Read on Twitter
"As the virus spread... these officials callously wrote, 'who cares' and 'we want them infected,' They privately admitted they ‘always knew’ the President’s policies would cause a ‘rise’ in cases, and they plotted to blame the spread of the virus on career scientists." https://twitter.com/jaketapper/status/1339271913693192194
You know why the so-called "herd immunity" strategy was so appealing to a certain segment of the population?
Because it meant that they didn't have to do a damn thing. No hard things required of them or anyone else they cared about.
Because it meant that they didn't have to do a damn thing. No hard things required of them or anyone else they cared about.
No culpability, no responsibility. People with no known risk factors getting hit harder than expected? No one could have known that. Vulnerable populations getting hit anyway? It's their own fault; they should have been more careful.
This entire abomination of a strategy rests upon the idea that those who have decided to implement it, and those who willingly go along with it, will be insulated from its effects -- and that those who take the brunt of it were expendable to begin with.
Never mind that there are real world consequences here for real people. Never mind that, as this is a NOVEL virus, we still do not know what sorts of long-term effects it can have -- and the ones we do know about are alarming to say the least.
Never mind that it is effectively impossible for the average at-risk person to adequately isolate themselves from this disease if it's running rampant in the rest of the population.
Never mind that, even though most people live through a case of covid, it still makes quite a few people sick enough to need hospital care. Never mind that, even if we had enough hospital space for everyone, that's still an untenable burden on our health care providers.
Never mind that, as being overweight is considered a risk factor for Covid, upwards of 40% of American adults are therefore classified as "at risk."
Never mind that, even though it does seem to go easier on kids, children by necessity must come into close, frequent contact with adults -- some of whom are those same, aforementioned at-risk individuals.
Never mind that spreading the virus encourages it to mutate, thereby leading to a greater number of different strains, thereby making it more difficult to ultimately treat. Never mind that we have multiple confirmed cases of reinfection.
While we may not have gone whole hog for the misnamed "herd immunity" strategy here in the U.S., we've had enough people actively or passively pushing it that we've seen some of its effects, and they are not pretty.
Hundreds of thousands dead; many more suffering from organ damage, nerve damage, cardiovascular damage, some of which is happening in ways we can't yet treat or even understand.
The degree of permanence of this damage is unknown -- it may take these people months or years to recover, if they ever can at all. What we know from our last major coronavirus outbreak, though, isn't good.
(And keep in mind also that many of the people reporting long covid symptoms are among those who had "mild to moderate" cases.)
On top of that, active or passive proponents of so-called "natural herd immunity" have made things very difficult for anyone who does not want themselves or their loved ones to be numbered among the seriously ill or the dead.
We get in the way, you see, of the "just go back to normal, everything will be fine" mentality, for the simple fact that, to the best of our respective abilities, we *aren't* going back to normal. We're staying home. We're not going out. We're not eating out.
We mess up the narrative, and so must be punished for it. When we wear masks and keep our distance, we're "weak" and "fearful." If we pull our children out of school and keep them home, we're perpetuating abuses against them.
If we isolate from family members, we must want them to be lonely. If we stay home from church, then we must not be very faithful.
And then, of course, even if we do as many of these things as we can, if we were to still catch it because we haven't gone full hermit-in-the-woods, we know that the very people pointing and sneering at us will be first in line to tell us it's all our fault.
Do you see? Do you see how this "strategy" coarsens and degrades us as a people? How it encourages people to view those weaker than themselves not as fellow citizens worthy of protection, but as annoyances and inconveniences to be ignored or gotten rid of?
Setting aside for a moment the appalling cost in lives and suffering that we have seen thus far, think about what it does to the souls of the people who have been pushing for it, and those others who have chosen to trust that they know what they're doing.
It is, at its heart, "might makes right" as public health policy. That should give everyone pause.
Of course we, as individuals, are not primarily responsible for the health of those around us any more than we're responsible for the maintenance of their cars.
But wearing a mask and keeping your distance aren't about being responsible for your neighbor's health; they're about not actively making it harder for them to remain healthy.
And you *are*, as a human being, as a citizen, responsible for that -- just as much as you are responsible for not running red lights, speeding through a school zone, or driving drunk. Because those things endanger the people around you.
Look, from a historical perspective, we have had it *amazingly* good for longer than my lifetime. We're not used to hard stuff happening here, not on this scale anyway. But it did. We have vaccines on the way, which is AMAZING.
But between now and their wide deployment, we need to do the hard things -- many of which, from that same historical perspective, aren't even that hard. And we do them because we care about those who are at higher risk than we ourselves are; that's what civilized people do.
