The Permanent Pandemic Security State

‘A lot of what you’re seeing as attacks on me, quite frankly, are attacks on science,” Anthony Fauci told NBC’s Chuck Todd in June. In November, he told CBS’s Margaret Brennan that when people criticize him, “they’re really criticizing science because I represent science.” It must just be a coincidence, then, that “science” always seems to change whenever Fauci’s prestigious position at the head of our Covid regime is at stake. The mousy public-health bureaucrat just keeps finding reasons to extend the crisis. In March, he told CNN’s Jake Tapper that pandemic restrictions could end once the country fell below 10,000 daily cases. In November, Fauci changed his tune again: Cases need to fall to as low as 3,300 a day to return to “a degree of normality,” he clarified.

Now with Omicron, the same games are being played. As the goalposts continue to shift in the “war on Covid,” the justifications for restrictions are becoming increasingly arbitrary. The “scientific” basis for pandemic mandates was always iffy — Fauci’s flip-flops on everything from masks to herd immunity do not inspire confidence — but in the face of vaccines, monoclonal antibody treatments, and the latest variant’s relatively benign effects, the pandemic security state has lost any of the veneer of legitimacy that it may have once presented.

So why does all this feel like it’s never going away?

“In personal life, no one relishes a crisis, but in political life, many people pray for a crisis as drought-stricken farmers pray for rain,” the economist Robert Higgs wrote in 2009. “For these people, a societal crisis promises to bring not extraordinary difficulties, dangers, and challenges, but rather enlarged opportunities.” Every crisis leaves the political class more powerful than it was before, Higgs argued. The “ratchet effect theory,” pioneered in the libertarian academic’s seminal 1987 work Crisis and Leviathan, outlines how “temporary” expansions of government power in times of crisis often end up as the new permanent status quo: The Great Depression left us with the New Deal, the world wars left us with the kind of military-industrial complex that Dwight Eisenhower famously warned against in his Farewell Address, and the World Trade Center attacks left us with the post-9/11 security apparatus (worst of all . . . the TSA).

As today’s crisis recedes, Americans are saddled with a similar problem. By most reasonable metrics, we have won the war on Covid. As David Leonhardt writes in the New York Times, “because [Omicron] is milder than earlier versions of the virus, Covid now appears to present less threat to most vaccinated elderly people than the annual flu does.” The virus could still threaten an unvaccinated individual in an at-risk demographic, but that’s a consequence of that individual’s personal health decisions. It’s between him and his God. While every Covid death is tragic, the pandemic no longer has the society-wide implications that it initially did. Now that vaccines are widely available — and promising new antiviral treatments are on their way — the emergency basis for widespread restrictions has evaporated. It’s over.

But pandemic measures continue nonetheless. In defiance of all scientific evidence and common sense, universities across the country are pushing forward with draconian restrictions, locking down campuses and quarantining students — all of whom are fully vaccinated and boosted, in compliance with the universities’ own requirements — in their rooms. Chicago Public Schools closed for five days amid a fight between the city and its teachers’ union, which went on strike to advocate a return to remote learning. Mask mandates persist in abundance: My home state of Oregon is planning to extend theirs indefinitely.

On the margins, we’re already seeing worrying examples of how Covid-era restrictions could be used in a post-Covid country. Phil Klein noted in November that the Covid masking regime is being repurposed for illnesses like the flu, as public-health officials begin to subtly slip in admonitions like “it’s flu season” and “other viruses are out there” as reasons to wear a mask. More worryingly, we are seeing schools go remote for non-Covid reasons: A high school in Connecticut reverted to remote learning for four days in response to student vandalism, while a middle school in Oregon went online for three weeks to address an outbreak of student fights.

This trend should have been easy to spot. The indefinite extension of pandemic restrictions reflects an ironclad rule of institutional inertia: New laws, programs, and political arrangements always create new constituencies with vested interests in prolonging and expanding their power. The teachers’ unions are a very powerful constituency; as long as they see potential gain from wielding the threat of school shutdowns, they’ll keep on doing it. Public-health officials themselves have seen their power and prestige grow exponentially over the course of the past two years. Who wouldn’t be reluctant to give that up?

But the institutionalization of pandemic-era reforms opens the door to more dire abuses of power down the road. Vaccine passports, already introduced in a few of our major cities and now debuting in many more, are a dangerous step toward a Chinese-style social-credit system. That’s not hyperbolic. In Australia, law-enforcement agencies have begun to use location data from QR-code check-ins to track suspected criminals. New York bureaucrats are already fantasizing about creative ways to expand their “Excelsior Pass” system, too: “While Excelsior Pass started out as a tool to help New York businesses recover from the pandemic, the state is now exploring how the platform could be retrofitted to verify other types of records and credentials,” Vox reported in October. “New York hasn’t decided exactly what the Excelsior Pass system could be used for next, but it is confident there’s a role for these apps in the future.”

“Retrofitted to verify other types of records and credentials.” Oh. Fun!

We know progressives want to use Covid as a pretext to enact sweeping changes to the American way of life. They’ve told us so themselves. “If we can get some of the priorities in the COVID bill to help people now . . . we can then make the case when the crisis is over that some of these things are so basic they need to stay,” Representative Ro Khanna told the San Francisco Chronicle during negotiations over the first Covid aid package. “If we can get worker protections in the COVID bill and get the fact that people should be paid more decently and they should have child care, all the things that seem obvious now, then they seem much harder to take away after.” Echoing the sentiment, the chair of Biden’s Council of Economic Advisers called the pandemic “an opportunity to build a better economy in its wake.” (The name of Biden’s agenda — “Build Back Better” — more or less gives the game away from the start.) And at the international level, technocrats at the World Economic Forum tout “The Great Reset” as a way to “recover from COVID-19 to build a healthier, more equitable, and more prosperous future.”

The transition out of the Covid years will determine what a post-pandemic America looks like. Now that it’s safe to return to normal, we’re faced with an urgent question: Will we?