No more fearmongering, no more lockdowns, no vaccine mandates. The disease is here to stay and we need to return to something like normal before it's too late.
The problem with declaring the virus endemic and ceasing to advocate for mask/vaccine mandates is simply that we health care workers are overwhelmed and our system is overtaxed due mostly to the influx of unvaccinated COVID patients. Usually at this time of year I'll see 40 patients in clinic for a variety of issues but now we're hovering around double that. I'm sending younger and younger people to the hospital for hypoxia due to COVID related issues and it's not clear what makes the difference for one person versus another as far as how severe their immune response will be - unless they're vaccinated.
The very lowest common denominator of action we can all take is to wear a mask indoors - truly this doesn't infringe on any liberties and my 6 year old is perfectly capable of doing so. We're not having kids mask up because we're afraid of what might happen to them due to the virus (although it's much more concerning than last year at this time) but because when this virus runs unchecked through a population it's more likely to mutate into something that our current vaccines don't cover and we're back to square one.
I get that everyone is tired of all this - working in health care and seeing the same complaints day after day gets old also but we're not able or willing to stop providing care to those who need it.
I do understand this, and I wish we had the resources to bolster health care facilities that are overwhelmed when virus counts spike. That's a critique of our healthcare system in general and needs to be taken seriously in light of the way the pandemic has played out. But I cannot get behind a vaccine mandate. It is far too authoritarian. Mask mandates are less so and make sense when outbreaks occur, though evidence seems a bit thin that they do much (unless people are wearing better masks than what most of us wear). It's a tough situation no doubt. My girlfriend is a nurse and it's been hard to watch.
I don't see any problem with preserving free choice just like other vaccines - you can decline other vaccinations with life subsequently being made more difficult because of said choice. This particular disease is different than those others mentioned (especially flu) because of its random presentation - some people have no symptoms and some people asphyxiate without any rhyme or reason. I think it's quite miraculous that a year and a half into the pandemic we have a tool that will decrease your chances of having any issue with the virus by as much as these have proven to do.
Not getting the vaccine has pretty clear natural consequences; namely, getting really damn sick and possibly dying. If that won't convince people to get it, I'm not sure threats of less life-altering things will help (but incentives might).
Frankly, I think it's batshit insane not to get the vaccine. I got it the moment I was able to and will get a booster when I can also. It's a bloody miracle. But I still believe in our right to choose, even when we choose poorly.
Your article recommends a return to normalcy so here's my thought - declining to be vaccinated may result in your death, true. But it may also result in the death of others around you through no fault of their own. Given that America has a noted dearth in civic responsibility this isn't seeming to affect people the way you would think it might. The typical right-wing chud might respond "well if people are high risk then they should just not go out at all." And that would completely go against the return to normalcy you're advocating.
And then there's us, the health care workers. Speaking of right wing chudishness - there's always photos on social media of some nurse that's been shitcanned for refusing vaccination and taking a stand against Big Hospital. Do you really want the medical personnel treating you to be able to inadvertently kill you because they're exercising their rights?
As an aside - I'm currently replaying through Horizon Zero Dawn after the 60 fps patch dropped and one of the themes of the endgame is that humanity of the late 21st century came together knowing they were going to be annihilated to work toward a future of humans they would never live to meet hundreds of years later...reads a bit differently in a climate where we can't be bothered to wear a freaking mask in service to our fellow man.
My issue continues to be the difference between what's mandated and what's volunteered, and I do not think we will save humanity via mandates but only through larger cultural shifts that emphasize compassion and working together. It would be interesting to give HZD another shot post-pandemic, though!
My ex is a doctor and says hysteria is the main reason why clinics and wards are so full. The mind is a powerful instrument when it comes to making us sick.
I can definitely see how psychological factors would be at play, especially now after all these months of fear and stress (and the very real scare of people still dying from this thing).
Well said. I think there's no doubt that many people really do just want to help save lives, prevent sickness etc. with this stuff, but when we start entering territory where otherwise liberal-minded people are suggesting it's good that someone *dies* from COVID because they were an anti-vaxxer, or should be prevented from going to a hospital or attending school when these vaccines are less than 1 year old (compared to most vaccines required for attending school) that's insane and cruel and preposterous. As COVID becomes endemic and more "flu-like" will we really continue all these crisis policies? We don't do that for the flu! It's insane.
