Public health

According to the calculations of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 92.2 percent of American adults have received at least one dose of the Covid-19 vaccine. But a new report published this month found that as many as one in four Americans have never received a shot. The finding casts doubt on the role that vaccines played in getting the pandemic under control, and further incriminates the CDC’s pandemic response, undermining its trustworthiness. The report was prepared by the Covid States Project, a joint initiative of Northeastern University, Harvard University, Rutgers University, and Northwestern University. They surveyed almost 25,000 people across all fifty states and DC with state-level representative quotas for sex, age, and race.

Remember three years ago this month when shoppers were emptying supermarket shelves and locking themselves down inside? The masking of America was beginning — and for some it has never ended. On March 4, California’s governor Gavin Newsom terminated a three-year Covid state of emergency. His Department of Public Health will end mask requirements in medical facilities, prisons and homeless shelters beginning April 3. The nation’s official public health emergency will end on May 11. Blue-state and federal authorities are having a hard time letting go of the crisis. With the end of California’s rules, the city of San Francisco — bless its heart — has instated its own mandatory masking.

“Was it a mistake in so many states, in so many localities to see schools closed as long as they were?” an ABC reporter asked Dr. Anthony Fauci on October 16. His response: “I would say that what we should realize, and have realized, that there will be deleterious collateral consequences when you do something like that…” That was news to all of us parents who were called racists for raising the issue when it counted. For speaking of “deleterious consequences” during the height of the pandemic, we “open schools" parents were demonized and shut down. As the Chicago Teachers’ Union put it in a characteristic (but now deleted) tweet from December 2020, our push to reopen schools was “rooted in sexism, racism and misogyny.

A new year, a new assault on free speech in America. New York Senator Brad Hoylman claims that legislation he's introduced into the state senate targets Big Tech algorithms to keep them from promoting “controversial and harmful content.” Yet the bill seeks to “protect” public health by making almost any social media comment going against Hoylman’s beliefs illegal. Hoylman passes himself off as a defender of the public good by vowing to take on Big Tech, which he accuses of profiting by deliberately stoking controversy. He specifically mentions anti-coronavirus vaccine posts “as a false statement of fact or fraudulent medical theory that is likely to endanger the safety or health of the public.

For a people supposedly united by their great and abiding love of freedom, the pandemic year has been an interesting test of Americans' commitment to their country's founding principles. Sure, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are great — but have you tried surveilling, spying and snitching on your neighbors amid an endless state of emergency? Turns out, many folks in the US are quite willing to sacrifice various freedoms if it means they get to scold and punish others, particularly their ideological opponents, for breaking the rules. The past two years have seen many Americans embrace their inner authoritarians, treating shamings like a spectator sport and excoriating the noncompliant with evangelical zeal.