The Covid Insanity Has to End

T he illogic of the Pandemic Reign of Error is long past the point of too much to bear.

As Covid infections have surged beyond control — breaking through vaccines and boosters — the CDC now says that we have to reduce the number of isolation days for people who test positive for the virus but are basically asymptomatic. Our Phil Klein has elaborated on the arbitrariness of it all. Naturally, leave it to our Janus-faced megalomaniac, Dr. Anthony L’Science C’est Moi Fauci, to supply the risible rationalization du jour: “If you are asymptomatic and you are infected, we want to get people back to the jobs, especially those with essential jobs.”

If we were dealing with a real plague, the insanity of this would be so obvious even the media-Democrat complex would not be able to speak of it without snickering.

With an infectious disease that posed a serious threat of lethality to the average person, a credible positive test would call for isolation until the person was certifiably cleared of infection. Here, by contrast, the government is now saying that the certifiably infected need to get back into the general population faster. This, even though the government (a) insists on treating non-vaccinated people as if they were lepers (including those who have had Covid, even though their natural immunity makes their risk comparable to that of vaccinated people); and (b) has been coercing even people who are “fully” vaccinated (whatever that means from moment to moment) to mask up and take other precautions because being vaccinated and asymptomatic is no guarantee against transmitting the virus.

We’ve lost our minds.

Just to be clear on where I’m coming from, I am enthusiastically pro-vaccination. I got the jab as soon as it was available to me, and was boosted weeks ago. I’ve insisted that family members whom I’m either responsible for or have influence over do likewise. I lost family and friends in the early months of the epidemic. I would like to prevent everyone from getting Covid, even in what early reports indicate is the milder new Omicron iteration, and even though our wondrously evolved world of vaccines and improved therapeutics makes the chance of death or serious illness vanishingly small.

Then again, I’d similarly like to prevent everyone from catching the scourges of viral rhinitis (also known as the common cold) and influenza. But I don’t want to prevent that outcome, an inevitable one for all of us at some point(s), nearly as much as I want us to live in a free society. By nature, liberty entails risks, an enormous number of which are more perilous than Covid. Freedom is America’s foundation, but it necessarily involves no small amount of annoyances and inconveniences, aches and pains, large and small. A risk-free society is stifled and inert. It is no society at all.

Following a pattern of viral mutation that Jim Geraghty explained a year-and-a-half ago, Covid appears to become less lethal as it becomes more transmissible. (To be sure, it is still too early for settled conclusions, opinions vary — see, e.g., here and here — and the CDC is characteristically confused about whether we’re in the onset of Omicron, the depths of Delta, or both.) The virus is now spreading like the common cold and seasonal flu, with both of which we long ago learned to live. For the former, there is no cure but many well-known mitigation strategies. For the latter, which Mario Loyola fittingly described in our pages as a relatively “prolific killer,” we have perennially adjusted vaccines that are no guarantee against infection but reduce its likelihood and ameliorate most cases.

People who roll the dice, ignoring precautions against cold and failing to get a flu shot, sometimes escape unscathed and sometimes get bad cases. The number of them who get seriously sick is small, and the number who die is negligible. For the most part, moreover, their ignorance or negligence is a threat to themselves, not to the rest of us — or at least not much of a threat, and not nearly enough of one to justify jamming the gears of a free society.

Covid fits this pattern. It is impossible to calculate a perfectly accurate mortality risk since there are many more infections than reported cases (including more deaths attributable to Covid than deaths reported as such). But even if we grossly inflated the death rate by using reported cases as a crude metric, it would still be just 1.4 percent (about 801,000 deaths out of about 55.5 million cases); and the real risk varies widely — almost none for those under 30, much higher for the elderly and those with comorbidities.

Elected officials and bureaucrats are well aware of this; they just don’t want to say it aloud. But in the places where they figure you won’t look and where the media won’t report, they make admissions they hope you’ll never hear about. So it is with the Justice Department, which is laboring to defend President Biden’s indefensible vaccine mandate — issued on a purported “emergency” basis by the Occupational Security and Health Administration two years after the pandemic began and one year after vaccines were developed . . . though before the president suddenly conceded on Monday that there is no federal solution to the virus, which he now regards as principally a matter of state regulation.

Based on the government’s own data, crunched by the CDC, Justice Department lawyers have acknowledged to the federal appellate courts that unvaccinated workers between the ages of 18 and 29 bear a risk roughly equivalent to that posed to vaccinated persons between 50 and 64. Yet the Biden administration — the same administration that venerates abortion as a private health-care matter to be weighed by a woman (or “birthing person”) and her doctor free of government interference — is hell-bent on extorting the young to get vaccinated, on pain of lost livelihood and pariah status.

That is beyond absurd. It’s tyrannical.

It is not that the vaccines are ineffective. They are great. Still, like anything else that is defamed and overhyped, as the Left has done to the vaccines (first talking them down as unreliable because they were developed under the Trump administration, then talking them up as the silver bullet that would empower Biden to make good on his vow to “shut down the virus”), they are not quite as advertised. They are settling into what they will be in a future era of endemic Covid (an era that is already under way): an invaluable mitigation tool for an infectious virus that, like the flu, we must learn to live with and manage.

It is high time that we, too, live with and manage Covid, just as we do with the rest of life’s tribulations. Things that are a spot of bother the vast majority of the time but tragically lethal in outlier cases. Conditions that are nuisances for most of us but mortally threaten a few of us who have underlying conditions — threats that, fortunately, we learn more about, and about how to treat, every day.

Having finally discovered federalism, perhaps President Biden could take the next step and discover liberty. If he did, he’d accomplish more of what he wants — higher vaccination rates and lower incidence of serious illness and death, fewer disruptions and better economic performance — by trusting Americans to care for themselves. Trying to strong-arm reluctant people into compliance with increasingly irrational protocols is not working on them, and it is strangling all of us.