I read Matt Yglesias every morning. There are days when his brand of contrarianism is refreshing, but every once in a while it lapses into a weird almost-sociopath. Today is one of those moments.
Basically his argument is that we should stop pretending that we are living in a pandemic. That we have ceded too much authority to public health officials and need to stop hand-wringing over Covid. He does this without noting that over 2,300 a day are dying of the disease right now. If his argument was "we need clear metrics to determine when we are free and clear," then I could endorse it. But this is just more of the "Who gives a damn about the rubes who won't get vaxxed."
The problem, of course, is that a large un-vaxxed population creates a reservoir of virus that can mutate and give us Delta or Omicron. If we only had to care about the first variant, we would be over this by now. We don't. That's not how viruses work. The callous disregard for those dying right now, choking to death on their own lungs, is frankly sociopathic.
Yglesias is touting the superior wisdom of being a "generalist" rather than an epidemiologist. He comes of as a sociopath instead. (As do many of his commentators.)
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