Fourteen Points

Were you to ask me precisely when the COVID-19 pandemic ended, my first answer would be late January 2021, when I caught a mild case of the thing itself and, in so doing, presumably acquired the requisite antibodies to fight off any theoretical infection in the future.  The fact that my actual infection proved so inconsequential more or less settled the question of whether I had any reason to fear COVID in the first place (answer: not really) and mentally eased the three-month wait until my first dose of a vaccine.

My second answer would be early June 2021—that is, two weeks after receiving my second shot—when (according to the CDC) my body officially became immune to both catching and spreading the coronavirus and was thus totally unkillable from this particular threat to life and limb.  (The CDC would completely reverse itself on the catching-and-spreading part six weeks later, but let’s not get hung up on details.)

And my third answer would be two Fridays ago, when a group of family and friends hailing from points up and down the Eastern Seaboard gathered at my brother and sister-in-law’s place for a Passover Seder—the first fully non-virtual such event since the spring of 2019—with attendees as old as 91 and as young as, well, a few months less than zero.  Everyone had received at least three vaccine doses.  Everyone had been tested earlier in the week.  No one wore a mask.  Indeed, the word “COVID” was not spoken except ironically in reference to the ten plagues of Egypt.

Of course, all of these alleged finales to the coronavirus pandemic apply only to me and my loved ones, not necessarily to the country as a whole.  But then again, perhaps that is the best for which we can reasonably hope: For each of us to individually declare independence from the psychological torpor of COVID without the nation itself ever getting around to doing the same.

That said, last week’s decision by a federal judge to nullify the Biden administration’s mask mandate on public transportation—the only such rule still in effect on a national level—might ultimately be seen as the pivotal COVID-era policy reversal that causes all the remaining dominos to fall.  As even the most liberal, regulation-heavy municipalities are abandoning their own mask and vaccination dictates left and right and a great majority of our fellow countrymen are generally comporting themselves on the premise that they are no longer living in an emergency, there is real reason to suspect the so-called “return to normal” we have craved for the past 25 months is manifesting itself before our very eyes.

Then again, maybe not.  Maybe the administration’s formal appeal of the mask ruling will be sustained and the government will force us to cover our faces on planes, trains and buses (and God knows where else) from here to infinity.  Maybe there will be yet another mutation of the virus that proves deadlier and more contagious than everything that came before, making restrictions on public activity as much of a moral necessity as it was in March 2020.  Maybe COVID really is forever and selfish ingrates like me just need to suck it up and get with the program.

Supposing this is the case—and why on Earth not?—it might behoove us to review certain truths about this plague that have accumulated over the past two years and change:

First, that COVID-19 is a communicable disease that spreads through close contact among human beings.

Second, that human beings are innately social creatures that cannot survive without close contact.

Third, that communicable diseases have circulated for as long as humans have existed as a species and, by their very nature, cannot be eradicated entirely.

Fourth, that at least 58 percent of Americans—or 190 million souls—have been infected with COVID thus far.  With just under 1 million U.S. deaths to date, that means 99.5 percent of those who have caught the virus have survived.

Fifth, that nearly all whom COVID has killed have been elderly, overweight or in some way immunocompromised.

Sixth, that every elderly, overweight or in some way immunocompromised person knows who they are and has the common sense and wherewithal to take whatever extra precautions their condition requires.

Seventh, that COVID is not a serious threat to children and never has been.  While those under 18 comprise 22.1 percent of the U.S. population, they have accounted for 0.12 percent of U.S. COVID deaths.

Eighth, that for the past year vaccines have been available for every American, free of charge.

Ninth, that these vaccines, upon being administered, render the recipient all but impervious to death from COVID, while not necessarily protecting them from either contracting or spreading the virus.

Tenth, that 77 percent of all Americans have received at least one vaccination, and that the remaining 23 percent have, in some form or fashion, been made aware that vaccination is an option they can choose at any time.

Eleventh, that every adult who has opted to forego vaccination has made that decision freely and with the understanding that they—and they alone—are responsible for the consequences.

Twelfth, that millions of Americans have been misinformed of the facts about both the disease and the vaccines, and that a non-trivial subset of this group has died—and will continue to die—as a direct result.

Thirteenth, that for an equally non-trivial subset of this cohort, there is nothing anyone can do to change their mind or their behavior.

Fourteenth, that face masks limit the spread of this virus.  Except when they don’t.

