Australia is using dystopian surveillance-state methods to enforce draconian lockdowns (not on its politicians, of course).
School districts are sending home uninfected children by the hundreds due to possible exposure to other uninfected children.
The news media are in a panic about a mythical rash of horse paste poisonings.
And contrarian commentators are trying to plump up unproven treatments in place of vaccinations.
All of this misses the point. We cannot end the coronavirus. We should not consider every case of COVID-19 a serious threat to one’s life. And we should not pretend that vaccines are useless or unproven. Instead, we should get as many people as possible vaccinated around the world, mostly because vaccination reduces spread and severely reduces the seriousness of infection.
Vaccinated people in highly vaccinated areas have a 1% chance of getting COVID-19 over the course of three months, compared to approximately five or 10 times that risk for the unvaccinated, as David Leonhardt lays out today at the New York Times.
More importantly, Leonhardt explains, “The risks of getting badly sick remain minuscule.”
“In Seattle on an average recent day, about one out of every one million vaccinated residents have been admitted to a hospital with Covid symptoms.”
Of course, the delta outbreak shows us that vaccination can’t eradicate COVID-19, but the numbers from all parts of the world show us that vaccination can make COVID-19 so not dangerous that it’s not worth closing anything or mandating anything in order to avoid it.
Yet, Australia and our public schools behave as if any risk of a single infection is intolerable. In Melbourne, you’re only allowed to leave your home for two hours per day. There’s a 9 p.m. curfew. You may not travel out of town. Children who gather for small hangouts outdoors incur thousands of dollars in fines. It’s a dystopian lockdown.
My own public school system in Maryland has just issued insane quarantine rules that anyone who shows a single symptom must leave school immediately, and all his or her close contacts must quarantine, too, until it is established the cougher, or exhausted child, is not COVID positive.
The liberal media are trying to convince people that hospitals are overflowing from rednecks taking horse paste. And Joe Rogan and conservative commentators are wrongly leading vaccine skeptics to believe that ivermectin or other available treatments, none of which are proven to work against COVID-19, make vaccines unneeded.
All of these wrongheaded approaches are undermined by the single-most established fact of this whole pandemic: The vaccines approved in the United States are extremely effective at preventing serious illness.
Meanwhile, the zero-tolerance approach of U.S. schools and the Australian government ignore the reality that COVID-19 is never going to go away. Nearly everyone on this planet is going to get COVID-19 at some point. The best we can do is get people vaccinated before they get it. The second best thing we can do is run clinical trials for treatments such as ivermectin. The worst thing we can do is to operate as if the vaccines don’t exist or that COVID-19 infection risk will ever be eliminated.
Instead, we can end the emergency, including all justifications for lockdowns, mask mandates, and crazy quarantine rules, by getting more people in the U.S. and around the world fully vaccinated.
