White House Correspondents’ dinner attendees asked to test for COVID-19 after 2022 superspreader
W. James Antle III
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The White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner is asking attendees to take a same-day COVID-19 test and email the negative results after last year’s event was viewed as a superspreader.
When the dinner resumed after a two-year pandemic-related hiatus in 2022, a more stringent testing requirement was put into place, but multiple guests subsequently contracted the virus nevertheless.
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“Guests should conduct a home rapid test on the day of the dinner and send the results before heading over to the Hilton,” this year’s guidance reads. “However, if guests do test positive and want to be able to hand off a ticket to a colleague or friend, knowing their COVID status earlier in the day would be better.”
The Daily Show’s correspondent Roy Wood Jr. will be the entertainer this year. Last year, it was comedian and former host Trevor Noah. Noah joked about the dinner spreading COVID-19 and then-White House press secretary Jen Psaki’s multiple cases of the virus in his remarks.
President Joe Biden will speak at the dinner, as he did last year. Vice President Kamala Harris will also attend. The Biden-Harris ticket announced a reelection bid earlier this week.
Resuming the dinner as a mass public event last year was not without controversy. Anthony Fauci was the federal government’s top infectious disease expert and a public face of its pandemic response at the time, and he was reportedly “miffed” by the dinner and the attendance of high-profile Biden administration officials.
The White House’s COVID-19 response coordinator, Ashish Jha, attended and defended the big maskless gathering.
“I don’t think events like that need to be canceled,” Jha told Fox News at the time. “I think if people put in good safeguards, they can make it substantially safer, make sure people are vaccinated, make sure you have testing, improve ventilation. Those are strategies we have learned over the last two years.”
“Looking back on it, I’m wondering what the hell was going through Ashish’s mind at that point,” a person who was on the call where Fauci complained about the message sent by these events told Politico.
It was later reported that no testing or vaccination was required of the hotel staff working the dinner. The White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner is followed by numerous after-parties and is often a busy weekend of socializing for participants.
Afterward, staffers for CNN, ABC News, NBC News, CBS News, and Politico, among other participating media outlets, tested positive for the virus. “Just as Trevor Noah warned and Anthony Fauci feared,” the Washington Post reported. This included ABC’s Jonathan Karl, who shook hands with Biden at the dinner. The president did not get COVID-19 from this event.
A year later, widely attended events with little more than suggested COVID-19 testing are common. The Department of Health and Human Services’s pandemic emergency declaration ends on May 11. Biden signed into law a bipartisan congressional resolution ending the national emergency a month earlier than that.
“Our aim is for people who have COVID to stay home and watch on C-Span and having everyone take a rapid test on the day of the event is the best way to do that,” the WHCA advised this year.
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The White House Correspondents Association Dinner will occur on Saturday night in Washington, D.C.
Biden’s attendance is not only a resumption of pre-pandemic practices. Former President Donald Trump boycotted the dinner, and his press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, now the Republican governor of Arkansas, was once ridiculed from the podium. Former President Barack Obama’s mockery of Trump in his own remarks at the dinner is often speculated to have been a motivation for Trump’s successful 2016 candidacy.