Anti-vaxers

America is a porned-out society. Half of young men and a fifth of young women admit to viewing porn in the past week (millions more do so and then lie to pollsters about it). Prestige cable shows such as Game of Thrones built their popularity through a bevy of brazenly-displayed breasts. The best-selling book of the 2010s was an erotic BDSM novel; the second and third-place spots were taken by its sequels. And the concept of a quick, dirty, cheap high extends outside the domain of sex, which is why the world has food porn, architecture porn, and military porn. And now, enter a new genre: COVID-19 death porn. On Saturday, the Daytona Beach News-Journal noted the death of radio host Marc Bernier after a three-week battle with COVID.

Until recently, progressive elites had cornered the market in COVID irrationality. They shut down society to prevent one particular threat to human health, oblivious to the costs of that shutdown on the rest of human flourishing. They used a zero-tolerance approach to COVID risk, arguing that if lockdowns prevented just one death from COVID, as New York governor Andrew Cuomo insisted early on, the destruction of social and economic capital would be worth it. They inflated the toll that COVID was allegedly taking on human life, counting hospital admissions and deaths with COVID as hospital admissions and deaths from COVID. They hyped case counts as tantamount to death counts and refused to compare COVID deaths with other sources of human mortality.

The Biden administration is desperate for some fresh ideas as they attempt to convince more Americans to take the COVID-19 vaccine. Between White House press secretary Jen Psaki, Dr Anthony Fauci and Dr Rochelle Walensky, we are constantly hearing about the White House’s latest creative ways to encourage people to get vaccinated. The administration seems eager to push the notion that all of the vaccine holdouts are Trump supporters. Unfortunately for them, recent studies suggest otherwise.

What follows the global pandemic? The global vaccine freakout. European politicians have their knickers in a twist about the Oxford-AstraZeneca shot. The source of the panic was reports from Denmark and Norway that some people who received the British-made vaccine developed blood clots — though there is no evidence yet that the shot is at fault. Over a dozen European nations, including France, Germany, Ireland and Spain have temporarily suspended their use of Oxford-AstraZeneca, in what seems to be a team effort to mistake correlation for causation. Sometimes the world cries out for American global leadership. The US is currently sitting on a stockpile of around 30 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine. AstraZeneca has yet to apply for FDA approval for their shot.