There is a concerted effort underway, led by health experts and their allies in the liberal media, to convince the public that life amid the coronavirus pandemic is the new normal. It is not, and it never will be.
We’ve reached what should be the final phase of this pandemic. Highly effective and safe vaccines are being distributed to the most vulnerable, and soon, they’ll be available to everyone else. That means herd immunity is only a few months away, yet we’re being told to buckle up and wear masks, practice social distancing, and comply with restrictions for another year — and maybe even longer.
Asked when people could expect to resume normal activities, Dr. Anthony Fauci predicted last week that by Christmas of this year, we’d be “approaching a degree of normality.” President Biden has said the same thing. When pressed about what that “normality” would look like, Fauci said it all “depends on what you mean by ‘normality.’”
The answer should be simple: Normality looks like life before the coronavirus. No masks. No social distancing. Open businesses. The freedom to move about freely, gather with loved ones, and go about everyday life without needing to think about the coronavirus. Fauci knows this, but he’s doing what the experts do best: He’s making people believe that our worst-case scenario is the only possible outcome so that our expectations stay low.
To understand just how successful the experts have been, look at how far the goal posts have shifted. Last year, the goal was to flatten the curve by shutting the country down for 14 days. Now, the goal is completely indiscernible — the curve has been flattened, the death toll continues to drop, and high-risk people are being immunized daily — but the restrictions remain intact. So much so that some are beginning to argue these restrictions aren’t actually that restrictive:
A lot of people on the right seem emotionally invested in the idea that the scoldiest voices in media have the force of law or that we’ve been living under Italian-style lockdown conditions for eleven months, but in truth there are few legal restrictions on most people.
— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) February 24, 2021
We might not be under total lockdown anymore, but the very fact that businesses still have to wait for permission from the government to open their doors is proof that we have a long way to go before we’re back to anything resembling normality. Anyone arguing otherwise is gaslighting us all in an effort to make the public believe our present situation isn’t that bad. Tell that to the tens of thousands of business owners who have lost their livelihoods.
The public needs to start pushing back, lest the experts succeed in keeping us in a constant state of coronavirus anxiety. We have always lived with some degree of risk, but we’ve never before had to put our lives on pause because of it. To be sure, the coronavirus pandemic was an extraordinary risk, but now that immunization is underway, there is no reason to drag this out any longer. It’s time to get back to normal, and no, this is not it.