Obviously, the plural of anecdote is not data, but I've seen people I previously thought were relatively stable sorts go into fits on both sides. One of them is an EMT whose quit his job because he believes... well, he can't really seem to make up his mind what he believes, but COVID either is a Chinese bioweapon that the Democrats deliberately released into the water supply in major red states because the entire party was a "century-long Communist infiltration mission" or it doesn't even exist and the government is deliberately poisoning hundreds of thousands of people using fast-food soda laced with arsenic to make it look like it does.
On the other side is an artist (sadly now EX-friend) who is advocating that the country should lock down every flu season and that we should establish "containment zones" where unvaccinated people are ghettoized from the rest of the population. When I suggested this wouldn't happen without massive amounts of violence from the state (something they have always opposed previously- they had long been one of the most outspoken opponents of police brutality I've known) they said that the unvaccinated were "trying to kill everyone anyways" so they had no sympathy.
I think that this is, quite literally, the most stressful event in most adult Americans' entire lives, and as a result we're seeing a lot of distorted/delusional reasoning fueled by emotion and not much else. It makes me very concerned about 2022, as an anxious and angry people are extremely vulnerable to political manipulation.
I had C19 and recovered after 3 days. But I get sharp pain in my chest now. Good article. Thanks. When do you think the media will stop reporting it? It’s kinda fuelling the fire and I’m getting whiplash from the opposing POVs. Makes me wish someone famous was assassinated so the media could change the narrative.
This isn't going away any time soon, sadly. Even a famous person being assassinated would eventually just go right back to COVID/vaccine/mandate/etc. news.
Except it's not like the 'flu. Nobody aged 40, a bit overweight, catches the 'flu and dies 2 weeks later like a man in our street. Nobody in their 30s catches the 'flu and is so devastated by long 'flu that they still can't walk 3 months down the line.
Yes, Covid will eventually become endemic, as happened with the 'flu, but it will remain a much more serious disease for those unlucky enough to catch it.
Very few people under the age of 70 become seriously ill with the'flu. That is not the case with Covid now, ignoring any complications from new variants even now brewing in the vast swathes of the world still unvaccinated.
I mean, I say as much in like the fourth or fifth paragraph. Obviously when an entire population has zero immunity it won't be like the flu, but as time goes on and a much higher percent does it will become more like the flu--an endemic disease that we combat through normal healthcare protocols.
And what do you suggest we do about "the rest of the world"? Force them to vaccinate under the barrel of a gun?
Most of the world isn't vaccinated against influenza, either-that's why we get new strains and variants every year and require an annual flu shot.
Every authoritarian regime that has risen out of a democratic system has used the same method- a promise of "temporary, emergency" tyranny now to ward off a crisis, that then is extended out indefinitely into the future. We already have tiny examples of this: remember how baggage fees were a temporary measure to assist airlines in getting back on their feet after 9/11? Remember how they promised they'd be gone by 2010? Remember hot that didn't happen, and now everyone assumes they've just always been there? I remember.
Been following your work for years, and this might be the first time I have to strongly disagree. There's a lot to unpack here, but I'll try to keep it short and stick to two main points. First, COVID is nowhere near to becoming endemic. It still spreads way too fast, kills too many people, leaves many more with long-lasting health issues and, most importantly, puts way too many in the hospital. Regardless of what people - and governments - might say, most anti-COVID measures aren't put in place just to save lives. In a more specific sense, those measures are there to prevent healthcare systems from choking to death. It's amazing just how quickly even a big and well-equipped hospital can go from business as usual to people clawing at their throats while lying on the floor in the corridors. And then people with other conditions cant' get treated normally, and you get immunocompromised cancer patients mingling with COVID patients and hell reigns supreme. That sort of thing doesn't happen with the flu. As of now, the strain COVID puts on everything isn't remotely comparable to that of the flu, and it can't be treated as such.
