More than once, someone has asked me what I would have done had I been in charge of our COVID response, as if there were some alternative universe where I was in supreme leader who could bend both the populace and virus to my will. Since we are playing make-believe, I now answer that I would have kept SARS-CoV-2 out of the country altogether.
No one has been impressed by my “plan”. However, anyone who points its flaws is ceding an important point- the real-world matters. Theoretically, my plan is perfect. If we sealed the border in January 2020, we could have lived normally and opened up after everyone was vaccinated, saving lives and obviating the need for mitigation measures. It would have been the best of both worlds.
Unfortunately, we cannot gift ourselves magic powers to translate our desires into reality. Just because I claim I “would have” kept the virus out of the country doesn’t mean actually I would have kept the virus out of the country, and I deserve no credit for my absurd “plan.”
Yet, a whole class of COVID pundits, the opinion class, are eager to conjure an entirely imagined, alternate history where we let the virus spread in 2020 and conveniently, everything turned out just fine. In their fantasy, schools, business, and restaurants remained open. Some kids and young adults got the sniffles, but vulnerable people were protected, trust in public health remained high, and the pandemic fizzled away. There were no problems at all. You know who these pundits are. They are very serious thinkers who claim to consider trade-offs in a unique and nuanced way. They are all over very serious newspapers, magazines, and podcasts, rewriting the history of the pandemic.
They do this in two ways. First, they seek to memory-hole the horrific scenes of 2020 and beyond. Pundits will never remind their readers of overflowing morgues when the virus was left to spread unchecked. They’ll never discuss young lives lost to COVID or those lost to anti-vaccine disinformation. Pundits never discuss COVID’s non-fatal harms. Only the harms of mitigation measures, both real and imagined, matter to pundits. Even though it’s been years since we tried to control COVID, that’s all pundits talk about today.
Second, pundits gift magical powers to We Want Them Infected doctors. The idea of focused protection, creating a million impenetrable bubbles, is no more realistic than my idea of creating one giant impenetrable bubble. Yet, this doesn’t matter to COVID pundits. WWTI doctors claim they “would have” done amazing things, and pundits praised them as if they had actually done them. Pundits occupied a world of complete fantasy and imagination.
Pundits spent the pandemic sharing their opinions from behind a laptop. That’s it. That’s all they did. Aside from maintaining their audience, they had no real-world responsibility for anything. This allowed them to treat their opinions as obvious- schools should be open– without a care in the world about what it actually took to open schools. Those of us who cared about what educators had to say knew it was often impossible to keep schools open when the virus raged. COVID was to blame, even in Sweden.
Yet, the opinion class didn’t care a bit. They never let unpleasant realities intrude into their imagined utopia. They never reached out to people with real-world responsibility to hear about their experience and the challenges they faced. It never occurred to pundits that they might have something to learn from actual workers. Pundits sealed them themselves in a bubble and only talked to other pundits. They practiced focused protection from reality and anyone who might inform them of it.
In the vision of the opinion class, imagining a policy in a Tweet or newspaper editorial was the impressive part. Translating that policy into the real world was the easy part. The opinion class always made it seem that people with real-world responsibility had a choice when it came to unwanted mitigation measures, that the virus never forced anyone’s hand. They made it all sound so easy, as they heaped scorn and contempt on their anointed villains- teachers, doctors, public health workers, literally anyone who actually had to deal with the virus.
Pundits wrote articles unoriginal, interchangeable articles such as How Public Health Discredited Itself and How The Coronavirus Sparked An Epidemic Of Intellectual Malpractice, which absolved SAR-CoV-2 of all responsibility and displaced its harms on to the people who had to handle it. According to the opinion class, these workers weren’t well-intentioned people who made some mistakes as a new, mutating virus swamped their hospitals and morgues. Rather, they were “ambitious social engineers” who used to pandemic to gain “prestige, power, and funding.”
It makes perfect sense that the opinion class glorified WWTI doctors. These doctors also spent the pandemic on podcasts and TV “calling for” other people to do things and boasting of their wonderful, though entirely hypothetical achievements. They treated zero COVID patients, and what actually happened in schools and hospitals didn’t matter at all to them. WWTI doctors never acknowledged headlines from Florida’s Delta wave, Florida Morgues ‘Out of Space for Bodies’, Oxygen Crunch in Hospitals and School Closures Reported In Five Fl Counties; Districts ‘Drowning’ In COVID, when they helped run the show. Unwanted facts could be wished way, and those who reported them were blamed for them.
The opinion class ignored or glossed over the deluge of disinformation spread by WWTI doctors. It didn’t bother pundits that WWTI doctors botched simple statistics, repeatedly declared the pandemic over, and treated vaccine side-effects as a fate worse than death. Their predictions of powerful, lifetime “natural” immunity and under 40,000 COVID deaths don’t concern pundits at all. Pundits often spread blatant disinformation themselves. No, a child’s risk of dying from COVID wasn’t lower than the risk of dying from the flu in 2020, though pundits claim otherwise. Instead of caring about basic facts, pundits treated WWTI doctors as oppressed victims because they lost a YouTube video and some Tweets. According to pundits, WWTI doctors were “smeared,” and even with everything that’s happening right now, we should center their feelings above all else.
Pundits never discuss the plan for herd immunity via natural immunity in 3-6 months or its origins at the hands of a proud child-labor advocate. Though this pro-infection rhetoric dominated the discourse in 2020, pundits seek to replace it with a fantasy where WWTI doctors simply cared about education for underprivileged children. Several pundits applauded this plan to use infected children as human shields at the time- you should be exposing yourself to the virus in order to promote herd immunity– and today, they refuse to revisit their words or acknowledge the existence of videos like this.
However, it’s not 2020 anymore. Only sheltered pundits whine about lockdowns today, and we no longer have to evaluate WWTI doctors by their entirely imagined accomplishments. Some of them have actual responsibility for the first time. They told us they would have done amazing and wonderful things with regards to COVID, but they have a real-world track record now. How are things going at the NIH, FDA, and ACIP? How is the overall state of science and medicine under their leadership? Were WWTI doctors right about RFK Jr. being the savior of vaccines? Is America becoming healthy again?
And suddenly the opinion class gets real quiet. They have nothing to say about their role in enabling all of that and they never will.