The Perpetual Covid Crisis
By The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board
President Biden’s announcement this week that the U.S. should have enough vaccines to inoculate every adult American by the end of May brought hope of a return to normalcy. This apparently is prehistoric thinking.
“The last thing we need is Neanderthal thinking,” Mr. Biden said Wednesday after Texas Gov. Greg Abbott lifted his statewide mask mandate and restrictions on businesses. Democrats are applauding Mr. Biden, but imagine if Donald Trump had attacked Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s lockdown as “Neanderthal thinking.”
Vaccination rates in Texas and other states have been increasing while hospitalizations are plunging. About one in five adults in Texas has received at least one dose of the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine. Most are seniors and people with health conditions who are at highest risk of severe illness. Hospitalizations in Texas have fallen more than 60% since a mid-January peak.
Politicians created a box canyon with lockdowns last spring that were originally intended to “flatten the curve.” But then every time governors loosened restrictions and cases ticked up, Democrats would demand lockdowns. Not that lockdowns (or mask mandates) much helped California or New York, which experienced bigger surges this winter than Florida did with neither.
Vaccines were supposed to enable Americans more or less to get back to their before-Covid lives—youth sports, eating out, family gatherings, and even walking outside without a mask. It’s probably still prudent to wear masks in public settings indoors for a few more months, and businesses like Starbucks and Target plan to continue requiring them.
But liberals and their public health friends don’t seem to want the pandemic to end—ever. Some lockdown advocates are warning that myriad new gene variants may be more infectious—though it’s unclear if they are—and could render vaccines less effective. They also warn that vaccinated individuals might still transmit the virus if they are asymptomatic (though the probability is low).
Ergo, pandemic restrictions must be maintained until we achieve herd immunity—which the experts also say may never happen because of new more transmissible variants and the potential for reinfection. This eternal public health crisis is unsustainable politically and economically. Washington can’t keep passing trillion-dollar spending bills with jobless benefits, food stamps, cash payments, rent subsidies and other welfare to help unemployed (and many gainfully employed) Americans. Forget the mental health toll on people who have been cooped up for a year.
But Democrats seem pleased they can use the pandemic to expand the welfare state. Some are now demanding recurring stimulus checks and enhanced unemployment benefits tied to economic conditions. “This crisis is far from over, and families deserve certainty that they can put food on the table and keep a roof over their heads,” 10 Democratic Senators wrote to Mr. Biden this week.
Meanwhile, they are preparing a giant climate-infrastructure spending bill that they say is urgently needed to jolt the economy and save the planet. Behold how the Covid crisis bleeds into a climate crisis.
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Originally Posted by lost in melb.