Second, let's talk vaccine mandates. Now, I'm usually all about personal freedom (as an aside, I struggle to put a political label on myself these days. Used to consider myself a liberal, but that got way weird in recent years. Yet I'd hesitate to call myself a libertarian since those guys tend to skew uncomfortably to the right. Classical liberal, maybe? Eh, who needs labels anyway). However, trite as it may sound, one person's freedom ends where another's begins. And that has never been truer than in the context of vaccination. Erik, you said yourself numerous times that refusing the vaccine is madness. True enough, but, more importantly, an unvaccinated person presents a real and clear danger to themselves and, crucially, countless others. And no society, no matter how free, allows madmen that are a danger to themselves and others to roam around unchecked. It's not an issue of freedom, it's an issue of public safety, of protecting lives.
Anti-vaxxers kill people. An unvaccinated person is a walking manslaughter case waiting to happen, although not literally, since no one will ever be prosecuted for infecting someone else with a deadly disease. In lieu of that, society's only recourse is to incentivize vaccination. Now, a mandate is incentive - negative incentive, certainly, but incentive nonetheless, and effective, too. Honestly, I find the idea of positive incentives for vaccination iffy. "Hey, what if we pay you to not harm yourselves and others?" is, historically, a highly controversial negotiating tactic. Where I'm from, people who get vaccinated get a chance to win a car. That's just insane. Less effective than a mandate, too.
At the end of the day, if there's one type of segregation that no society can do without, it's the segregation of dangerous anti-social elements from the rest of the population. It's still unpleasant, but necessary. Hell, Solid Snake was ready to put a gun in his mouth to avoid spreading a deadly disease. While people refuse to get a simple and safe jab.
Aaaand it did get overly long, apologies for that. I should add, the subject of putting masks on children is a more comlicated one, I'd have to look into fresh data on just how much of a vector schoolchildren actually are for parents and relatives. Where I'm from, children don't wear masks, but infection rates do seem to jump up whenever kids go back to school. I personally know a few people who almost certainly got COVID from their kids, but, as always, anecdotes are not data.
The problem with declaring the virus endemic and ceasing to advocate for mask/vaccine mandates is simply that we health care workers are overwhelmed and our system is overtaxed due mostly to the influx of unvaccinated COVID patients. Usually at this time of year I'll see 40 patients in clinic for a variety of issues but now we're hovering around double that. I'm sending younger and younger people to the hospital for hypoxia due to COVID related issues and it's not clear what makes the difference for one person versus another as far as how severe their immune response will be - unless they're vaccinated.
The very lowest common denominator of action we can all take is to wear a mask indoors - truly this doesn't infringe on any liberties and my 6 year old is perfectly capable of doing so. We're not having kids mask up because we're afraid of what might happen to them due to the virus (although it's much more concerning than last year at this time) but because when this virus runs unchecked through a population it's more likely to mutate into something that our current vaccines don't cover and we're back to square one.
I get that everyone is tired of all this - working in health care and seeing the same complaints day after day gets old also but we're not able or willing to stop providing care to those who need it.
I do understand this, and I wish we had the resources to bolster health care facilities that are overwhelmed when virus counts spike. That's a critique of our healthcare system in general and needs to be taken seriously in light of the way the pandemic has played out. But I cannot get behind a vaccine mandate. It is far too authoritarian. Mask mandates are less so and make sense when outbreaks occur, though evidence seems a bit thin that they do much (unless people are wearing better masks than what most of us wear). It's a tough situation no doubt. My girlfriend is a nurse and it's been hard to watch.
I don't see any problem with preserving free choice just like other vaccines - you can decline other vaccinations with life subsequently being made more difficult because of said choice. This particular disease is different than those others mentioned (especially flu) because of its random presentation - some people have no symptoms and some people asphyxiate without any rhyme or reason. I think it's quite miraculous that a year and a half into the pandemic we have a tool that will decrease your chances of having any issue with the virus by as much as these have proven to do.
Not getting the vaccine has pretty clear natural consequences; namely, getting really damn sick and possibly dying. If that won't convince people to get it, I'm not sure threats of less life-altering things will help (but incentives might).
Frankly, I think it's batshit insane not to get the vaccine. I got it the moment I was able to and will get a booster when I can also. It's a bloody miracle. But I still believe in our right to choose, even when we choose poorly.
