

Ayoade Alakija, special envoy for the World Health Organization's Access to COVID-19 Tools Accelerator, on the other hand, disagreed with Biden's comments.

"I really love President Joe Biden, but I have to completely and totally disagree with him and say that it is not over," she said.

"The acute phase of the pandemic is not over," Alakija added.

She noted that there are more than 400 people dying daily in the U.S. — a number some feel is an undercount. By comparison, in Africa, "We don't have a means to measure. We don't have access to the tools. There is no Paxlovid [an antiviral treatment used to treat COVID] on the African continent."