Many US politicians are prolonging the national misery of the pandemic instead of easing it.
Throughout the pandemic, American political and public-health leaders have been following Rahm Emanuel’s classic dictum for power-seeking officials: “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” Now they’ve adopted a corollary: You never want a crisis to end.
So they are prolonging the national misery instead of easing it, which could be done with a few simple strategies:
- Explain to the public that the virus will never disappear but is no longer a mortal threat to the vast majority of Americans.
- Encourage the minority still at risk to get vaccinated by honestly discussing who is in jeopardy and what scientists have learned about infections.
- Promote treatments proven to prevent infection and speed recovery while avoiding unproven treatments and mandates that cause collateral damage and generate mistrust.
- Above all, make it clear to Americans that we finally have reason to celebrate: What once seemed an unprecedented danger is now just one of many pathogens that we know how to live with.
But the nation’s crisis-mongers aren’t about to relinquish their hold over the public, so they’ve set new goals that are as unachievable as they are unnecessary and harmful.
Making vaccines available to every American adult is no longer sufficient; now the crisis cannot end until the entire population has been vaccinated. Instead of focusing efforts on vaccinating the vulnerable, officials obsess on compelling universal obedience, even if that means squandering vaccines on people who already have acquired natural immunity or are at minimal risk of serious illness.
Children are being sentenced to another round of unnecessary mask mandates and probably more school closures based on evidence-free warnings from Dr. Anthony Fauci and others that the Delta variant will be more deadly to them than the original virus. While the variant is more infectious, the evidence does not show it to be any more lethal. One of the most thorough studies, in England, shows that the survival rate for those under 18 with COVID is 99.995 percent.
Public-health demagogues lament that a minority of the public remains reluctant to get vaccinated without recognizing that their own tactics are likely a chief cause of this reluctance. They have been misleading people for so long — and censoring challenges to their misinformation — that it’s no wonder polls show that an overwhelming majority of unvaccinated Americans say they don’t trust Fauci or the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Many of these unvaccinated people have mistaken ideas about vaccine side effects, but they’re not wrong when they tell pollsters that the dangers of the virus have been exaggerated and exploited for political purposes.
The CDC continues to undermine its credibility by claiming strong evidence for the efficacy of lockdowns and mask mandates. Dozens of studies have found that lockdowns are ineffective, and one recent analysis of trends in the United States and other countries found that lockdown policies are associated with an increase in excess deaths.
The evidence offered by the CDC for mask mandates is weak, as Jeffrey H. Anderson has documented, and the most rigorous research — from more than a dozen randomized clinical trials — suggests that masks are ineffective (and possibly counterproductive) at stopping viral spread.
As David Zweig reported in New York magazine, when researchers from the CDC compared COVID-mitigation techniques at 169 elementary schools in Georgia, they found no statistically significant reduction of infections in schools that required masks for students, enforced social distancing, or installed barriers between desks. Those were important findings because it was the first such large study, but the CDC did not even mention them in the summary of research that it published and went on recommending masks for all students.
Meanwhile, dozens of other researchers have demonstrated an array of problems inflicted by mask-wearing called “Mask-Induced Exhaustion Syndrome.”
Mask mandates for children can’t be justified on ethical or scientific grounds, but they persist because they serve the interests of a certain class of adults. The purpose of this hygiene theater was described with blunt accuracy by Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor and one of the few politicians who has actually been following the science during the pandemic. “Politicians,” he explained, “want to force you to cover your face as a way for them to cover their own asses.”
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John Tierney, a contributing editor for City Journal, is the co-author of “The Power of Bad: How the Negativity Effect Rules Us and How We Can Rule It.” Adapted from City Journal.
This piece originally appeared in New York Post