The Public-Health Gun Is Out of Bullets

So, the press has started to notice that the Biden White House isn’t doing all that much to meet or alleviate anxiety or material conditions caused by the Omicron wave of Covid-19.

The premise of this question itself is kind of funny. Biden has attacked unvaccinated people in personal terms, saying that “we are running out of patience” with those who haven’t been vaccinated. And, unlike Emmanuel Macron, President Biden has tried to institute a policy that will result in depriving the unvaccinated of their livelihoods; French employment protections are far too strong for that.

But this all serves to highlight the great fact of our public-health response: The vast majority of vulnerable people have been vaccinated in the United States. Perhaps 85 percent of eligible adults have received at least one dose. This reality helps explain our current situation. Despite the incredible record number of cases in New York and other regions in the past few weeks, we’re seeing that ICU beds are still open and many hospitals are operating at normal non-pandemic levels of usage.

You can look across the heat maps of the spread of Omicron in the United States and you won’t see any evidence that jurisdictions that mask young children, or that mask people in stores, have lower rates of transmission. The vaccine is orders of magnitude more effective at altering outcomes than any other public-health intervention in this pandemic.

Which means there is no future “off-ramp” up ahead. There is no new thing, or development, that can come along and reassure public-health officials that we can safely drop the mostly useless non-pharmaceutical interventions. Public health has fired the silver bullets it had, approving the vaccines and treatments. It has hit the target where it counts.

There is no efficacious intervention for public health to release to the public or impose on it.