Erick Erickson is affecting[1] rage at left-wing arrogance:
The prevailing thought on the right is that pandemic controls are about progressives wanting to control us. I think people who think this are wrong.
It was never about control. It was and remains about arrogance.
It was arrogant to think a virus, once released into the wild, could be controlled.
It was arrogance to think unelected bureaucrats and elected politicians could contain Americans in their houses in perpetuity.
Science, vaccines, bureaucracy all come in for his faux-spanking. Even stuff he’s making up:
Our leaders and public health officials promised us COVID Zero. They promised us a way out of the viral path. They could not deliver. They lack the humility to admit they were wrong.
The dangerous binary of the religious mind. Science investigating a new phenomenon promises nothing but to try; it discusses potentialities, hypothetical scenarios, techniques. Guarantees? Only to try.
And so I encounter this conclusion, the peak of societal irresponsibility:
The path forward is for Dr. Fauci, the President, and others, to admit we will never get to COVID Zero and must return to normal, each of us using our own risk assessments to move forward.
In short, the sooner the elite acknowledge they cannot control us to conform in a way to eradicate the virus, the sooner we can control the virus. Their control of us has never been about a desire to control us, but a desire to cover up their lack of control of a microbe. Science is their god and their god has failed them.
Shall we consider what would happen if we followed his advice?
IN CURRENT CIRCUMSTANCES, meaning a substantial portion of the citizenry refusing to be vaccinated, or boostered, but instead demanding the use of ineffective medications or the intervention of deities, who appear uninterested in helping, along with the evolution of Covid-19 into variants, the medical profession would suffer an unprecedented exodus of personnel: doctors, nurses, and associated professionals involved in emergency and infectious diseases. This, in fact, appears to be underway already, as Ed Yong notes.
Some health-care workers have lost their jobs during the pandemic, while others have been forced to leave because they’ve contracted long COVID and can no longer work. But many choose to leave, including “people whom I thought would nurse patients until the day they died,” Amanda Bettencourt, the president-elect of the American Association of Critical-Care Nurses, told me. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that the health-care sector has lost nearly half a million workers since February 2020. Morning Consult, a survey research company, says that 18 percent of health-care workers have quit since the pandemic began, while 12 percent have been laid off. [The Atlantic]
Overloaded by patients lead on to think they are experts in pandemics, or, worse, infected by the same against their will, these medical professionals would leave a sacred vocation that is already little more than skin deep on the body of the country, and substantially dependent on immigrants. Would the behavior of the irresponsible patients, already denying other sufferers medical treatment, discourage those critical immigrants from coming to America, knowing that a substantial portion of the populace is behaving in an effectively irresponsible manner?
FORTUNATELY, CIRCUMSTANCES CHANGE. The emergency approval of Paxlovid, the Pfizer-created treatment for Covid-19, based on reported test results of
Pfizer’s pill was 89% effective in preventing hospitalization, according to final clinical trial data submitted by the company to the FDA earlier this month. [CNBC]
has the potential to return the United States to normal operating behavior, with the singular exception that exhibition of symptoms characteristic of Covid-19 should result in immediate visits to the doctor and, if warranted, consumption of this medicine. This, of course, applies to the great bulk of the population; there would, of course, be exceptions, but this is the normal course of our medical knowledge.
And, if & when this happens, I will look for Erickson to proclaim victory for his point of view, when in reality it loses. Science developed the medicines using science-based principles, and until it managed to do so, we took the recommended precautions, or we didn’t and sickened horribly, overloaded hospital facilities, and even died. We collectively rode the wave from ignorance to knowledge, skillfully or less so, and now Paxlovid will hopefully let us transition out of this altered way of living.
But, if it doesn’t, we can use our new skills to continue to survive, while science continues to work the problem. Erickson does not want science to win, because it’s a hole in the side of his own view of reality.
And it really is a pity. There is an element of arrogance to the left. If he connected the lack of public debate on the issue of transgenderism to how that deliberate lack violates the implicit mutual promises of the very core of our nation, its liberal democracy nature, as I do here, he could make some real progress in uncovering the flaws brought on by the arrogance of the know-it-alls in the progressive side of the spectrum.
He might even find a way to equate that to the failures of his comrades, who organized and lead the assault on the Capitol of January 6th, a day of treason. That I would be interested in reading. The betrayal, inadvertent as it may be, by both sides of the political spectrum has been disheartening and, really, discrediting of certain elements of both sides.
Perhaps, some day, he’ll do that.
