COVID: No Trust, No Exit

I t was just July 31 when CDC director Rochelle Walensky said, “To clarify: There will be no nationwide mandate [of vaccines]. . . . There will be no federal mandate.” She was just repeating the administration’s line, which Joe Biden had been saying since before his inauguration. In December, then president-elect Biden said, “No, I don’t think it should be mandatory. I wouldn’t demand it to be mandatory.”

Last week, plans changed.

If you squint hard after drinking some homemade Chartreuse, it’s not quite a federal mandate to get vaccinated. Rather, it’s a new rule for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which will require your employer, if that employer has 99 other employees besides you, to either test you for COVID-19 every week or certify that you are vaccinated. Failure to comply comes with huge fines for the employer. Technically, you could just quit! Or, technically, your employer could collect your precious nasal fluids every week. Or force you to present them to a doctor and bring your test in to be verified by — someone in HR or your supervisor. More likely they’ll just demand that you get the vaccine or get fired. So you won’t be forced to do anything, it’s just a personal and private medical decision between you, your doctor, your direct report, human resources, and the Department of Labor.

This is becoming a familiar playbook. The federal government can’t directly impose speech codes and police your thoughts. But it can create workplace rules that make the employer liable for an “unsafe” environment if you in any way express your wrong thoughts about transgenderism, or gay marriage, or family life — either verbally, through decorations hung in your cubicle, or your hand gestures. That’s why you have to sit through sensitivity trainings, why you’re being pressured to sign on to “allyship,” and why you, if you are a conservative at a corporate headquarters job you really need, learn to shut up right quick. By using regulations and fines to dragoon private entities, the government gets to outsource the violation of the First Amendment. So why wouldn’t it use the same playbook when it usurps public-health authority from the states and the people, where it was assigned in the Tenth Amendment?

Besides this slippery use of authority, there are larger problems with Joe Biden’s latest plan to end the pandemic. The first and most serious is that this reversal on mandates is yet another lie to the public. America’s public-health authorities — including NIAID director Anthony Fauci and Rochelle Walensky — have gotten into this habit of trying to manipulate the public with untruths. Fauci is up-front about this. He misled the public, according to his own account, about masks in order to preserve them for medical professionals. (This itself is almost certainly untrue; he more likely believed the ample studies showing that cloth masks are mostly useless at stopping a respiratory virus.) He has upped his guesses and predictions for when the public might reach herd immunity, based on what he thought the public could bear to hear. Walensky reversed CDC policy on kids’ masking outdoors at summer camp; the about-face was clearly a result of political pressure, but she pretended it was on the basis of new studies. And this is besides the American officials’ bad habit of not addressing obvious questions. The United States is a strange outlier in its refusal to discuss natural immunity.

The public’s lack of trust has been fatal to the COVID-containment effort. And it contrasts neatly with the approach of Denmark, which has recently relaxed all government-imposed COVID restrictions. Denmark’s public-health authorities often leveled with the public about their confidence level in various measures. Denmark did employ a vaccine passport, but its use was extremely limited compared with neighboring France’s vaccine-passport measures. In Denmark, you could still shop without a vaccine passport. The Danish government’s information campaign stressed that the vaccine was safe, effective, and voluntary.

That high level of social trust, the transparency of public-health authorities, and the more tightly calibrated intervention — focusing on those with the highest risk — helped Denmark avoid the nationwide rioting that has greeted vaccine passports in Israel and France. By declining to compel compliance, Denmark allowed people to come to their own decision, and it did not put the relatively small group of skeptics on the defensive. Needless to say, Denmark did not force employers to be involved in the health care of individual workers. Nor did the elected government’s leaders express anything like the dripping contempt that Joe Biden’s shows for laggards, as when he recently snarled, “Our patience is wearing thin.”

There’s another larger problem with the plan: There’s no description of an end-state.

You can see this problem and the illogic in Vice President Harris’s insistence that masking and testing will “protect the vaccinated.” Because the vaccinated already have the best protection they’re going to get in the vaccine itself. Comparatively, non-pharmaceutical interventions such as masks are almost useless. It has been obvious for a year that the pandemic is driven far more by the change of seasons and that whole regions of the United States see rises and dips together, whether or not they have indoor or outdoor mandates.

American authorities are exacerbating the culture-war dynamic that informs our pandemic response. Biden has now consistently framed his policy as a set of rewards and punishments for good and bad behavior, rather than as responses to the fluctuations of the pandemic itself. One begins to suspect that the reason the Biden administration refuses to describe an end-state for the pandemic is that our pandemic policy is divorced from the disease itself. It is now a policy seeking moral satisfaction rather than public health.