Your article recommends a return to normalcy so here's my thought - declining to be vaccinated may result in your death, true. But it may also result in the death of others around you through no fault of their own. Given that America has a noted dearth in civic responsibility this isn't seeming to affect people the way you would think it might. The typical right-wing chud might respond "well if people are high risk then they should just not go out at all." And that would completely go against the return to normalcy you're advocating.
And then there's us, the health care workers. Speaking of right wing chudishness - there's always photos on social media of some nurse that's been shitcanned for refusing vaccination and taking a stand against Big Hospital. Do you really want the medical personnel treating you to be able to inadvertently kill you because they're exercising their rights?
As an aside - I'm currently replaying through Horizon Zero Dawn after the 60 fps patch dropped and one of the themes of the endgame is that humanity of the late 21st century came together knowing they were going to be annihilated to work toward a future of humans they would never live to meet hundreds of years later...reads a bit differently in a climate where we can't be bothered to wear a freaking mask in service to our fellow man.
My issue continues to be the difference between what's mandated and what's volunteered, and I do not think we will save humanity via mandates but only through larger cultural shifts that emphasize compassion and working together. It would be interesting to give HZD another shot post-pandemic, though!
My ex is a doctor and says hysteria is the main reason why clinics and wards are so full. The mind is a powerful instrument when it comes to making us sick.
I can definitely see how psychological factors would be at play, especially now after all these months of fear and stress (and the very real scare of people still dying from this thing).
Melodramatic, but we are at a crossroads.
We can have the world that Michael Tracy fears, or the world that Erik Kain envisions.
Up to each of us to speak up.
Frankly, Tracy's world is not the U.S., and not a world that I want.
Respect for people's choices is key.
I - as do we all - have opinions, but our country is built on individual choice and if we lose that respect, we lose our country.
Well said. I think there's no doubt that many people really do just want to help save lives, prevent sickness etc. with this stuff, but when we start entering territory where otherwise liberal-minded people are suggesting it's good that someone *dies* from COVID because they were an anti-vaxxer, or should be prevented from going to a hospital or attending school when these vaccines are less than 1 year old (compared to most vaccines required for attending school) that's insane and cruel and preposterous. As COVID becomes endemic and more "flu-like" will we really continue all these crisis policies? We don't do that for the flu! It's insane.
Obviously, the plural of anecdote is not data, but I've seen people I previously thought were relatively stable sorts go into fits on both sides. One of them is an EMT whose quit his job because he believes... well, he can't really seem to make up his mind what he believes, but COVID either is a Chinese bioweapon that the Democrats deliberately released into the water supply in major red states because the entire party was a "century-long Communist infiltration mission" or it doesn't even exist and the government is deliberately poisoning hundreds of thousands of people using fast-food soda laced with arsenic to make it look like it does.
On the other side is an artist (sadly now EX-friend) who is advocating that the country should lock down every flu season and that we should establish "containment zones" where unvaccinated people are ghettoized from the rest of the population. When I suggested this wouldn't happen without massive amounts of violence from the state (something they have always opposed previously- they had long been one of the most outspoken opponents of police brutality I've known) they said that the unvaccinated were "trying to kill everyone anyways" so they had no sympathy.
I think that this is, quite literally, the most stressful event in most adult Americans' entire lives, and as a result we're seeing a lot of distorted/delusional reasoning fueled by emotion and not much else. It makes me very concerned about 2022, as an anxious and angry people are extremely vulnerable to political manipulation.
I had C19 and recovered after 3 days. But I get sharp pain in my chest now. Good article. Thanks. When do you think the media will stop reporting it? It’s kinda fuelling the fire and I’m getting whiplash from the opposing POVs. Makes me wish someone famous was assassinated so the media could change the narrative.
Also that sucks about your chest. What do doctors say? That would freak me out...
This isn't going away any time soon, sadly. Even a famous person being assassinated would eventually just go right back to COVID/vaccine/mandate/etc. news.
Except it's not like the 'flu. Nobody aged 40, a bit overweight, catches the 'flu and dies 2 weeks later like a man in our street. Nobody in their 30s catches the 'flu and is so devastated by long 'flu that they still can't walk 3 months down the line.
