Society

The vaccine programs launched this year appear to offer a Happy Ending to the Horrible Story of the COVID-19 Pandemic. But I am cautious. Not because I am ‘antivax’, but because lasting ‘ever afters’ are never written in the language of emotional manipulation and coercive control. Herd immunity, when enough people have either recovered from COVID or been vaccinated, will end the pandemic. The pressure to get there has given us a vaccination drive with an unprecedentedly strong behavioral psychology and emergency response approach. A panoply of persuasions has been deployed to encourage the hesitant, the slow and the complacent. From dating app bonuses to donuts, lotteries to laminated vaccination cards — when do incentives become coercive?

The New York Times recently published a lengthy piece on the long- term ‘slide’ in world population with ‘plunging fertility levels’ and ‘sweeping ramifications’. How will the lower projected levels of world population affect climate change? Surely, if humanity is a blight on earth, as leading environmentalists assert — from the great naturalist David Attenborough who famously said that ‘humans are intruders’ to UN secretary general António Guterres who declared that ‘humanity is waging a war on nature’ — then surely the projected decline in world population by the end of the century should be welcome news.

By the time you read this, Uncle Sam’s latest ‘definitive’ report on UFOs (it’s not the first) will have been made widely available, with the exception of a classified annex (there’s always room for a sequel). If the leaks are to be believed, we will have learned that there’s a lot more out there that we don’t know. Some of the material may well be impossible to explain, but inexplicable is not a synonym for extraterrestrial. Could we instead be catching glimpses of something the Russians or the Chinese have dreamt up? E.T., though, will neither be ruled in, nor, crucially, ruled out. For their part, ufologists will take what they can get.

Two things can be true at the same time. First, the Republican-backed state laws banning medical gender-transition treatment for youth — one has already passed in Arkansas — are a very bad idea. Second, there is a serious dearth of solid evidence in this area of medicine — and some reasons to be genuinely concerned about these treatments. If you’re a consumer of mainstream American media, you’ve likely received a heaping dose of the first message. But the second, if you’ve encountered it at all, has probably been presented to you as a deeply unscientific, bigoted talking point. This is a problem. It’s impossible to unpack what’s going on here without summarizing the recent history of youth medical transition.

Apps are the 21st century’s answer to everything, it seems to Cockburn. Faced with a problem, sooner or later some wiseacre will show up with one that will not only provide a solution but also vastly improve the lives of all that use it. The miracles of smartphone tech are now being used to deal with the poor, huddled masses who have fetched up in one of the many refugee areas along the US-Mexico border. With tens of thousands of asylum seekers caught up in a vast tangle of bureaucratic delays and no short-term fix in sight, everyone is getting understandably vexed. Enter technology.

There are some wondrous revelations in Dr Anthony Fauci's over-3,200-page email trove acquired by BuzzFeed and the Washington Post through the Freedom of Information Act. A number of people — particularly Republican politicians — are fixating on the several emails from other experts mentioning the possibility that the SARS-CoV-2 virus may have been engineered at and emerged from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. They are right to do so — but there are some other gems in there too. A tipster pointed Cockburn to a February 2020 email from then-New York Times science writer Donald G. McNeil Jr, in which he describes how Americans 'tend to act like selfish pigs'. In contrast, McNeil tells Fauci that 'a lot of average Chinese behaved incredibly heroically'.

In a Department of Homeland Security Senate hearing in April 2012 on ‘Biological Security: The Risk of Dual-Use Research’, Dr Anthony Fauci admitted that the National Institute of Health partnered with the Department of Defense on controversial dual-use research projects. Dual-use research, of which gain-of-function research is a kind, can involve examining the ability to manipulate natural viruses to become more transmissible or possibly even a bioweapon. Gain-of-function research has found its way into the pandemic lexicon due to the resurgence of questions regarding the origins of COVID-19.

Good news everybody — you can finally post what you always thought about how the pandemic started on Facebook without being muzzled. The Silicon Valley giant, which has around 2.85 billion users, had been banning posts that claimed COVID-19 was man-made. But now, according to a company spokesperson, ‘In light of ongoing investigations into the origin of COVID-19 and in consultation with public health experts, we will no longer remove the claim that COVID-19 is man-made from our apps.’ The ‘lab-leak’ theory — that the SARS-CoV-2 virus originated from a laboratory in Wuhan, China — has gradually gained mainstream acceptance in the months since Trump lost the election. Nicholson Baker horrified New York magazine readers in January by bringing up the hypothesis.

The theory that COVID-19 originated in a Chinese laboratory has completed its year-long trudge — from fringe nutjob idea to mainstream and expert-approved opinion. Leading scientists and epidemiologists such as none other than Dr Anthony Fauci were so quick to dismiss the ‘lab talk’. It was first portrayed as a hare-brained wild and tacitly racist conspiracy theory driven by paranoid Republican senators and fever-dream right-wing media. Now it is seen as not only an acceptable theory worth more study, but one that has broken through into the mainstream. This has happened in a matter of days. Where does Sen. Tom Cotton go for his apology?

America has become a nation of butt fetishists. I’m not judging. I’m not calling for a moral crusade; it’s far too late for morality in America. I’m just observing the passing of one dispensation in manners and the establishment of another, like Talleyrand after the French Revolution. The bottom is one of the few areas in which the US can claim to lead the world. California, with its porn and internet industries, saturates the global imagination with images of the callipygous American butt in action. Rap videos, a hybrid of music and porn, teach twerking to the innocents of Asia. Anal sex has become so vogueish that Teen Vogue advises its readers on how to do it. This reflects the pornification of absolutely everything in the names of entertainment and personal freedom.

Since the early days of COVID-19, public health experts have been frequently wrong and unreliable. 'Trust the science' now sounds like a sarcastic joke. People want to know how long lockdowns and various mask requirements will last. When, or even if, they will get a vaccine. What about vaccine passports? The science doesn’t seem to know. So we listen to politicians. President Joe Biden recently shed some light by announcing that fully vaccinated people no longer have to wear masks indoors and outdoors, in most settings. Florida’s governor Ron DeSantis had previously weighed in with an executive order lifting all COVID-related restrictions statewide until a new law begins in July allowing him to overrule local governments.