Covid

My wife and seven-year-old son were halfway to Boston to catch a connecting flight to Ireland on Monday when the news came down. Or, as it were, went up, as Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle voided the Biden administration’s widely reviled but recently extended mask mandate on public transportation. After receiving instructions from the ground, the pilot on their plane emerged from the cockpit and announced that masks were no longer required. He then invited the passengers to “go ahead and throw them in the trash.” There was a swell of cheers as the passengers and crew were overcome by a euphoria of deliverance from the tyranny of overzealous Washington.

Authorities have finally done something about the aggressive, rabid critters that lurk around our nation’s capital and slink from their dens on the Hill to assault honest people for no good reason. Cockburn has encountered all sorts of such creatures on various Capitol Hill pub crawls, but the type the police just decided to address was neither a blundering elephant nor an indignant jackass. Neither was it a Blue Dog, one of those endangered porcupines that rarely appear in the Swamp, nor even a squawking chicken hawk. It was a red fox. A cute little lady fox with a majestically bushy tail, black-tipped ears and feet, white markings on her chest and muzzle, and shining black eyes. People first started posting images of the fox on Monday.

The Canadian truckers might have been driven out of Ottawa, but a copycat protest is brewing in the United States. Cockburn hears that police are preparing for demonstrations that could gridlock the DC area, and they could start as soon as Wednesday. Honk honk! The truckers are coming to Washington — just in time for President Biden's State of the Union address next week. Cockburn has been a fan of truckers ever since he decided to see whether he could hitchhike across America using only Jim Beam trucks (he could, as it turns out). But in this case, the big riggers may be in need of a friendly correction.

No one need ask why the strict public health regime to manage Covid — masks, mandates, quarantines, and required inoculations — has begun to collapse. Between angry truckers, unfavorable polling for continued lockdowns, the perception of a Wuhan coverup, changing reports of vaccine effectiveness, and declining hospitalizations, even President Biden and blue state governors realize they have but two options: pretend to be leading a return to normalcy or face an unpredictable grassroots rebellion. The interesting question for Americans is not why the sudden prospect of a return to normalcy but what “returning to normalcy” really means.

Joy Behar made a predictable announcement last week on ABC’s The View. While discussing how the CDC may ease mask guidance in the near future, she explained the depths of her neurosis to her co-hosts. "So if I go on the subway, if I go in a bus, if I go into the theater... a crowded place, I would wear a mask, and I might do that indefinitely," she added. "Why do I need the flu or a cold even? And so I'm listening to myself right now. I don't think it's 100 percent safe yet.” A few hours later, a photo emerged on Twitter of Behar sitting in a booth with two friends at a restaurant. She was sans mask. Worse yet, journalist Libby Emmons, who posted the photos, added, “I hear that she also walked out of the restaurant unmasked, though her companions dutifully donned theirs.

Today’s school-aged students are in grave danger. A murderous virus is ripping through the population, leaving a tragic body count in its wake. We need aggressive preventative measures. Classes need to go online, indefinitely if necessary. The experts must be heeded. The science must be followed. This epidemic is simply too dangerous; we cannot afford to play games with our children's lives. I’m talking, of course, about the preeminent public health crisis of our time: lawnmower deaths. The threat that lawnmowers pose to our nation is no joke. According to the Consumer Product Safety Commission’s National Electronic Injury Surveillance system, 90 Americans die every year from lawnmower accidents. Over the past decade, 3.

A new Johns Hopkins systematic review cuts in two the narrative that government-imposed mandates meaningfully prevent coronavirus deaths. The review looked at 34 different studies analyzing business and school closings, shelter-in-place orders, and international travel bans. It included data from US and European Covid mitigation efforts, along with endeavors in India, South Africa and China. Almost two dozen of these studies were peer-reviewed, while the other 12 were working papers. The results of this meta-analysis are striking. Lockdowns reduced Covid mortality by an average of only .02 percent. Shelter-in-place orders were slightly better at a 2.9 percent average, but nothing worth crowing about.

In the mid-2000s, I was an avid fan of mixed martial arts. My friends and I would pool our money to order the pay-per-view events of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, the combat sport’s largest promoter. One of the fixtures of UFC broadcasts was — and remains — the color commentary of Joe Rogan. Most people of that era would have been more likely to recognize Rogan as the host of Fear Factor, a hokey NBC gameshow in which contestants attempted to withstand such challenges as being covered in live insects or dropped into deep water while trapped in a car. But my buddies and I were more impressed with his UFC broadcast work. He was knowledgeable about the sport and infectiously enthusiastic, to the degree that we wondered whether he was coked out of his mind.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., son of Bobby Kennedy, is a conspiracy theorist and an anti-vaxxer. He's also an environmentalist lawyer, progressive talk-show host, and near-embodiment of horseshoe theory, having become something of a pin-up for Covid-era cranks. According to Scientific American, this scion of Camelot has, since 2005, "promoted anti-vaccine propaganda completely unconnected to reality." According to the Center for Countering Digital Hate, his Children's Health Defense organization claims "unvaccinated children are healthier than vaccinated children" and condemns the parents of vaccinated children for "enrolling their kids in experimental Covid vaccine trials." On Sunday, Kennedy Jr.

Last week saw another batch of emails drop from Anthony Fauci, and another media blackout as to their contents. The strategy by the press in cases like this has been pretty straightforward: ignore the story, wait for right-leaning media or Republicans to pick it up, then frame any attacks on the subject as tainted by partisanship. Last week, when confronted once again by Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, Fauci responded with more hyperbole and ad hominem. The media, meanwhile, framed the exchanges as “Rand Paul Attacks!” and “Anthony Fauci defends!” They refused to look at the information in the emails that Paul was asking about, refused to ask questions about them, refused to even report on them. They are interested in the bloodsport, not the truth.

“It’s time for us to do what we have been doing and that time is every day" was the much ridiculed answer from Vice President Kamala Harris in an interview with NBC News on Thursday. It has been lampooned in almost every corner of the media and memed all over the internet, and rightly so. Harris has been plagued her entire electoral career by a sense that she isn't prepared. This time the test is the pandemic, which is a major problem for her and Joe Biden almost a year into their administration. It's a term they were elected to almost exclusively on the promise of “shutting down the virus.” But viruses are a non-political problem, despite Biden's politicizing it during the 2020 election.