What Exactly is Our COVID End Game?
Over the last week or two, it really seems like the COVID conversation has become a whole new type of divisive. Early on in 2020, we divided into two camps. On one side, you have the people who are like, “COVID is serious. Let’s take it seriously,” and later, it became, “The vaccines are here. Let’s all get vaccinated.” On the other side, you have the people who started with, “COVID is just the flu. Who cares?”, and now, a smaller (but still huge) part of that group says, “I’m not getting vaccinated.” Well, those of us in the first camp have officially split into two groups, and we need to talk.
I’ve been itching to write about this all week but didn’t know if I had anything to add, but more importantly, I was a little worried. Since day one, due to our massive issues with tribalism, if you didn’t treat COVID like the apocalypse, you were seen as some anti-vax science denier. I’ve been following COVID updates and the science as much as possible since the beginning to calm my anxiety, and now that others are speaking up, I figured it’s my turn.
I’m not anti-vax, and I was actually in one of the first groups in the country to get vaxxed back in February of 2021. The second they opened vaccines up for kids 12 and older, we got my son vaccinated. I wear my mask religiously wherever I go, and I’ve been extremely critical of people throughout the pandemic. Recently, I’ve written numerous pieces about Joe Rogan and the quack doctors he’s had on pushing vaccine hesitancy. I even wrote a piece about how parents need to stop losing their minds, and I’ve been critical of Bari Weiss in that piece and some others.
So, I hope I’ve made my case that I’m all about the good science behind getting vaccinated and all that jazz, but recently, I’ve just been exhausted because it seems like people want this pandemic to last forever. And no, I’m not talking about the anti-vaxxers. I’m talking about the people from my group, and it’s just become tiring.
At this point, I’m just trying to understand what the end game is. Earlier today, I saw author and guest on my podcast Oliver Burkeman tweet this screengrab from a doctor:
Granted, that was from December 30th when we still didn’t have all the details about Omicron, but what the hell is this doctor doing? Even as Omicron spiked, it was hard to get a straight answer about what was going on. It was more infectious but less severe. Still, hospitals were getting full. The best theory I had from some pretty smart people who I respect was that based on the higher number of infections, you’re going to have more people who need to be hospitalized, even if it’s a smaller percentage from previous variants.
It’s been weeks, and now we have way more data showing us that our vaccines don’t work against Omicron, but the vaccines still help prevent severe illness.
So, let’s talk about these vaccines. They’ve been widely available for about a year now, and just about everyone can get them. The only people who want the vaccine and can’t get them are immunocompromised people. We don’t just get vaccinated for ourselves, we get vaccinated for them.
Unfortunately, there’s a group of people who won’t get vaccinated, and I just want to have some real talk now.
It’s been a year. Does anyone really think that these people are just randomly going to see a tweet calling them stupid and say, “You know. After a year of being called stupid, you make a good point. I’ll set my appointment to get vaccinated.” And to a lesser extent, do we think any of them are all of a sudden going to trust the science?
We literally had people storming the Capitol a year ago due to the false belief of election fraud. I know we’re not all psychologists, but I figure it’s common sense by now to realize that people only go deeper into their beliefs. I’m an optimist, but I’m also a realist. It seems silly to think that any of these people are going to up and get vaccinated any time soon.
They tried to enforce a vaccine mandate through OSHA recently, and the Supreme Court slapped it down. Even after SCOTUS denied this work-related vaccine mandate, you had a ton of people show up in Washington DC a week ago to protest vaccine mandates.
I don’t know if I’m missing something, but it seems like the mandate thing isn’t happening, so I’m not sure why all these people showed up. But that’s a conversation for another time.
The point is that those who are not vaccinated are probably not getting vaccinated, so again, what’s the end game plan here?
We can’t force people to get vaccinated. There’s an extremely low probability that they’re going to get vaccinated, so I just fail to understand why we’re not attempting to get back to normal. Even more so, I’m trying to understand why people are still fear-mongering about COVID.
The only theory that makes sense to me is that a lot of COVID catastrophists have been getting a lot of attention since the start of the pandemic, and they’re not ready to let that go.
But as I think about that theory, I’m also sure that there are people who legitimately think it’s as bad as the height of the pandemic pre-vaccine. And if that’s the case, unfortunately, they’re suffering from ignorance. Personally, I don’t care about wearing a mask, but the science shows they don’t really do anything. The only reason I wear my mask religiously is because I don’t like confrontation, and it’s not a big deal to me. I’d much rather wear this piece of cloth than deal with some stranger sassing me.
Let’s Get Really Real
Let’s end this thing on a real note. If we want this pandemic to end, we need our billionaire class to quit being greedy assholes.
When Omicron came, and I was talking to my son, he’s like, “Yeah. We keep getting variants because of the unvaccinated.” Then, I had to explain to him that this is only part of the story.
Where’d Omicron come from? Africa. Are people in Africa anti-vaxxers? No. So, why aren’t they getting vaccinated? BECAUSE THE RICH DON’T WANT TO GIVE UP THE PATENTS FOR THE DAMN VACCINE.
We have a much better chance of limiting the variants by getting billionaires to get the vaccine distributed to poorer nations. This is just like the ridiculous culture wars, and our anger and fighting is completely misdirected. They rich love watching us fight amongst ourselves because it means we aren’t fighting with them. If these public figures would stop screaming at anti-vaxxers and started screaming at Big Pharma and Bill Gates, it’d probably be more effective.
So, unless you’re a master of persuasion and have a plan to change the mind of all the anti-vaxxers in the United States, your time is probably better spent pressuring the rich to get vaccines to other countries.
I’m currently writing a book about how we’re manipulated by the news, social media, technology, advertisers, and each other. It dives into the psychological history of manipulation, our biases, tribalism, and more.
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