From a Washington Post story by Paul Farhi, Roxanne Roberts, and Yasmeen Abutaleb headlined “After Gridiron Dinner, a covid outbreak among Washington A-list guests”:
As of Wednesday morning, Reps. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) and Joaquin Castro (D-Tex.) and Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo had announced they had received positive results on coronavirus tests after attending the dinner at the downtown Renaissance Washington Hotel. On Wednesday afternoon, Attorney General Merrick Garland announced that he, too, had tested positive.
In addition, about a half-dozen journalists as well as members of the White House and National Security Council staffs said they tested positive after the event. Their names are being withheld because they have not announced their status publicly.
Several White House aides who tested positive did so after traveling to Poland last week with President Biden and before the Gridiron Dinner. White House press secretary Jen Psaki — who attended the Gridiron Dinner — reiterated Wednesday that all White House employees who come in proximity to Biden are regularly tested.
Biden didn’t attend the dinner but appeared via video.
Tom DeFrank, a contributing editor at the National Journal and the president of the Gridiron Club, said in a statement that dinner guests were required to show proof of vaccination but that “a small number of our guests have reported positive tests since then.”
“We wish them a speedy recovery,” he said.
The white-tie-and-gowns dinner attracted about 630 guests, including members of Congress, the Cabinet, diplomatic corps, military, and business.
Among those in attendance were Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s top infectious-disease expert and Centers for Disease Control director Rochelle Walensky.
Other guests included Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine), Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), and Roy Blunt (R-Missouri); Reps. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) and Debbie Dingell (D-Mich.); Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack and special presidential envoy John F. Kerry; Federal Reserve chairman Jay Powell; Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) and New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu (R) and New York mayor Eric Adams (D).
The possibility that senators at the dinner were infected could conceivably delay a Senate vote to confirm Biden’s Supreme Court nominee, Ketanji Brown Jackson. A vote could come later this week; no delays have been announced.
The dinner’s guest list also included former NFL great Emmitt Smith; NBA commissioner Adam Silver; CBS host Jane Pauley and her spouse, “Doonesbury” cartoonist Garry Trudeau; Ukraine’s ambassador to the United States, Oksana Markarova; “Face the Nation” host Margaret Brennan, PBS NewsHour anchor Judy Woodruff; ABC chief Washington correspondent, Jonathan Karl and Washington Post publisher Fred Ryan and editor Sally Buzbee.
Following a predinner cocktail reception, guests sat together at long narrow tables for hours, and watched satirical skits and songs performed by members. At the event’s conclusion, guests joined hands for the traditional singing of “Auld Lang Syne.”
The dinner was supposed to reflect a return to normalcy after being canceled the past two years due to the pandemic. Few guests wore masks or practiced social distancing, according to people in attendance. Only the serving staff was consistently masked throughout the evening.
One guest said that while organizers asked attendees to show their vaccination cards at the door, there was no requirement to be tested.
The evening’s sketches, performed by veteran Washington journalists, parodied figures in both parties, although Republicans — such as former president Donald Trump, Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (Ga.), Lauren Boebert (Colo.) and Paul A. Gosar (Ariz.), former secretary of state Mike Pompeo, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, and Sens. Ted Cruz (Tex.) and Tom Cotton (Ark.) — came in for the sharpest jabs. None of those figures were in attendance.
At one point, a performer dressed as Fauci sang from the stage to the real Fauci in the audience: “Doctor, doctor, give me some clues, we’ve got a bad case of covid blues.”
The Gridiron dinner is a smaller, more elite precursor to the better-known White House Correspondents’ Association gathering in late April. That organization’s president, Steven Portnoy, said earlier this week that it will require its dinner’s 2,600 guests to show a same-day negative coronavirus test, which they will be able to upload to an app.
The president typically attends the WHCA dinner, though Trump never did during his years in the White House. Biden has not yet announced his plans.
The Gridiron Club dinner appears to have been conducted with respect to the latest official guidelines for covid safety.
The CDC updated its guidelines on Feb. 25 to ease mask recommendations for the vast majority of the country, and all 50 states have lifted their mask mandates in recent weeks. More than 95 percent of the country, including Washington, D.C., is classified by the CDC as having a low burden of disease, meaning the agency does not recommend a mask mandate.
But some experts have cautioned that the new CDC guidelines could leave the country unprepared in the event of another wave. The BA. 2 variant caused a sharp uptick in cases in Europe and has become the dominant strain in the United States, though cases have not yet begun rising nationally. Some parts of the country, including the Northeast, are beginning to experience a modest uptick in infections.
Outbreaks from events like the Gridiron could be a harbinger of what’s to come, said Abraar Karan, an infectious-disease physician at Stanford. “You’ll have these big outbreaks that start slowly and then you’ll notice more of them. It’s not surprising to me there was this big outbreak at a gathering where people were testing afterward,” Karan said.
“We’re constantly testing the boundaries. Everybody is testing the boundaries a little bit. … We’re trying to see what’s a tolerable level of risk but when you have a big outbreak, that makes everybody pause,” Karan said.
Amesh Adalja, an infectious-disease doctor and senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, said there is no activity that comes without risk of contracting covid-19 — or any other respiratory illness.
“There are going to be things like this that occur whatever it might be, whether it’s covid-19, influenza, norovirus — a social gathering like that always has that kind of risk and it would be surprising to not see that kind of thing happening,” Adalja said. “For some people that’s an acceptable risk, for other people it might not be and that’s where we want to move to.”
Paul Farhi is The Washington Post’s media reporter. He started at The Post in 1988 and has been a financial reporter, a political reporter and a Style reporter.
Roxanne Roberts is a reporter covering Washington’s social, political and philanthropic power brokers. She has been at The Washington Post since 1988, working for the Style section as a feature writer and columnist.
Yasmeen Abutaleb joined The Washington Post in 2019 as a national reporter covering health policy, with a focus on the Department of Health and Human Services, health policy on Capitol Hill and health care in politics. She previously covered health care for Reuters, with a focus on the Affordable Care Act, federal health programs and drug pricing.
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