Certainly, several of these assertions are contestable.  And there are any number of additional and/or alternative points one can make on this subject (my list contains 14 primarily for the sake of a cheap Woodrow Wilson reference), leading one to any number of conclusions as to how we might confront COVID from here on out.

Here is my conclusion.  The virus we call COVID-19 will be with us forever.  It will infect every man, woman and child on Earth many times over (if it hasn’t already).  There is no escaping it, no matter how hard you try.  Sooner or later it will find you, and you’ll need to deal with it when it does.

Accordingly—and assuming Big Pharma continues churning out the necessary vaccines and treatments—the Biden administration should formally declare COVID-19 a merely endemic disease (as Anthony Fauci sorta-kinda did just this morning), the CDC should resume its historical and proper role as a merely advisory federal agency that the president and the public can follow or ignore at their discretion, and American citizens should be empowered to make their own life decisions—regarding masks, vaccines and everything else—based on their own individual level of risk.

Yes, some of those decisions will prove foolish, if not fatal.  That’s what happens when human beings are given free will and nations are founded on ensuring and fostering the untrammeled exercise thereof.

The question is:  What is the alternative?

Assuming all (or at least most) of my 14 points are correct, what is the argument for continuing to micromanage each other’s behavior every time we enter a confined space?  What lives are being saved that weren’t already being saved by a vaccine?  Is our ultimate goal to prevent our fellow citizens from dying of COVID or from getting a mild cold?  If it’s the latter, is there a sentient being on Earth who believes such a thing is achievable?

In many ways this debate now hinges largely on one’s philosophy about government in a democratic society.  If you trust the wisdom of individuals over the wisdom of bureaucrats, you will naturally favor some version of the settlement I have just proposed.  If you trust the wisdom of bureaucrats over the wisdom of individuals, you will naturally favor the approach the Biden administration has embraced (albeit haltingly) since it was inaugurated in January 2021.

And if, like me, you trust the wisdom of nobody (including yourself), you can always just sit on the couch and never leave the house again. As two years of practice have shown, avoiding all human contact and watching movies all day is even more fun than it sounds.

A Modest Proposal

Joe Rogan should invite Anthony Fauci onto his podcast, and Fauci should immediately accept.

So far as I can tell, that is the easiest, most direct and most obvious way that our national culture war about COVID-19 could be hashed out once and for all.

The logic is inescapable:  Rogan’s program, “The Joe Rogan Experience,” has the largest audience of any podcast in the history of Earth, and Fauci is at once the most trusted and most loathed public health official in the United States at a time when public health officials are trusted and loathed with unprecedented levels of intensity by the general public.

Accordingly, there seems no more germane way to bridge the divide between the two sides in the COVID wars—those who think the mitigation measures have been too draconian, and those who think they haven’t been draconian enough—than to bring together the most prominent avatar of each team in the same room at the same time.

Indeed, the more one thinks about it, the more inevitable the idea becomes.  Since the onset of the pandemic in the spring of 2020, Fauci has never met a microphone into which he did not speak.  Rogan, for his part, has proved to be about the most eclectic, open-minded and intellectually curious interviewer in all of podcasting.  To see the two of them discuss the science of and public policy response to COVID in an honest, free-wheeling manner would surely be the premier media event of the year.

It’s a match made in heaven.  Who could possibly object?

The answer, presumably, is:  A whole lot of people.  For the liberals who regard Fauci as a god among men whose every utterance carries the weight of holy writ, his appearing on “The Joe Rogan Experience” would constitute a pointless capitulation to the conspiratorial far-right fringe (notwithstanding Rogan’s status as a Bernie Sanders voter, that is).  For Rogan’s regular audience, this hypothetical conversation might well be seen as a sellout to the bureaucratic elite.

What it would actually be—assuming each man accepts the other’s intellectual honesty and desire for objective truth—is the full-throated, concentrated, unfiltered debate about all things COVID that the world has thus far been denied for the two-plus years that this plague has dominated the course of human events from one end of the globe to the other.

It’s a debate we, the people, probably don’t deserve and probably won’t get.  But wouldn’t it be nice if we did?

Covid Counterfactuals, Part 2

One year into his presidency, Joe Biden stands as the most unpopular chief executive in modern times, with approval ratings in the mid-30s to low-40s and his tenure thus far deemed a failure.

