Doubts About Post-Pandemic Life
I’m becoming increasingly worried about ever getting to the point when we’ll be able to have social interactions with each other.
There are abundant warning signs suggesting that the pandemic will have not abated as much as we’d like by July. A new variant appears to be more contagious and younger people are more susceptible.
President Biden has promised vaccines will be generally available by May. It will take time to get those who remain unvaccinated taken care of, and there is also a lag between getting inoculated and developing immunity. But that’s not what worries me.
The danger as far as I’m concerned are nearly half of male Trump supporters who say they're not very interested in getting the vaccine. Twenty-five percent of the members of the House of Representatives haven’t bothered to get their dose, but that hasn’t stopped the GOP leadership from demanding that existing safeguards be dropped.
Alex Berenson, one of KUSI News’ go-to experts, who has made a career out of pandemic contrarianism, is doing his best to stay relevant.
https://twitter.com/DavidJuurlink/status/1371446663349436419?s=20
Dr. Anthony Fauci appeared on Fox News Sunday, speaking with host Chris Wallace about COVID-19 vaccine rollout and related topics.
After showing a short clip wherein a number of past presidents, including Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama, promoted getting the coronavirus vaccine, Wallace was ready with a hard hitting question.
Wallace’s question: How much of a difference does Fauci think it would make if Trump “leads a campaign” for the people who are “most devoted to him” to actually get the vaccine?
“I think it would make all the difference in the world,” Fauci stated. He went on to say that he is “surprised” at the high percentage of Republicans who say they don’t want to get vaccinated, stressing that it’s not a political issue, but a public health issue. “I just don’t get it, Chris, why they don't want to get vaccinated,” he added.
Wallace, for the second time in the segment, credited Trump for vaccines being widely available (in reference to Operation Warpspeed) and asked Fauci why he thinks Trump didn’t participate in the PSA promoting the vaccine. Fauci, delicately, said this was “puzzling” to him.
“I wish he would,” Fauci stated. “He has such an incredible influence over the people of the Republican party, it would be a game-changer if he did.”
It will be a cold day in hell before Donald Trump, a man whose philosophy is all about promoting himself, gets into playing public servant, as David Corn notes at Mother Jones:
...Were Trump to join the chorus of public figures touting the benefits and safety of the COVID vaccination, he would be boosting Biden’s top priority and helping Biden’s presidency become a success. Such a move would not advance Trump’s political interests. If he is considering a 2024 rematch, he won’t want Biden to be the COVID hero. And having fueled and exploited right-wing paranoia—throughout the pandemic and during the post-election period—to build and expand his political base, why would Trump throw that all away? A call from Trump to get vaccinated could appear to some of his loyalists as unsettling counter-programming. Now we’re supposed to do what Fauci says? How discombobulating would that be? It would cut against Trump’s embrace of anti-elite know-nothingism. He would be conceding that Biden and the Fauci-huggers were right all along. After all, how can you own the libs if you acknowledge they are right about the vaccine?
It’s almost as if Trump and his followers WANT the pandemic to continue.
https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1371615817352278026?s=20
I can feel my anger against these flat-earthers rising.
It didn’t have to be this way, as Quinn Norton says in the essay, We Hate You Now - The Hardest Problem of The Aftertimes:
Plenty of countries, democratic, autocratic, eastern, western, big and small, opted out of the pandemic. They said no, their people said no, and they just didn’t have to live through the hell of the last year the same way my family and my community have lived through the US and European experience of Covid-19. Friends in New Zealand are almost apologetic when I talk to them. Vietnam, more populous than any country in Europe, has had 35 deaths from the virus at the time of this writing. They did amazing hand washing Tiktoks early, got together on the idea of prevention and masking, and just skipped the endless grind of living in an endless surge of misery and death.
When all the people who worked and sacrificed to slow Covid-19 down encounter all the people who didn’t, it’s going to be a new and vicious split in society, and it’s going to take a generation to heal.
Unlike any other pandemic in history, our level of scientific knowledge and ability to communicate globally gave us the power to stop this virus. This is humanity’s first self-inflicted pandemic. Or rather, a bunch of people inflicted it on the rest of us because of selfishness, ignorance, or both. If you are one of those people, you have by definition not had to deal with me or my tribe — the ones that took this seriously, the ones who fought this thing tooth and nail, or who stayed home except to do the most needful things. But when we are all back together, this is going to be a new and terrible social problem. If you were out, helping to spread this virus, I don’t know what to tell you. It’s going to be a long time before I know how to forgive you.
You should probably just lie about it for the rest of your life.
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