The pandemic is over. So sayeth none other than President Joe Biden while talking to “60 Minutes” Host Scott Pelley at the Detroit Auto Show, adding, “No one is wearing masks, everyone seems to be in pretty good shape.”
This declaration came on the heels of a recent attempt by the Washington Post to pretend that the “new normal” is just about annual covid jabs and more spending for pandemic preparedness. No word yet on if Twitter or Facebook are going to cancel Biden or WaPo for spreading misinformation, particularly Ultra MAGA Plus level misinformation.
It’s almost as if the new normal we were threatened with isn’t going to happen and instead, all those who hectored and lectured us for the past two years are pretending that they never really argued for the new normal at all.
The spread of the old normal variant isn’t stopping with the president, either. Leana Wen, not known for being muted in her love of excessive mitigation attempts, announced that her kids wouldn’t be wearing masks at school, even though she knows they’ll probably end up catching covid. Eric Feigl-Ding, Twitter scholar and chief covid neurotic, disagrees with both Wen and the president, at least when it comes to masks. Covid may now be less lethal than the flu, but Feigl-Ding isn’t going to let that stop him from not living his life. Kudos to him for his consistency, if only because he knows he’ll have to slither back into obscurity once people find a new form of panic porn.
There Are No Takebacks on the Covid Response
Others besides Biden, Wen, and WaPo, though, are starting to come around to arguments that banned and censored thought criminals have been making for the past two years. The New York Times now admits that remote learning had deleterious effects on kids. The Gray Lady also published a guest essay that was critical of the Science himself, Saint Anthony Fauci. Nature published a piece arguing for a return to the old normal. The Atlantic, to its credit, is encouraging people to admit they were wrong about our collective response to covid.
While it’s nice to finally see people get serious about the fact that we were never going to defeat a virus, particularly one that was turned up to 11 in a lab, we can’t allow them to get away with it. There can be no “oopsies, never mind, I was wrong” given how much they upended our lives in their futile quest.
In a just world, they’d all be tarred and feathered before being banished to a remote outpost with no internet access. In our world, they won’t even face censure on social media for now advocating for the same policies and ideas that got countless others in trouble, merely for being correct earlier.
The Virus Covid Truly Unleashed
Granted, we’re still quite a way from defeating the truly devastating virus covid unleashed — the tyranny of those neurotics. Some kids are still being forced to mask, a tool we once recognized didn’t do much, unless we count protecting our qi, until more study was done and it was determined that they don’t do much. California wants to force kids to get the jab, a shot which doesn’t stop the spread and which is for a virus they were never at risk from, but has to wait for full FDA approval. The Department of Defense is clinging to its vaccine mandate for service members. There are myriad requirements on the state level, none of which will accomplish anything except inconveniencing people.
There are also still individual businesses requiring masks, such as my middle daughter’s allergist. (Their WiFi password: breatheeasy.) Veterinarians seem particularly resistant to doing away with mask mandates, though dog moms are a different breed. Hospitals and doctor’s offices make more sense in sticking with masks, if you squint hard and ignore how lax compliance is amongst the staff, the people who are exposed to germs all day every day.
It’s Time to Ignore the Science™
It’s looking like the new normal is the same as the old normal, only with a lot more people who deserve to be ignored in perpetuity, if not, as mentioned, tarred, feathered, and launched to a remote outpost with no internet access. For as C.S. Lewis wrote, “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies.”
But just to be safe, to ensure that those busybodies never get another chance at LARPing Loki, particularly as they were more concerned with tyranny than our collective good, we shouldn’t discount the healing power of the catapult.
