For a certain part of the population, perhaps bereft of rituals and practices designed to help them transcend the crude, cruel and ambiguity-generating rhythms of our now largely transactional culture, the surrendering the self to authority can take on an almost religious allure.
The ambition to wipe out the virus in two weeks or permanently “slow the spread” only prolonged the pain. Older people had to be isolated much longer. Younger people who never should have faced lockdowns at all were denied normal lives, including two years of educational losses. The ensuing public health calamity will vex us for decades hence.
Will brings to mind Oxford’s Sunetra Gupta (or she brings to mind Will) when he writes that “The interconnectedness of the modern world, thanks in part to the jet engine’s democratization of intercontinental air travel, deters the weaponization of epidemics that the connectedness facilitates.”
Perfectly healthy people were now considered “fallen” in the health sense, and basically told the only way they could be redeemed, that is, permitted to recover their full constitutional rights, was to follow a course of “rehabilitation” capriciously determined by the authorities and enforced by legal sanction.
A careful reading of Jacobson shows that it is not just an automatic consideration allowing the government to do what it wants when a pandemic emergency has been officially declared. Covid-19 vaccine mandates do not satisfy any of the required criteria in Jacobson, let alone all of them.
On November 6, 2020, the Journal of the American Medical Association sponsored an important debate between Stanford’s Jay Bhattacharya and Harvard’s Marc Lisitch over the policy response to the pandemic. They have very different points of view, with Jay favoring “focussed protection” and traditional public health measures, while Marc is on the side of the novel “non-pharmaceutical intervention” side, e.g. lockdowns.
The war on absinthe – this won’t surprise you – created the opposite of its intended effect. It raised the status of the drink and created a completely unwarranted hysteria in both directions: overconsumption followed by bans followed by speakeasy indulgence. Can you think of anything else, perhaps, that has fit that general model? Marijuana perhaps? Liquor in general? Tobacco? Politically incorrect speech?
Atlas’s book has exposed a scandal for the ages. It is enormously valuable because it fully blows up what seems to be an emerging fake story involving a supposedly Covid-denying president who did nothing vs. heroic scientists in the White House who urged compulsory mitigating measures consistent with prevailing scientific opinion. Not one word of that is true
Let’s resolve now to not let the Covid warriors merely fade away, using our imaginations to find ways of making it as uncomfortable as we possibly can for the merchants of moral panic to continue to practice their craft, and exercise their magisterium over public opinion.
In our current safety culture-driven pandemic response, any risk of infection is deemed unacceptable, and those who highlight potential costs of mitigation measures are labeled irresponsible and dangerous. However, safety worship and building engineers might override old-fashioned common sense, but they can’t override our own biology.
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