Scott Tibbs
Nature itself has "normalized" mass infection with COVID-19
By Scott Tibbs, March 8, 2024
Four years ago, our nation went through a dark time. The COVID-19 pandemic killed over one million Americans and millions more worldwide. According to the
University of Nebraska, more than 77% of Americans "had antibodies from at least one prior infection." Death rates are down, hospitalizations are down, and we have learned to live with the virus the same way we have learned to live with influenza.
Obviously, COVID-19 is still dangerous. That is why it is important for vulnerable people to take steps to protect themselves, and why the rest of us need to take precautions when interacting with vulnerable populations. But some people want the entire population to be in the same lockdown and panic from March 2020.
Washington Post reporter Taylor Lorenz
posted a lengthy rant on BlueSky about "normalizing mass infection."
Lorenz claims to have a weakened immune system, so it makes sense for her to take extra precautions. But it simply is not true that "no infection" with COVID-19 is ever "safe." I know from personal experience. I was fully vaccinated and boosted when I got COVID-19 in 2022. I felt pretty bad on Saturday and Sunday, and was feeling much better by Monday. Tens of millions of people have had a COVID-19 infection with mild symptoms and resumed normal life with no long-term side effects. (Other than, perhaps, becoming radicalized against Communist China and the United Nations, which covered up the spread of the virus in the crucial early months of the pandemic.)
Lorenz sets up a straw man and knocks it over by shouting at people who (allegedly) claim viruses do not cause harm. (Do such people even exist?) The issue is not that viruses do not cause harm. Obviously that happens, as we saw with the horrifying Ebola outbreak in West Africa in 2014. Bacteria can also cause great harm, as we saw when United Nations "peacekeepers" murdered ten thousand people in Haiti by poisoning a critical water supply with cholera. But not all viruses and not all bacteria are the same, and are certainly not equally lethal.
Despite Lorenz' urging, people who are not especially vulnerable to COVID-19 are not going be wearing an N95 and avoiding crowds forever. That mentality was mostly finished by 2022. Her hysterical claim that people who do not mask up are participating in "eugenics" is both laughable and outrageous. This is
exactly the kind of overheated rhetoric and demonization of dissenting opinions that destroyed trust in the medical establishment, the political class and the mainstream media in 2020/2021.
Four years after the COVID-19 pandemic, we need to be able to discuss public health policy reasonably. This means not equating people to Nazis because they do not wear a face covering when they are not sick. We can agree that reasonable precautions are necessary to protect the vulnerable, but not everyone is going to agree with every policy or how each individual should behave. Even the Center for Disease Control under Joe Biden is loosening
isolation guidelines for people infected with the novel coronavirus. We all need to be a lot more tolerant of opposing opinions, and a lot less judgmental. We should not allow people like Taylor Lorenz to continue to divide us.
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