The coronavirus pandemic was a black-swan event the likes of which this planet hadn’t seen in almost a hundred years. It caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people and crashed the global economy, resulting in the largest socioeconomic change since 2008. It was, in short, not good. Yet there are pockets of public health experts and corporate media pundits who seem content to play out an endless cycle of pandemic porn. This runs contrary to what the majority of the population wants to watch and how most Americans are choosing to live their lives.
As COVID cases and deaths in Michigan soar, under a #girlboss governor who received endless praise in New York Times puff-pieces, the free state of Texas is almost completely open, with full baseball stadiums, no mask mandates — and a steadily declining COVID death rate. Dr Anthony Fauci must be scratching his head at how this could possibly be. Of course, Fauci is the same expert who praised Andrew Cuomo’s handling of managing the pandemic as well. He’s one of several public health officials who see their time at the podium possibly coming to an end. His tenure skipping from media outlet to media outlet, offering mixed messages on vaccines and a return to normalcy, is soon to expire.
When Business Insider asked Fauci if he saw himself attending indoor dining anytime soon, the good doctor said no, even though he is fully vaccinated. Movie theaters? That was also a no. Airplane travel? Nope. We don’t know if Fauci was speaking as a leading health expert and the top epidemiologist in the country, or simply an obsessive compulsive and raging hypochondriac. That’s the problem: Anthony Fauci has wrapped himself in a cocoon of personal skepticism on everything from sporting games to weddings, apparently unaware that these events have resumed over most of the country.
But Fauci is not alone in issuing mixed messaging about getting the country back on track. Several mainstream media outlets aren’t quite ready to move on either. MSNBC’s Joy Reid (or was it a hacker?) tweeted that ‘I too am one vax down, but even when I get the second shot, I am too “scurred” to be out there wildin. No flying and no indoor activities for me. Nope!’ The Washington Post ran a perspective piece declaring ‘I’m vaccinated, but I’m really not ready to leave my pandemic cocoon.’ Poor you!
Earlier this week when the FDA suspended all doses of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine over six cases of possible blood clotting in seven million doses (literally less one in a million), Fauci said they were simply following the science and could not confirm whether the J&J vaccine would even be made available again. This is sure to reverberate throughout the country; a considerably-sized portion of the population is already vaccine-hesitant.
Most of us are already exasperated by mixed messaging from every government agency in charge of public perception. The FAA and CDC both said vaccinated people should still not fly on airplanes, before pulling back and then declaring it safe to do so. President Biden, who has been fully vaccinated for four months, still wanders around in a mask, as does the Vice President who shadows him at every turn. The media and the Biden administration want to tell everyone that the vaccines work, but are unwilling to demonstrate the perks of getting vaccinated. These people are not interested in returning to normal by the end of the year. That’s saying nothing of the antics by national teachers’ unions attempting to extort the public before allowing their members to return to classrooms.
Perhaps the personal anxiety being displayed in the pages of the New York Times and Washington Post is simply lifestyle bias: journalists in DC and New York perceive the entire country to be boxed in as they are; they struggle to accept that Florida and Texas have been open for months. Perhaps the Biden administration sees an opening for a broad and restructuring opportunity to push through an ambitious agenda for the country on the back of the pandemic and doesn’t want to let a good crisis go to waste. Perhaps Anthony Fauci sees the curtain falling on his moment in the spotlight.
One thing seems obvious as more and more people become immunized against both the virus and hesitant elites — life is going to resume whether the ruling class wants it to or not. As the institutional figureheads find excuse after excuse to prolong the pandemic, their several messaging missteps mean their words aren’t having the intended effect. Soon enough, the politicians, pundits and ‘experts’ will see that the American public is content to leave them behind and tune them out.