Yes, Covid will eventually become endemic, as happened with the 'flu, but it will remain a much more serious disease for those unlucky enough to catch it.
Very few people under the age of 70 become seriously ill with the'flu. That is not the case with Covid now, ignoring any complications from new variants even now brewing in the vast swathes of the world still unvaccinated.
I mean, I say as much in like the fourth or fifth paragraph. Obviously when an entire population has zero immunity it won't be like the flu, but as time goes on and a much higher percent does it will become more like the flu--an endemic disease that we combat through normal healthcare protocols.
And what do you suggest we do about "the rest of the world"? Force them to vaccinate under the barrel of a gun?
Most of the world isn't vaccinated against influenza, either-that's why we get new strains and variants every year and require an annual flu shot.
Every authoritarian regime that has risen out of a democratic system has used the same method- a promise of "temporary, emergency" tyranny now to ward off a crisis, that then is extended out indefinitely into the future. We already have tiny examples of this: remember how baggage fees were a temporary measure to assist airlines in getting back on their feet after 9/11? Remember how they promised they'd be gone by 2010? Remember hot that didn't happen, and now everyone assumes they've just always been there? I remember.
Been following your work for years, and this might be the first time I have to strongly disagree. There's a lot to unpack here, but I'll try to keep it short and stick to two main points. First, COVID is nowhere near to becoming endemic. It still spreads way too fast, kills too many people, leaves many more with long-lasting health issues and, most importantly, puts way too many in the hospital. Regardless of what people - and governments - might say, most anti-COVID measures aren't put in place just to save lives. In a more specific sense, those measures are there to prevent healthcare systems from choking to death. It's amazing just how quickly even a big and well-equipped hospital can go from business as usual to people clawing at their throats while lying on the floor in the corridors. And then people with other conditions cant' get treated normally, and you get immunocompromised cancer patients mingling with COVID patients and hell reigns supreme. That sort of thing doesn't happen with the flu. As of now, the strain COVID puts on everything isn't remotely comparable to that of the flu, and it can't be treated as such.
Second, let's talk vaccine mandates. Now, I'm usually all about personal freedom (as an aside, I struggle to put a political label on myself these days. Used to consider myself a liberal, but that got way weird in recent years. Yet I'd hesitate to call myself a libertarian since those guys tend to skew uncomfortably to the right. Classical liberal, maybe? Eh, who needs labels anyway). However, trite as it may sound, one person's freedom ends where another's begins. And that has never been truer than in the context of vaccination. Erik, you said yourself numerous times that refusing the vaccine is madness. True enough, but, more importantly, an unvaccinated person presents a real and clear danger to themselves and, crucially, countless others. And no society, no matter how free, allows madmen that are a danger to themselves and others to roam around unchecked. It's not an issue of freedom, it's an issue of public safety, of protecting lives.
Anti-vaxxers kill people. An unvaccinated person is a walking manslaughter case waiting to happen, although not literally, since no one will ever be prosecuted for infecting someone else with a deadly disease. In lieu of that, society's only recourse is to incentivize vaccination. Now, a mandate is incentive - negative incentive, certainly, but incentive nonetheless, and effective, too. Honestly, I find the idea of positive incentives for vaccination iffy. "Hey, what if we pay you to not harm yourselves and others?" is, historically, a highly controversial negotiating tactic. Where I'm from, people who get vaccinated get a chance to win a car. That's just insane. Less effective than a mandate, too.
At the end of the day, if there's one type of segregation that no society can do without, it's the segregation of dangerous anti-social elements from the rest of the population. It's still unpleasant, but necessary. Hell, Solid Snake was ready to put a gun in his mouth to avoid spreading a deadly disease. While people refuse to get a simple and safe jab.
Aaaand it did get overly long, apologies for that. I should add, the subject of putting masks on children is a more comlicated one, I'd have to look into fresh data on just how much of a vector schoolchildren actually are for parents and relatives. Where I'm from, children don't wear masks, but infection rates do seem to jump up whenever kids go back to school. I personally know a few people who almost certainly got COVID from their kids, but, as always, anecdotes are not data.