Pretty soon, half of the U.S. population will be vaccinated. Two new vaccines are in the pipeline. Additionally, new research shows the efficacy of antibodies in reducing coronavirus symptoms.
COVID-19 deaths in the United States have averaged below 1,000 per day for all of April, after being above that mark consistently since early November. That’s because cases among the elderly are dropping rapidly.
Although some parts of the country are experiencing a third wave of infections, cases nationally are nearly flat. Weather and vaccinations are likely to prevent this latest wave from becoming nearly as serious as the first two.
If all this sounds like good news to you, don’t assume everyone else welcomes it that way.
“Half the population [is] dreading the return to normal,” the Washington Post asserted over the weekend, in a piece about how nice the past 13 months have been for introverts: “The calendar was suddenly, blissfully empty. Life slowed down.”
The New York Times followed up with a piece about all the parents who love Zoom school and want to persist in remote-only public schooling through graduation.
We’re happy for those people who found some joy in lockdowns, closures, and stay-at-home orders. We hope they find a way to preserve their solitary pleasures when the entire country fully reopens, and life fully returns to normal. But the unwillingness to let go of the pandemic and its lockdowns is a far more sinister reality. The public health experts who gained new prestige and unprecedented power, and their adoring double-masking fans in the press, just seem to want things to go on like this forever.
These vaccine deniers have shifted from an eccentric, debatable position on lockdowns to one that is objectively pro-pandemic and anti-science.
Dr. Anthony Fauci was asked on national television on Sunday about eating in restaurants. He replied that “it’s still not OK,” adding that even vaccinated people shouldn’t go to crowded places. Yet, what limited data we have suggests that even before mass vaccinations, restaurants caused only a tiny amount of COVID-19 spread.
The liberal cable media has been sounding the same doom-ridden note as Fauci, with MSNBC host Joy Reid saying she will continue to double mask and do “no flying and no indoor activities.”
Cable news and the Biden administration seem to come up with new arguments against the efficacy of vaccines every day. Of course, they don’t think of them as anti-vaxx arguments, but how else should we understand them?
At first, Fauci peddled the unfounded (and since demolished) idea that although coronavirus vaccines keep you from getting sick, they might not keep you from getting other people sick. If some scary possibility hasn’t been disproved, this doom-and-gloomer mindset prescribes, we must act as if it’s likely!
Then came the argument that we don’t know how effective the vaccines are against the variants. Many in the media went overboard on this one, even peddling a story that the South African variants had defeated the Pfizer vaccine because eight people (not one of them fully vaccinated, it appears) got sick.
The latest anti-vaccine argument from the doomers is that we cannot reopen society after mass vaccination because vaccines are not 100% effective. CNN used that reasoning to claim, based on no facts or sound reasoning whatsoever, that 1 in 10 vaccinated airline passengers will get coronavirus from flying.
This is idiotic. These arguments are anti-science. They’re also shamefully opportunistic. Media elites know that scare stories sell — “If it bleeds,” the old saying goes, “it leads.” Government health officials know that the pandemic has been their moment not only to become celebrities but also to wield power. They really don’t want this to end.
We all need to start ignoring them. And soon, we will need to declare this pandemic over.
