Citizens are less likely to accept restrictions. I mean, wasn’t that the whole point of taking the vaccine? To get our lives back? And locking down 15 days to stop the spread?
Mask mandates. Remote classes. Outdoor dining.
As 2022 dawns, it’s beginning to look a lot like March 2020 – so much so that President Joe Biden sought to reassure Americans they would not return to those dark days, instead promising a future made safer by vaccines and tests.
Yes, the tests developed under President Trump, as well as the vaccines, which Biden said wouldn’t happen anytime soon.
Those breakthroughs, along with genomic sequencing that can identify new variants and the promise of powerful antiviral pills, represent a revolutionary assault on the coronavirus. But biomedical advances are only half the battle, experts say.
“We have seen it isn’t enough to have testing and vaccines; you have to have a public health system that can deliver testing and vaccines,” said Joshua Sharfstein, vice dean for public health practice and community engagement at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
In other words, a Central Government health system. Here’s the big one, though
The country is at a pivotal moment, Sharfstein said, full of opportunity if the lessons of the past two years lead to a new focus on getting shots in arms, swabs up noses and pills into mouths.
But some experts contend that the imbalance between the country’s scientific advances and its public health response is starker than ever, looking back in wonder on spring 2020 when a largely compliant population submitted to wide-ranging restrictions.
“We are going backward,” said Alfred Sommer, an epidemiologist and former dean at Hopkins.
“People are infinitely less responsive now,” said Sommer, who has tackled outbreaks of cholera and smallpox around the world. “This is different from anything that any public health person I know would have predicted in March 2020.”
Well, yeah, people are less responsive, because they were told if they took the vaccine, they’d get their lives back. We’ve seen all the studies that scientifically show that masks are mostly ineffective. We were told we only needed to wear a mask when we were going to be in close proximity with other people, then they put in mask mandates for everyone when inside. And told to wear a mask even if vaccinated. We were told to keep 6 feet apart, then, suddenly, we were told don’t bother. That disappeared. People have rather had enough 2 years on, and Big Government advocates and politicians are rather upset about this.
For anybody who trusts science, this is “vastly different than March 2020,” said Francis S. Collins, who in December stepped down as director of the National Institutes of Health, the nation’s medical research agency. But those who don’t trust science and haven’t been vaccinated are in a vulnerable place, he said, endangering everyone around them.
Why is there a mandate for companies with 100+ employees, not all companies? That seems rather silly. So does the scaremongering, blamestorming, and other denigration of those who are vaccine resistant, who read the scientific studies which say that most masks barely make a difference.
Those organizational shortcomings are coupled with incomplete and sometimes contradictory messages. There was, for example, the early assertion that the general population would not need to wear masks and, later, a months-long disagreement among federal officials about the importance of booster shots, Winsten recalled.
That’s because this was a rather revolutionary pandemic, and no one really knew what to do, here in the U.S. and in other nations. They were trying to get a handle on it, and the science said that masks were barely effective. For boosters, we were told that the initial shots were all that were necessary, then we learned that they are really just 6 month flu shots. Israel saw that much earlier, requiring boosters way before any other country.
The rest of the Washington Post piece is more about softly pushing for a Big Government solution to controlling the healthcare system and the people.
Read: Experts Seem Upset That U.S. Is “Moving Backwards” From COVID Restrictions »
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