Enough with the COVID Zealots

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Tuesday, May 04, 2021

 

Here we sit, smack dab in the middle of the winter of our discontent, our arms chock-full of liquid innovation — and yet, for some utterly insoluble reason, we remain surrounded by resistance to summer. Has there ever been a people this indifferent to their liberation?

 

I have never been of the view that our responses to the pandemic were all unnecessary or illegitimate. Certainly, I never bought that it was a “hoax.” Yes, yes, COVID wasn’t the Second World War; but it also wasn’t just “the flu.” And so, to mitigate the risk to myself and others, I’ve played along with a good deal: I’ve been happy to wear a mask when asked to by businesses or the law; I have been happy to get vaccinated, having waited in line for my turn; and, unusually for me, I have happily supported at least some of the government’s spending, on the grounds that a state that is willing to deprive people of their liberty and livelihood should do at least something to mitigate the damage. All in all, I have agreed to eschew my usual absolutism in favor of the sort of balanced, scientific, and ultimately moderate approach that was adopted from the start here in Florida. Now, though, the time for such acquiescence has passed, and in its place we need something different: mockery, vehemence, resistance, dudgeon, exasperation, and, if it comes to it, a thorough raising of the middle finger. Enough!

 

In recent weeks, it has become increasingly obvious to me that the life I am living here in Florida bears no resemblance whatsoever to the lives that are being lived by my colleagues in the Northeast, in the Beltway, on the West Coast, and abroad. My kids have been in school since last August; theirs are stuck at home. We go out to eat whenever we want; they can count their excursions since last year on one hand. Their minds remain addled by the rules and customs of the Coronavirus Age; mine has been re-rewired back to normal without my ever having noticed. Here, we do our own risk assessments; there, they are micromanaged like children. And yet, among the powers-that-be, it is their model that is being praised and perpetuated — even though Florida’s approach has resulted in its sitting below the middle of the pack for deaths while maintaining a strong economy, full classrooms, and a more normal lifestyle than has existed anywhere else in the world. This is utterly ridiculous.

 

Worse yet, it’s hysterical. Last week, the CDC insisted that vaccinated Americans should still wear masks outdoors in crowds and indoors at all times — instructions that Joe Biden, the president of these United States, quickly described as “patriotic” — while on MSNBC, Joy Reid summed up the delirium that has taken hold in much of the press by declaring that, despite being fully vaccinated, she now wears two masks when she goes jogging. In wealthy and highly educated areas such as Brookline, Mass., and Montgomery County, Md., meanwhile, local officials were busy protecting their outdoor-mask mandates despite the governors of those states having abandoned the idea on the rationale that it was quite unfathomably stupid. So bad has this tendency become that, in the nation’s capital of Washington, D.C., residents can now be overheard clinging to their masks lest anyone suspect they might be a Republican, and the mayor has summarily reversed her decision to lift the city’s indoor mask mandate and made it illegal to dance at wedding receptions for good measure.

 

Oh, and the schools still aren’t fully open.

 

The architects of this collective madness remain immovable, and proud of it. Now, as ever, they meet every move toward normality with accusations of “murder” that are invariably proven incorrect, and yet are repeated in precisely the same tone and with precisely the same confidence the next time around. Now, as ever, they greet evidence to the contrary by either dismissing it out of hand, filtering it through a conspiracy theory, or issuing a never-to-be-revisited injunction to “wait a couple of weeks.” And, on the rare occasions that their position becomes untenable, they quickly change the subject, moving the material question from whether there is any evidence that one needs to wear three masks while skydiving to asking impatiently what harm can come from doing so. Every deadline is delayed; every argument is elastic; and nothing but COVID is written in on the ledger’s negative side. They’re zealots, for whom it will always be March 12, 2020. They must be stopped.

 

I do not believe that the initial panic over the coronavirus was driven primarily by cynicism or by expedience. But I do think that there is something both cynical and expedient about the glacial pace at which this country is being permitted to return to normal. For a certain sort of political progressive, our COVID-led status quo — with its rampant safetyism, its reliance upon experts, and its outsized role for government — is just not that big a deal, especially now that it can be used as an all-encompassing pretext for the Biden administration’s attempt to “remake” the United States. Add in that progressives seem to wildly misjudge how dangerous the virus really is — the chance that somebody with COVID must be hospitalized is between 1 and 5 percent, and yet 69 percent of Democrats believe that the number is more than 20 percent, and 41 percent believe that it is more than 50 percent — and you have a recipe for disaster. In the press, in the blue states, and in the federal government, that recipe is still being followed . . . well, well past the point of being overdone.

 

Your move, America.