Biden: Vote in Calif. boost to war vs. COVID

President Biden said the Golden State offered a good omen for his increasingly hard-line approach to the pandemic.

After Gov. Gavin Newsom decisively turned back a recall election in California on Tuesday, the president framed the result as a boost to the White House’s recent efforts to ramp up vaccine mandates, arguing that it showed bipartisan backing for urgent health measures.

“This vote is a resounding win for the approach that he and I share to beating the pandemic: strong vaccine requirements, strong steps to reopen schools safely, and strong plans to distribute real medicines — not fake treatments — to help those who get sick,” Biden said.

“The fact that voters in both traditionally Democratic and traditionally Republican parts of the state rejected the recall shows that Americans are unifying behind taking these steps to get the pandemic behind us,” he added.

Newsom (photo), who aggressively moved to mandate shots this summer, hitched his campaign to coronavirus requirements and earned the backing of about 64% of voters, according to incomplete tallies.

After wooing voters from the misty coastline of Humboldt County to the blistering desert of Imperial County, the 53-year-old governor declared his state had said “yes to science.”

“We said yes to vaccines,” Newsom said. “We said yes to ending this pandemic.”

Biden, who last week unleashed a new round of far-reaching rules to push both federal employees and private business staffers to get inoculated, visited California on Monday to stump for Newsom.

After initially expressing resistance to mandates, the president has taken a significantly harsher tone toward vaccine holdouts in recent weeks, attempting to speak for an impatient country dismayed by the spread of the delta variant.

He said last Thursday that the “time for waiting is over” and told the unvaccinated that their “refusal has cost all of us.”

Newsom has been on the cutting edge of health rules throughout the pandemic: Early in the crisis, he introduced America’s first statewide shutdown order.

In August, he instituted a first-inthe-nation requirement that schoolteachers get immunized or face weekly testing.