According to the left, this is because Biden hasn’t spent enough money to deliver material benefits to the working class.  According to the right, this is because he has spent far too much money and plunged the nation into an inflationary spiral.  And according to everyone else, Biden’s unpopularity owes to his inability to end the COVID-19 pandemic after having been elected to do exactly that.

Of course, it’s possible all three interpretations are correct (along with several dozen others that, in the interest of time, we will cheerfully ignore).  As a card-carrying member of Team Everyone Else, I would hazard a guess that a great deal of the discontent toward the 46^th president concerns the fact that, after two years and three vaccinations, I am still being asked—if not ordered—to conceal half my face with a mask every time I enter an indoor public space, and that there is no compelling reason to think this will end for as long as I’m alive.

Who could’ve guessed that heavy-handed—and open-ended—government control over its citizens in a democracy wouldn’t fill those citizens with unalloyed joy?

As it happens, this week also marks one year since I contracted COVID myself—a diagnosis that was confirmed roughly 24 hours after Biden’s inauguration.  In retrospect, the coincidence is perhaps less ironic than it seemed at the time.

Healthy 30-something that I was, my symptoms were more or less as you would expect, and I was back at full strength before the week was out.  Indeed, that I managed an hour-and-a-half-long bike ride on Day 2 of my illness—in mid-January, no less—would suggest I hadn’t lost a whole lot of strength to begin with.

Whether my infection imparted any long-term damage is an open question.  Although I have suffered no lasting physical effects from the virus—at least none that I’ve noticed—I can’t speak to the impact COVID might have had on whatever’s left of my brain.  After all, I’m the guy who just last week argued the Democrats’ strategy of shaming and stigmatizing anti-vaxxers is pointless, counterproductive and stupid—a view that is surely the product of an intellect in acute neurological decline.

In any event, as we sort out the particulars of what, precisely, the coronavirus pandemic hath wrought–particularly in the field of mental health, as nearly the entire U.S. population becomes infected—let us ponder an alternate timeline whereby, once COVID vaccines became widely available last spring, President Biden simultaneously declared victory and defeat against the pandemic and urged Americans to get back to their regularly-scheduled lives.

Suppose, in other words, he had made some version of the following speech:

“The coronavirus has proved a formidable and devastating foe, and it’s possible it will never completely go away.  However, thanks to extraordinary work by our most brilliant scientists, there are now vaccines available, free of charge, at every drug store in America.  While they will not necessarily prevent you from catching the virus, they will all but guarantee the virus won’t kill you or put you in the hospital.  If that sounds like a good deal, I encourage you to get vaccinated right away.  Should you decide that not getting vaccinated is the best choice for you and your family, I respect your decision and wish you the best of luck.”

Let’s further suppose that, in this same speech, Biden vowed to turbocharge distribution of COVID rapid tests and keep the nation posted on any new data about the nature of the virus and the ways the public could protect itself as it saw fit.  Suppose the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were tasked with continuing their monitoring of COVID’s mutations, but not with issuing formal recommendations that the administration would adopt as official policy carrying the force of law.

Suppose individual states and municipalities were provided the relevant information with which to make their own rules, but were cautioned that an overly-aggressive approach to “stopping the spread” could yield unintended consequences and trigger a backlash for which they might not be prepared.

Suppose the public were told—as has knowingly and consistently been true for the past year—that they have no reason to fear catching COVID unless they are unvaccinated, and that even the vast majority of the unvaccinated are likely to emerge from an infection without a scratch.  That the leading risk factors for bad outcomes are advanced age, obesity and certain other preexisting conditions—as is the case with virtually every other malady known to man—and that people in those circumstances should take whatever additional precautions they deem necessary and prudent.

Suppose, in short, that the Biden administration had treated its constituents as rational adults who could be trusted to conduct themselves responsibly and in their own best interests, and had limited its own actions strictly to the bureaucratic sausage-making for which it was elected in the first place.

To be sure, this hypothetical hands-off approach to governing would not have prevented the Delta or Omicron variants from running rampant.  Nor would it have necessarily headed off the contentious school closures and mask and vaccine mandates that certain governors and mayors might well have enacted on their own initiative.  Nor, frankly, would it have guaranteed fewer infections, hospitalizations or deaths from the virus overall.  Indeed, it might well have made those numbers worse.

