Perhaps you’ve heard: The pandemic is over. Joe Biden said so. In fact, for folks who actually pay attention to what our cognitively challenged president says, it’s been over for a couple of weeks now, ever since he said as much to CBS News’s Scott Pelley during a “60 Minutes” interview. (No, there’s no truth to the rumor that Biden actually asked Pelley, “How long is this show?” But we digress.)

“We still have a problem with COVID,” the president said three Sundays ago. “We’re still doing a lot of work on it. But the pandemic is over. If you notice, no one’s wearing masks. Everybody seems to be in pretty good shape, and so I think it’s changing.”

No one’s wearing masks? Really? Joe must not get out much — at least not to liberal college towns. Because, as our Nate Jackson noted, plenty of his voters are still irrationally wearing masks. Young people. Ostensibly intelligent people. People whose political affiliation has allowed them to be duped into believing everything the government tells them.

But the rest of us? Over it. Long ago. Pandemic, schmandemic. What time’s the game on?

Here, Zach Loesch must be wondering: If the pandemic is over, then why is my commander-in-chief still bent on firing me and thousands of my fellow warriors for not taking an experimental vaccine that didn’t prevent infection or transmission of variants of an illness that never posed a serious risk to me? And, come to think of it, during a time when our service branches can’t even sniff their recruiting targets?

Who, you ask, is Zach Loesch? He’s the warrior, the U.S. Coast Guard rescue swimmer, who Biden personally thanked Friday for having saved people’s lives as Hurricane Ian battered Florida. He’s also a young man who’ll be discharged from military service for not having a COVID-19 vaccine.

As Fox New reports, Biden called several members of the Coast Guard over the phone, including Technician Second Class Loesch, and thanked them for rescuing people on the southwest Florida coast in Fort Myers and Naples. “I told him how proud of him I was and thanked him for all the work he and his Coasties are doing to save lives,” Biden said of his call with Loesch in remarks the White House published Friday.

But, as Breitbart reports, despite the president thanking him for his life-saving efforts, “Loesch is due to be kicked out from the Coast Guard in 30-60 days due to Biden’s own mandate that all members of the United States Armed Forces be fully vaccinated.”

Loesch says he’d put in for a religious accommodation but was denied, as was his appeal. So it goes.

“If I had asked any of the people I saved yesterday if they wanted to come with me even though I am unvaccinated,” says Loesch, “every single one of them would have said ‘Yes.’”

We don’t doubt that for a moment. After all, the pandemic is over.

But back to the question: Why is Joe Biden continuing this cruel, idiotic, and anti-scientific policy given what his own CDC has said about these vaccinations, and about the more effective and more durable natural immunity that Loesch almost certainly has acquired by now?

Answer: Because the military personnel who’ve chosen not to get vaccinated aren’t sheep. They aren’t lemmings. Instead, they’re among the best and brightest. They tend to be the strong-willed, free-thinking, principled types that make great military leaders, both officers and enlisted. They also tend to be conservative. Thus, by continuing the policy, Biden can continue the Left’s purge of our military’s conservative ranks.

“It just sucks that he thanked me, yet the vaccine mandate is what’s kicking me out,” said Loesch. “I just love my job and I’m really good at it. It sucks. I feel like this is the job that I was born to do.”