My apologies that this article is dreadfully boring so far. But boring is striking because, for some reason, we decided to forget all of this for the last two years in dealing with a new virus that is associated with a 99.8% survival rate, the victims of which tend to die at an age at which people normally die.
In short, we decided to panic ourselves into abolishing rights and liberties, while throwing out all inherited wisdom about infection, immunity, therapeutics, and viruses in general, not to mention all rights and traditional law. Talk of therapeutics for Covid was all-but banned. In short, we went utterly crazy, causing tremendous harm to public health, and the social and cultural fabric.
What strikes me about Biden and the frog in his throat is how casually and quickly he and his administration take recourse to traditional wisdom about viruses, even as the same administration is promoting the upending of life as we’ve known it all for a virus that is a near cousin of the very thing he caught from his grandson. And yet his spokesperson draws on what we’ve always known in order to calm people down.