By Charles C. W. Cooke
Thursday, January 06, 2021
Earlier this week, CNN’s Chris Cillizza lamented that, throughout the pandemic, “Societally we
unknowingly turned having Covid into some sort of judgment on your character.”
To remedy this, Cillizza suggested, “We need to recognize that getting Covid isn’t a
moral failing! It’s a super infectious disease that you can protect against,
sure, but can’t guarantee you won’t get it.”
“Unknowingly”? “We need to recognize”? “Societally”? Does
Chris Cillizza live in a sensory-deprivation tank?
There has been nothing “unknowing” about the implication
that catching Covid is evidence of a “moral failing.” It has been the core of
the progressive response to the disease. We see it every time that someone who
disagrees with the maximalist approach to lockdowns, restrictions, or mandates
is labeled a “Covidiot.” We see it every time the governor of Florida is
described stupidly as “DeathSantis,” or the governor of Texas is accused of belonging to a “death cult,” or any politician or
writer with a different risk calculus than Anthony Fauci is charged with
wanting “to kill grandma.” We see it insinuated by figures such as the New
York Times’ Paul Krugman, who has compared the states experiencing a seasonal surge to
the slaveholding Confederacy. We see it indicated every time that those
with rational objections to pandemic-mitigation measures are characterized in the press as conducting an “experiment in human sacrifice.” We
saw it last week, when “health-care expert” Gregory Travis told a bunch of kids swimming at a Holiday Inn that,
as a result of their indulgence, five out of ten of them would become infected
and one of them would die. We saw it in summer 2020’s preposterous assumption
that COVID would spread less efficiently if the crowd in question was
protesting against racism. We see it each time a Republican celebrity announces
that he has the virus and is swiftly blamed for his own illness. We see it in
every hysteric who tells desperate business-owners that their desire to reopen
betrays a preference for “money” over “love.” It has been the motivation behind
the schizophrenic manner in which COVID has been routinely covered by the media
— the tone of which has depended almost entirely on where the virus is currently surging, who is being affected by it, and who is the president
of the United States. And it is what Nicolle Wallace means when she complains
that despite being “a Fauci groupie” and “a thrice-vaccinated, mask adherent”
who buys “KN95 masks by the, you know, caseload,” she is beginning to sense
that she won’t be able to “outrun” Omicron.
When Cillizza says that “we need to recognize,” what
he should mean is, “We need to apologize.” There is one reason
and one reason alone that Cillizza and his ilk are running away from the
Judgment of God assumption that has marked the press’s coverage of Covid for
nearly two years: Now that they’ve contracted Covid themselves en masse,
the ruse has become unsustainable. It is one thing to point at the hicks down
South and conclude that they’re coughing because they have the wrong politics;
it is quite another to reckon with what infection must mean when your own city
is inundated, when your own friends are sick, when your own policies have
failed. It’s different when it’s you and people like you. It’s different when
the “adult” president proves as hapless as the “moron” president. It’s different
when the Buzzfeed Christmas party, rather than Spring Break at the Lake of the
Ozarks, becomes the super-spreader event of the season.
Much as Antifa seems to have convinced itself that it
must be Good because it is opposed to something that is Bad, so our censorious
press came to conceive of itself as the Keeper of Science and Public Health.
And then, all of a sudden, it lost its sense of taste.
And boy was it sudden! Just like that,
President Biden has moved out of his sickly savior mode and admitted that the
federal government can’t do much to help after all. Just like that, the
teachers’ unions have begun to take hits for their duplicity and their cynicism.
Just like that, the efficacy of cloth masks and the workability of the
zero-risk approach are being questioned, and some of our most influential
voices are acknowledging that there might perhaps be some
downsides to shutting down the world. Just like that, we’re hearing talk of
previously downplayed concepts such as “endemicity,” “seasonality,” “risk
tolerance,” and — heaven forfend! — humility.
Many of the defectors wish to pretend that their shifting
approach is the result of their having only recently learned the true nature of
Covid. Others propose nervously that Omicron is “different.” But it isn’t — at
least, not in the way that matters. In its lethality, Omicron is mercifully
distinct from previous variants, but the practical question before us is the
same as it was before: Are our public-policy measures able to meaningfully
control its spread? And the answer to this question is the same as it was
before: Absolutely not. Yes, the consequences of this inability are less grave.
But that’s not the point. The point, as Matt Shapiro has observed, is that now, as ever, it is “impossible to
understand COVID by looking at voting patterns or mitigation regimes or by
setting two regionally disperse states against each other,” and it is especially impossible
to understand Covid by looking to the moral character of the people who have
contracted it. It doesn’t care how virtuous you think you look. It doesn’t care
whom you voted for. It doesn’t care whether your mayor has a nice lawn sign.
It’s a disease.
We need to recognize that getting Covid isn’t
a moral failing? No, Chris. You do.
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