Nonetheless, empowering individuals to act individually while providing all the necessary tools to mitigate the virus’ worst outcomes—tests, treatments, hospital beds—would have given the American people permission to stop viewing COVID-19 as a never-ending state of emergency.  It would have imparted psychological relief to the millions of citizens who have come to feel like they are living in a de facto police state every time they leave the house.  It would have lent real muscle to the notion that vaccines truly are a miracle cure and the key to our national salvation, and it would have undercut the suspicion among many that figures like Anthony Fauci are enjoying their power to control the behavior of 330 million people just a little bit too much.

The net result of such a strategy, one can reasonably surmise, would have been a much less neurotic, divided and despondent electorate, a robust economy devoid of the senseless closings and interruptions that our “COVID-Zero” mindset has necessitated, and an altogether more hopeful and serene national mood that would naturally translate into higher approval ratings for the people in charge, not least the commander-in-chief.

What we have instead is the exact opposite:  A regime intent on keeping us in a persistent state of anxiety about whatever new variants are around the corner, yet wholly inept at foreseeing and preparing for them in a timely manner.

It’s enough to make you wonder:  If our leaders can no longer be bothered to take this plague seriously, why should anyone else?  From here on out, what is the purpose of panicking about a virus that—as we have been told over and over again—is not dangerous to anyone who has received a vaccine?  Why—at the risk of repeating myself—am I still wearing this damned mask?  And why, come November, should I not vote for any candidate for office who will allow me to take it off?

Then again, maybe that’s just the brain damage talking again.

Pivot Point

On December 10, TIME Magazine will announce its choice for 2020’s Person of the Year.  If history is any guide—as it often is—there is reason to believe the “winner” will be a toss-up between Joe Biden and COVID first responders.  On the one hand, since 1972, TIME has devoted its year-end issue to all but three winners of the U.S. presidential election; on the other hand, in recent years it has paid special heed to those in the public service sector, from journalists to whistleblowers to those who battled Ebola in 2014.

As must be said every year—and which our outgoing president famously does not understand—TIME’s pick for Person of the Year is not an honor, per se.  By the magazine’s own reckoning, the selection represents “the person or group of people who had the greatest influence on the events of the year—for better or worse.”  TIME has carried on this tradition since 1927, and while the majority of its choices have been highly honorable folk, the list has also included the likes of Hitler, Stalin and Donald J. Trump.

Such is the nature of history:  One need not be virtuous to profoundly shape and alter the lives of millions.  Indeed, the opposite is all-too-often the case.

In any event, this annual exercise is nothing if not a parlor game, and I would be remiss not to proffer my own view on this mildly important matter in this most tumultuous of years.

For my money—and without further ado—the most influential person in 2020 was Darnella Frazier, the 17-year-old girl who videotaped the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25.

The argument is as follows:  Until Memorial Day, the coronavirus pandemic was the only news story of 2020.  From the moment in late February when it became clear that the mysterious pathogen that had rattled China in late 2019 would soon become an American problem, the United States was operating in a continued state of emergency, with most commercial activity ground to a halt and residents of countless cities and towns advised to shelter inside their homes until further notice, venturing out only for essential goods and services like food and medicine.

While the suspension of any semblance of normal life was not necessarily the relaxing vacation it felt like at the start—particularly for those whose only source of income had dried up as a direct consequence of the outbreak—by late spring we had more or less gotten the hang of it, grudgingly obeying the pleas of local and state officials to keep away from each other and wear face coverings as a means of keeping the infection and death rates as low as humanly possible—even at the cost of no longer seeing family and friends, going to the movies or even attending funerals.

And then Derek Chauvin put his knee on George Floyd’s neck, and the whole country changed the subject.

In an ordinary year, news that a white Minneapolis police officer had fatally pinned a black man to the ground for 7 minutes and 46 seconds for the crime of passing a counterfeit $20 bill at a grocery store would be treated merely as a horrific, racially-biased miscarriage of justice.  In the late spring of 2020, the killing of George Floyd proved cataclysmic, for several key reasons.

First and most obviously, the murder was filmed from beginning to end and broadcast almost immediately, thereby preventing the Minneapolis Police Department from downplaying and/or whitewashing the incident before it became something of a big deal.  What’s more, the sheer, sadistic brutality of an unarmed man being suffocated to death by the police in broad daylight while he cried out for his (dead) mother proved so indefensible that not even the president of the United States deigned to defend it.  In a notable break from tradition, all four officers involved were fired within 48 hours of Floyd’s death and charged with murder by the end of the week.

Of course, none of this quasi-accountability prevented the international outrage that followed, which saw millions of people take to the streets in protest, marching, demonstrating and demanding rectification, with the occasional looting and arson tossed in for good measure.

