Mark Levine’s New COVIDiocy

When is New York City’s COVIDiocy going to end? The latest deranged ploy comes from Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine, seeking onerous new ventilation rules for indoor spaces. It’s “critical to protecting us long-term from this virus, from future waves and similar transmissible diseases,” he says.

Bull. The new regulations would only impose massive costs (including on taxpayers) for retrofitting (at least) ventilation systems.

And with scant promise to counter “future waves” of COVID or any other disease. The city’s own data show that COVID is getting successively less deadly here, because more people are getting vaccinated, more people have immunity from past infections and the virus is evolving to be ever-less deadly.

And there’s no guarantee the next pandemic bug (if one comes; the last hit a century ago) will be airborne just as COVID is.

The idea that more rules and buckets of money are urgently needed for New York City to finally defeat COVID is as dangerous as it is nonsensical. The bug is beaten already; only fear (and hype from Levine and others who hope to profit off it) remains.

It’s deeply irresponsible for a public official to argue for anything other than increased vaccine uptake, common-sense policies like staying home if sick and narrowly focused protections for high-risk folks.

Yet “irresponsible” is a Levine trademark: Back in February 2020, he implied that worrying at all about COVID was racist, calling

concerns “fear mongering” in a tweet summoning people to Chinatown. Weeks later, he flipped to COVID hysteria.

COVID alarmism is driven by politics, not science. It continues in the city’s cruel toddler-masking mandate and the still-hanging talk of a return to restrictions.

New York’s most vulnerable have borne the cost of this insanity for two years, yet must keep on suffering until those in power, like Levine, stop peddling nonsense.