What next?
The virus won’t vanish completely, but “the crisis portion of the pandemic” is nearly over, said Jim Geraghty in NationalReview .com. “No one’s going to have to worry about 6 feet of social distance at the Fourth of July backyard barbecue.” By summer, “it will be time to go to baseball games, concerts, and outdoor festivals.” People will fill restaurants, movie theaters, churches, airplanes, and schools, and the “mask police” will fall silent. “Sounds heavenly,” doesn’t it?
The U.S. won’t achieve herd immunity if millions of Americans refuse to be vaccinated, said Derek Thompson in TheAtlantic.com. “One-third of American adults” say they don’t want the Covid-19 shot “or are undecided about whether they’ll get one.” They might be worried by stories of people feeling sick after shots, or by online conspiracy theories, or by U.S. medicine’s history of racist exploitation, like the Tuskegee syphilis study. To overcome vaccine hesitancy, experts say, we can’t dismiss skeptics as “idiots.” Doctors and trusted leaders must engage with their fears, and use realworld evidence to explain why these vaccines are safe and will give them their freedom back. Some people may wonder which vaccine to get, said
Dr. Bruce Lee in The New York Times. The Johnson & Johnson vaccine was 72 percent effective in
U.S. clinical trials, whereas Pfizer’s and Moderna’s vaccines were more than 90 percent effective. But J&J’s vaccine was 100 percent effective at preventing severe illness and death. All three shots are miracles. “Take whatever is available to you first.”
If that all sounds too dangerous, said Jonathan Chait in NYMag.com, you might be suffering from “Zeroism.” It’s the belief, adopted by many traumatized liberals after Trump’s “willful indifference” to 500,000 deaths, that we are safe only when there’s zero risk of infection. Zeroists think vaccinated people shouldn’t hug and schools should remain closed unless every American is inoculated. But in deciding when to return to normal life, we need to make a rational “cost-benefit” analysis. Kids desperately need to return to school, and we all badly need hugs, friends, and fun.