We can’t obey our way to normalcy. That shouldn’t surprise people as historically unruly as Americans. Obedience is often abnormal for us.
But it remains true in a pandemic. There is no guarantee of getting out of or beyond COVID-19–era mortifications on public life — masks on toddlers, socially distanced funerals — by compliance with public-health wishes. Nobody in the White House, CDC, or the public-health bureaucracy has put a number on shots in arms that get us back to normalcy. They don’t know. And now their minds are too rattled by the Delta-variant wave to speculate. As we’ve seen in the past week, a study of Bear Week in Provincetown, or a study out of Europe, can knock the confidence out of them almost instantly.
Would more vaccines make it easier to relent on us? That’s getting harder to say. Possibly 100 million Americans have acquired some form of natural immunity from COVID-19. Two hundred million Americans, overlapping significantly with the first set, have some level of acquired immunity from the vaccine. If there were a herd immunity that stopped COVID dead in its tracks, we’d be reaching it by now. But it looks like the disease is destined to go endemic — becoming more transmissible, possibly more resistant to vaccines, too — but less deadly as it evolves.
This question is entirely separate from whether the vaccine is advisable for you. My view is, I think, the normal one that it’s urgently necessary for vulnerable people to get it but that it is insane, evil, and innumerate to delay normalcy for children until there’s a pediatric vaccine. But getting vaccines into arms doesn’t guarantee an end to public-health interference.
Just look around the world. Sweden was the bad boy of the Western world during the pandemic, trying fewer interventions and being more resistant to lockdown than any other country. Their vaccination uptake is behind America’s currently, and they have few public-health restrictions now. Israel, by contrast, imposed one of the toughest lockdowns in a democratic society. It has a slightly higher vaccination rate that is the envy of most other nations. Yet Israel is contemplating a new lockdown.
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See Also:
(3) Pandemic Policymakers: Dancing the Delta Two-Step
(4) If Mandates Fail, What Will Politicians Do for an Encore?
(5) Small-Time Landlords ‘Hanging on By Their Fingernails’ as Eviction Moratorium Drags On
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