Now that Joe Biden is about to step into the Oval Office and is calling for lockdowns to be relaxed or ended and for kids to get back to school within his first 100 days — because he has a plagiarized COVID rescue plan, after all — it has suddenly become appropriate for Democrats and the Leftmedia to prioritize economic concerns and even question the efficacy of lockdowns.

Case in point, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo is pushing for reopening his state. “We simply cannot stay closed until the vaccine hits critical mass,” he now says. “The cost is too high. We will have nothing left open. We must reopen the economy but we must do it smartly.” Hmm. Where have we heard this argument before?

On Thursday, Newsweek published an article titled, “COVID Lockdowns May Have No Clear Benefit vs Other Voluntary Measures, International Study Shows.” Who could have possibly guessed this would be the case? The article notes that researchers comparing the pandemic’s impact on mandatory-lockdown countries to that of less restrictive and voluntary-response nations found “no clear, significant beneficial effect of [more restrictive measures] on case growth in any country.” Furthermore, “We fail to find an additional benefit of stay-at-home orders and business closures.”

Conservative commentator Noah Rothman wryly observed, “Major metro mayors are on a mission to retroactively validate everything lockdown skeptics have said for months only to have their motives questioned and characters impugned.” And as Power Line’s John Hinderaker notes, “Now that the presidential election is behind us, Democratic governors and mayors will be happy to see the economy rebounding. And, of course, Joe Biden will take credit for all improvement that results from abandoning the lockdowns that have crushed our country for the last ten months.”

Indeed, our bet is that in the coming weeks and months, the pandemic will no longer dominate the headlines. The daily updates on the number of new COVID-19 cases and coronavirus-related deaths will be relegated to a back page or ignored entirely. In their place will be stories covering the stunning success of Biden’s coronavirus response in working to get the U.S. vaccinated coupled with glowing reports of an economy on the rebound credited entirely to the leadership of the new administration.

Of course, any significant flare-ups of the virus can easily be blamed on those selfish “anti-science” Trump supporters who failed to don their masks.