Want normalcy? Then please just be normal
Is there a more self-defeating bunch out there than hardline opponents of vaccine mandates? Yesterday, the National Mall played host to an anti-mandate rally at which prominent anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. compared the plight of the unvaccinated to the Holocaust. “Even in Hitler’s Germany…you could hide in the attic like Anne Frank did,” he said. He then rambled on about Bill Gates’s satellites. Another speaker, Del Bigtree, warned that “Unlike the Nuremberg Trials that only tried those doctors that destroyed the lives of those human beings, we’re going to come after the press.”
From the streets of the capital to the pages of the American Conservative, where a review of a book by Alex Berenson describes the journalist and novelist-turned Covid-contrarian as the “the pandemic’s rightest man.” Actually, they hedge their bets with a question mark: “The pandemic’s rightest man?” asks the title of the piece by Auguste Meyrat.
Allow me to answer your question, Auguste: no. Berenson has attracted a huge following over the last two years, with a blockbuster Substack and two bestselling books. He has found success as a critic of vaccines, masks and just about every other response to the pandemic. Along the way, he has got an awful lot badly wrong. (The yawning gap between cases and death rates is all I need to know that Berenson and Meyrat are barking up the wrong tree.)
The offensive nonsense spouted by RFK Jr., like Berenson’s crankery, is all the more aggravating because of the existence of reasonable, persuasive and popular arguments against any further restrictions and mandates. If you want to help make the case for normalcy (i.e. a world free from the measures introduced in response to Covid), I am begging you to please just be normal.
The patent ridiculousness of the speakers at the March against Mandates plays into the idea, favored by the White House, that only the anti-science lunatic fringe and poor victims of misinformation oppose their onerous measures. But that’s just not the case. Voters are split down the middle on the rules.
It’s exactly because of the efficacy of vaccines that I’m against mandates. Anyone who wants to has the ability to reduce their chance of death or serious illness from Covid to a number very close to zero. In that world, interventions fail a cost-benefit analysis. And if a vaccine keeps me safe, what do I care whether the diner on the table next to me has had the requisite doses or not?
More broadly, the pro-vaccine, anti-mandate territory seems to be the sweet spot for the largest segment of the country. It’s a middle ground occupied by a diverse bunch: Republicans like Glenn Youngkin and Donald Trump, as well as Democrats like Joe Manchin, Jon Tester and Colorado governor Jared Polis.
You might call this the “Done with Covid” crowd. As Dr. Vinay Prasad, who has been a reliable source of common sense and honesty throughout the pandemic, puts it, those three words are short for “continuing draconian restrictions at this moment is inflicting far more damage on vulnerable populations (especially kids) than benefit, and I will no longer participate in your inability to consider trade-offs.”
Berenson likes to contrast Team Apocalypse — Fauci and the millions who have fallen for Covid hysteria — with Team Reality — those who, like him, have seen through the Covid lies. But it’s increasingly clear that the Covid spectrum is a horseshoe. The messages at either extreme, Team Fauci and Team Berenson, are mirror images of one another. According to former, the pandemic is the end of the world as we know it. The latter says the same thing, only in reference to the policy response rather than pandemic itself. Then there’s the rest of us: alive to the risks of Covid, frustrated at the overzealous response from officialdom, happily vaccinated and getting on with our lives.
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Cheer up, it’s only the end of America as we know it
Over the past few weeks, Joe Biden’s approval ratings have steadily deteriorated from bad to very bad. Meanwhile, a new NBC poll finds that almost three quarters of Americans think the country is going in the wrong direction.
Some unsolicited advice for the president: perhaps the situation wouldn’t be quite so bleak if he stopped talking down the country that elected him.
On the one hand, the Biden administration claims it is bamboozled by the gloominess. Psaki, Klain and company want you to know you’re living through the Joe Biden jobs boom, that inflation is no big deal and that the world is a safer place now their guy is in the White House.
On the other hand, Team Biden thinks it’s important you remember that America’s social safety net is practically nonexistent without Build Back Better and US democracy is hanging by a thread. Voters react to these claims in one of two ways: believe them and feel dismayed or see them for the nonsense they are and, for different reasons, feel just as dismayed. If Biden wants everyone to cheer up, he might lead by example.
Sarah Palin’s day in court
Former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s long-running legal row with the New York Times finally makes it to court today. The case concerns a scandalous 2017 editorial in which the newspaper asserted a link between campaign literature published by Palin’s PAC with crosshairs over electoral districts and the 2011 shooting of Representative Gabby Giffords.
The Times corrected the error and apologized to Palin. But Palin is suing for defamation and claiming that the Times operated with “actual malice.” Readers should be wary of rooting for the plucky hockey mom from Alaska in her battle against America’s paper of record. The editorial may have been a shabby piece of journalism, and the case promises to be an uncomfortable few days for the Times, but take it from a refugee from the land of onerous libel laws: be careful what you wish for when it comes to restrictions on your First Amendment rights.
What you should be reading today
Tim Ogden: What does Russia hope to achieve in Ukraine?
Ben Sixsmith: ‘West Elm Caleb’ and the vindictiveness of a social media feeding frenzy
Jane Stannus: The Indigenous mass grave that wasn’t
Julius Krein, First Things: Elite grifters
Samuel Goldman, the Week: Moderates still don’t understand why conservatives voted for Trump
Sebastian Mallaby, New York Times: What Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos reveal about venture capitalism
Poll watch
President Biden Job Approval
Approve: 41.2 percent
Disapprove: 54.9 percent
Net approval: -13.7 (RCP Average)
Do you trust the CDC on the coronavirus?
Overall: 49 percent
Democrats: 69 percent
Republicans: 22 percent
Independents: 37 percent (NBC)
