As a man who has taken both shots of the miracle vaccine, let me now quote the right and honorable Charles C. W. Cooke of National Review.
“I am done with all this nonsense, whatever the CDC says.”
Contrary to all of the doomcasting from the fear-monger types, we are far from the same position in which we were in in April, 2020. Simply put, the vaccine was the game-changer and that bell cannot now be un-rung. We have distributed it to approximately 60 percent of our population freely and for free. The government is now begging people to take it. Though the messaging of the CDC and the president has been abysmal, America has done a better job of vaccinating its populous than almost any other country in the world.
When the pandemic first began, we knew very little about the virus. Remember wipe-down frenzies and hand-washing theater? But more to the point, the vaccine was only a vague light at the end of a dark tunnel; a tunnel that most experts predicted we might very well still be in today. The announcement of the arrival of not one…not two…but three vaccines by last Christmas was a miracle indeed. And yes, it was solid evidence of American exceptionalism.
Now, through its typical muddled messaging, the CDC would further undermine public confidence in the vaccine by insisting that those who are fully vaccinated should still wear a mask. This is patently absurd! The burden of responsibility has now shifted to the unvaccinated. If they choose to live in willful ignorance of the benefits of the vaccine versus the possible long term costs of contracting COVID-19, that is their choice. This choice applies equally to red and blue America.
Pssst! All you vaccine snobs. There are a lot more Team Blue anti-vaxers than you would care to admit.
I believed in masks when they were appropriate. I believed in health guidelines when all of society was at risk. But acting as if the situation on the ground hasn’t changed and that the vaccinated and unvaccinated should shoulder the burden of responsibility equally is typical bureaucratic illogic.
I will not surrender to the hysteria. I will wear a mask if my boss orders me to do so. I will not place a poor bus driver, store clerk or restaurant server in the position of being a mask cop; a job they didn’t sign up for. But my non-sexual default position is, mask off. The Delta variant will be disappearing in a matter of weeks and we will deal with mutations when they occur.
PS: Fuck Fauci. Fuck Walensky. If you want to hear a non-partisan medical expert who has been a voice of reason since the beginning of the pandemic, follow Scott Gottlieb.
Here is an article from the aforementioned Charles C. W. Cooke that serves as another excellent snapshot in time. If you find it useful, I highly recommend National Review for thoughtful conservative content, particularly the NRPlus digital feature.
COVID-19 Has Given Us Progressivism Unleashed
By Charles C. W. Cooke
July 29, 2021 2:08 PM
Thankfully, if history is any guide, the backlash will last a lot longer than the pandemic.
Earlier this week, the investor Paul Graham took to Twitter to criticize the many millions of Americans who have grown skeptical of the scientific establishment during the COVID-19 pandemic. “If you think you don’t trust scientists,” Graham wrote on Twitter, “you’re mistaken.” In reality, he wrote, “You trust scientists in a million different ways every time you step on a plane, or for that matter turn on your
tap or open a can of beans.”
On its own terms, this is of course correct. It’s also entirely non-responsive to the question at hand, which is why so many otherwise-reasonable people have come to conclude that “science” is being routinely used as a means by which to launder political authority. Over the last 16 months, institutions
from the CDC to the NIH to Facebook have been caught making up the rules as they go along — not because the data upon which they were relying was changing
by the minute, but because their political aims had shifted, so their rationale had to as well.
In an excellent piece over at Slate, Kerrington Powell and Vinay Prasad contend that public-health officials have a choice: They can either “report facts and uncertainties
transparently,” which is science; or they can “shape information, via nudges, to influence the public to take specific actions,” which is politics. What
they can’t do is both — at least, not without leading switched-on observers to recognize the ruse. “When experts or agencies deliver information to the
public that they consider possibly or definitively false to further a larger, often well-meaning agenda,” Powell and Prasad conclude, “they are telling
what is called a noble lie.” And noble lies ain’t science.
There is a good reason that American citizens do not tend to question the science behind why airplanes fly, and that is that American citizens are not
given constantly evolving rationales for why airplanes fly — or, even worse, lied to about how the mechanics of flight work in order to advance a discrete goal. If every time American Airlines overbooked a flight, the FAA issued a set of contradictory statements about the likely effects of uplift on aluminum wings, we’d have a lot more flight-skeptical Americans than we do —and with good reason.
Mercifully, this is not how governments behave when the issue is travel, plumbing, or beans. In the case of COVID, however, it absolutely has been. Since the pandemic started, we have been told that masks were useless and that they were imperative; that protests were disastrous super-spreader events and
that they were safe and necessary; that the lab-leak theory was racist, conspiracist nonsense and that it was the most plausible explanation; that any vaccine that was developed while Donald Trump was president was likely to be rushed and dangerous and that to refuse to take such a vaccine is death-cult-like behavior. It is true, of course, that “science” doesn’t care about any of this vacillation — SARS-CoV-2 will ravage your unvaccinated body without the slightest care for why you declined to protect yourself from it. It is also true, though, that when diametrically opposed theories are sold to the public under science’s auspices, people will quickly switch off. Figures such as Graham can snark as much as they wish about the beautiful immutability of the truth, but the reality is that, outside of a few kooks, the many Americans at whom those barbs are aimed are not really rejecting “science” so much as they are rejecting the people who have glued themselves to it as a means by which to accumulate more power.
That rejection is likely to survive the end of the pandemic. Indeed, if this trend continues, it will take a long time for American progressivism to recover from the fallout. In its Wilsonian form, progressivism is a system in which the elected branches attempt to permanently outsource many of the country’s key political decisions to an ostensibly disinterested technocracy. When that technocracy is trusted, as it was for a while in the early 20th century and again in the 1950s and early to mid 1960s, those attempts enjoy a sufficient degree of support. When that technocracy is not trusted, as was the case after the fall of Robert McNamara and during the malaise-ridden 1970s, those attempts create a mighty backlash. In the long run, progressivism will always fail,
because it is incompatible with human nature and because it is simply not possible to abolish politics, but it can work for a short while, providing that its technocrats have the discipline to prioritize science as a neutral process over “science” as a deceptive buzzword. Unfortunately for today’s progressives, the technocrats of this era chose precisely the opposite course.
Observers who wonder why so many within our government have been unwilling to let go of their power would do well to consider that the endless series of lockdowns, mask-mandates, and social-distancing rules that we have just lived through has been progressivism in its purest form. Just as war is the health of the state, the arrival of COVID-19 provided the perfect impetus for the rampant safetyism, unchecked authority, hysterical micromanagement, mawkish moral crusading, and interminable federal spending that the sorts of figures who graduate from public-policy and public-health programs spend their lives dreaming about. For the better part of two years now, they’ve had an absolute ball. If history is any guide, they’ll spend the next 20 or 30 picking up the tab.