The effects of these “Black Lives Matter” demonstrations were manifold.  First, they got people out of the house for the first time in more than two months.  In principle, this was in direct violation of every advisory that had been issued by the nation’s health experts since the pandemic began.  However, because the protests occurred in the name of racial justice—ostensibly a noble and urgent cause—those same experts were forced to tie themselves in logistical knots, arguing that even though they had spent some 10 weeks explicitly condemning large gatherings as potential “superspreader” events, the BLM gatherings somehow didn’t count because…well, fighting racism is more important than fighting COVID, I guess.

The howling inconsistency of this messaging was not lost on those who had been forced to forego such foundational rituals as churchgoing and Memorial Day parades only to be suddenly told that massive get-togethers were OK after all, just so long as they were held for the right reasons.

So much for following the science.

In retrospect, the moment our political and public health leaders decided that loudly condemning police brutality was a worthy exception to the COVID-era rules was also the moment the coronavirus irreversibly became a political issue.  It was the inflection point when a large chunk of the populace stopped trusting that the likes of Dr. Anthony Fauci knew what they were talking about and had our best interests at heart, and began to wonder if this whole shutdown business was just one big unnecessary charade.

From there, you can trace the increased hostility toward any and all manner of controlling the virus, which correlated ever-so-neatly with fidelity to Donald Trump, while support for aggressive measures such as school closings and mask mandates came to stand in for opposition to same. 

While one can’t prove a counterfactual, it is entirely plausible that, absent a gargantuan, coast-to-coast civil rights uprising that happened to commence on the unofficial first weekend of summer, there would not have been such a contentious, painful and ultimately ruinous ideological civil war between those who recognized COVID-19 as a once-in-a-century epidemiological menace and those who considered it a hoax, a conspiracy or simply not that big a deal.

The BLM protests also had a surprising—and somewhat ironic—secondary effect:  They showed that the coronavirus does not spread outdoors at the rate that it spreads indoors.  Against all our preconceived assumptions, the demonstrations were not the “superspreader” events we initially feared they would be.  Whether due to their open-air setting or to widespread mask-wearing among their participants—presumably it was some combination of the two—the marches did not collectively cause a meaningful spike in COVID infections, hospitalizations or deaths.

In a weird way, the revelation that safe-ish outdoor congregating was, in fact, possible may well have shaped our future collective behavior more drastically than any other single factor—for better and for worse.  On the one hand, it provided a blueprint for the responsible resumption of such activities as weddings, outdoor dining and the like.  On the other hand, it lent real (if misguided) credence to the argument that the initial lockdowns were a hysterical overreaction and their associated restrictions on freedom of movement a gross abuse of government power over its citizens.  Someday, with enough data, we’ll know for sure whether that view was correct.

Here’s what we know now:  The resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement—with its inevitable excesses—provided Donald Trump with his most potent and lasting distraction from his own disgraceful mismanagement of COVID from Day 1, allowing him to stay competitive in his re-election campaign against Joe Biden and, in turn, ensure the continued viability of Trumpism beyond his own tenure, which will end on January 20.

Absent Trump’s “law and order” schtick throughout the summer, the 2020 election may well have been the Biden blowout we had been promised all along, complete with a Democratic Senate and all the legislative spoils that would follow.

Absent the BLM movement, that campaign strategy would not have gained its potency.  Absent the murder of George Floyd, the BLM movement would not have re-materialized when it did, if at all.  And absent the video footage of that murder, the name George Floyd would be completely unknown or, at most, a mere footnote alongside Breonna Taylor, Jacob Blake and the many other victims of apparent racist policing in 2020 whose stories, while outrageous and tragic, would not necessarily send millions into the streets all by themselves.

Long story short (too late?), the ultimate trajectory of 2020 would be unrecognizable had Darnella Frazier not been standing at the corner of East 38^th Street and Chicago Avenue in Minneapolis on May 25, with her cell phone camera at the ready.  Her uninterrupted recording of the final moments of George Floyd’s life—a video that, to this day, I haven’t quite brought myself to watch—altered the course of human events in ways big and small, and stands as the pivot point of the most chaotic and consequential period in the life of the United States in a generation. 

For that reason—at least according to the metrics of TIME Magazine—she is 2020’s Person of the Year. Although we should note that, by the same definition, the Non-Person of the Year was most likely a bat.