As everyone predicted, the masks-off, overcrowded fiesta of self-congratulation known as the White House Correspondents Dinner has been linked to lots of infections. Brian Stelter of CNN: “Trevor Noah joked about the event being a superspreader — and now the cases are rolling in.” So, it was a superspreader? Or is that designation reserved only for events that attract people Brian Stelter and CNN do not like?
Stelter says that ABC reporter Jonathan Karl has contracted the coronavirus, and he both shook hands with President Biden and sat next to Kim Kardashian. So Karl had close contact with at least one person who matters. “Anecdotally speaking, much of Tuesday afternoon seemed to consist of attendees trading text messages and emails about colleagues and friends and people they had seen who had tested positive,” Stelter writes in his newsletter. “That’s almost certainly going to continue in the days ahead.”
Since this was predicted, and predictable, perhaps the dinner should not have been held? Or at very least, the president shouldn’t have had close contact with others? Nah. They were right to hold the dinner. (Although I’m baffled why a near-octogenarian president would be allowed to shake hands with people, given that shaking hands is a completely unnecessary ritual.) The virus spreads easily among vaccinated people such as the dinner’s attendees, so there’s no point in vaccine apartheid. People who have been vaccinated, except for the elderly, have very little cause to fear serious illness. But . . . we’ve known all of this for nearly a year. So the rest of the country should have been like the WHCD. So tell me again why children, who are in a much lower risk group even when unvaccinated than President Biden is after being vaccinated, had to spend so much of the last two years masked, and why toddlers continue to face mask mandates in many areas?