Commentary: As mandates end, COVID alarmists fear return to normal life

Unfortunately, the most disconnected among us will never accept straightforward facts.

President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris depart the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 2022. (White House/Flickr)

Yes, COVID-19 is ultimately endemic, and yes, irrational masking continues, including the Biden administration’s extension of mask mandates for air travel to evaluate “COVID-19 community levels, risk of new variants, national data, and the latest science.”

But entering a fourth week of tragedies in Ukraine and soaring prices at home, the good news is we’ve got one less thing to worry about: Americans have defiantly moved on from the pandemic as an all-consuming emergency.

This is evident in many cases, including on Capitol Hill, where Congress recently passed an omnibus spending bill that focused on real priorities like defense spending, debt, and security.

But blessedly, they could not pass another round of profligate and unnecessary COVID “relief,” when even a few House Democrats balked.

Despite the New York Times’ best efforts, the pandemic is no longer an emergency, and that’s also reinforced by the latest jobs report, showing the economy added 275,000 more jobs than expected, while the unemployment rate declined again.

Throughout the much-hyped-but-not-deadly Omicron wave, the job market simply did not contract as some expected.

Even as anti-science colleges engage in absurd masking theater, coronavirus restrictions are thankfully disappearing at a staggering pace. And sadly, timorous urban elites, who used others’ labor the last two years, are pushing back.

In a column offering limited context, USA Today’s Louie Villalobos claimed “medically speaking, the pandemic isn’t over.”

He argues that resuming life insults those who died or who still struggle. Villalobos is not alone in living outside reality.

The Atlantic’s “science reporter,” Ed Yong, who boasted of cancelling his 40th birthday party due to coronavirus, is irked by anyone not concerned with those struggling from immunodeficiencies.

These folks are “stuck in limbo,” the London-based liberal explains, because their safety “depends on the accommodations society is willing to make.”

What does Yong, who’s been wrong on almost everything the last two years, yet still won a Pulitzer Prize for COVID reporting, demand? The continuation of disastrous remote schooling, remote work, and mask mandates.

Yong is arguing emotionally, not scientifically, which is all-too typical of those insouciant to the deadly and long-term ramifications of their misguided policies. They’re the ones who don’t care about society.

Yong also mentions a media fixation called “long COVID,” which if you’ve lived life the last 750 days without NPR, you luckily missed.

Long-COVID sufferers have symptoms similar to rheumatic disease, a treatable condition. Like those with other immunodeficiencies, they are more at risk because of their circumstances. That’s unfortunate, but that was normal life for millennia until March 2020.

Then there are insecure types who seek permanent restrictions on society, mostly to virtue-signal.

Diana Berrent, a radical who founded something called “survivor corps,” advises the public to “ignore the guidance” around masking from the CDC; her Twitter followers agree that perpetual masking is the only way to live. No freedom for them, apparently.

This was after the incompetent CDC finally caught up to the 80% of Americans who’ve been leading normal lives since probably summer 2020 and suddenly forwent their public masking edicts. That’s great, but politically transparent when a day prior nearly every U.S. county was still designated high risk.

Partisan Democratic politics too often trumped science the past two years, despite the reality that a genuinely at-risk population was always small and now is infinitesimal.

Unfortunately, the most disconnected among us will never accept straightforward facts.

 

A.J. Kaufman

A.J. Kaufman is an Alpha News columnist. His work has appeared in the Baltimore Sun, Florida Sun-Sentinel, Indianapolis Star, Israel National News, Orange County Register, St. Cloud Times, Star-Tribune, and across AIM Media Midwest and the Internet. Kaufman previously worked as a school teacher and military historian.