The COVID Morning After

It's been a long time since I've seen anyone in church, in a store, or even on the street, wearing a mask; it was a long, slow process -- but it's also irreversible. In fact, LA County tried to reinstate masks in health care environments just this past January, at a time when I was having to go to Kaiser pretty frequently. So starting then, I put a mask in my pocket just to be sure -- and Kaiser had in fact put up masks-required posters here and there. But when I got to the waiting room, I asked the assistants if masks were mandatory, and they said no -- in fact, they weren't wearing them, and most of the people in the waiting room weren't, either.

Even Kaiser, specifically ordered by the health department to reinstate masks, tacitly ignored the order. The county dropped it again a month later.

We've actually entered a belated period of official, or at least semi-official, never-mind acknowledgement of a COVID moral panic. For instance,

Testifying earlier this year in a closed-door interview before the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, a transcript of which was released this week, former NIH Director Francis Collins confessed that the government’s sweeping social-distancing guidance wasn’t backed by the science we were all supposed to be following.

. . . “I did not see evidence, but I’m not sure I would have been shown evidence at that point,” Collins replied.

But what about four years later?

“Since then, it has been an awfully large topic. Have you seen any evidence since then supporting six feet?” the staffer asked.

“No,” the former NIH director conceded.

There is even a recent tendency to acknowledge unofficially that COVID vaccines had serious side effects:

The pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca on Tuesday [May 8] said it is withdrawing its COVID-19 vaccine worldwide citing low demand and a "surplus of available updated vaccines" since the pandemic.

. . . The vaccine — called Vaxzevria — was one of a number of shots released onto the market by pharmaceutical companies aimed at preventing people from catching COVID-19.

The company said it would proceed to withdraw Vaxzevria's marketing authorizations within Europe. The vaccine was never approved in the U.S. by the FDA.

. . . According to the Telegraph, AstraZeneca admitted for the first time in court documents that its COVID-19 vaccine can cause rare side effects such as blood clots and low blood platelet counts. The admission came via a U.K. class action lawsuit that sought $125 million for almost 50 victims of AstraZeneca vaccine side effects.

According to the New York Times, in a May 3 story,

[T]housands of Americans believe they suffered serious side effects following Covid vaccination. As of April, just over 13,000 vaccine-injury compensation claims have been filed with the federal government — but to little avail. Only 19 percent have been reviewed. Only 47 of those were deemed eligible for compensation, and only 12 have been paid out, at an average of about $3,600.

Some scientists fear that patients with real injuries are being denied help and believe that more needs to be done to clarify the possible risks.

“At least long Covid has been somewhat recognized,” said Akiko Iwasaki, an immunologist and vaccine expert at Yale University. But people who say they have post-vaccination injuries are “just completely ignored and dismissed and gaslighted,” she added.

. . . The European Medicines Agency has linked the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines to facial paralysis, tingling sensations and numbness. The E.M.A. also counts tinnitus as a side effect of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, although the American health agencies do not. There are more than 17,000 reports of tinnitus following Covid vaccination in VAERS.

. . . Questions about Covid vaccine safety are core to Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s presidential campaign. Citing debunked theories about altered DNA, Florida’s surgeon general has called for a halt to Covid vaccination in the state.

In New Jersey, all charges against the gym owners who famously defied Gov Murphy's lockdown orders in May 2020 were finally dismissed:

Ian Smith and Frank Trumbetti — co-owners of Atilis Gym in Bellmawr — racked up the summonses after they kept their workout spot open in May 2020 despite Gov. Phil Murphy’s mandate to close non-essential businesses.

At one point, cops even arrested some gym rats as they left the building — and the owners were hit with scores of summonses and eventually ordered to pay about $165,000 in fines for violating public health emergency rules, according to NJ.com.

Several of the charges — which included violating a governor’s orders, operating without a mercantile license, creating a public nuisance and disturbing the peace — could have landed the duo in jail for six months, according to their attorney, John McCann of Oakland, New Jersey.

But late last month, a municipal judge in Winslow Township dropped the charges — following a nearly four-year legal battle, McCann told the outlet.

What we're seeing is the result of a gradual, but pervasive, reevaluation of the COVID moral panic, especially the recognition that a moral panic is what it was. There has also been a fairly widespread, if never offically acknowledged, assumption that the COVID panic affected the 2020 election -- but see even this academic discussion, The COVID-19 pandemic and the 2020 US presidential election:

Our results indicate that COVID-19 cases had a significant negative effect on the Trump vote share in the 2020 presidential election (in comparison to 2016). . . . In particular, the negative impact of COVID-19 incidence on Trump’s support is stronger (1) in states without a formal stay-at-home order, (2) in states that Trump won in the 2016 presidential election, (3) in swing states, and (4) in urban counties.

. . . These effects not only are significant and robust to many robustness checks but they are also quite sizable. A simple counterfactual exercise shows that, ceteris paribus, if the number of COVID-19 cases had been 5 percent lower, Trump would have won Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin—likely resulting in his re-election.

This academic conclusion, based on at least one group's statistical analysis, corresponds to the widedly held but officially discredited view that the 2020 election was "stolen", at least in the sense that COVID has always been thought by some people to have been a manufactured crisis that was in fact intended to sway the 2020 election. The revelations we're beginning to see are reinforcing that view and reinforcing the view that the respectable consensus line on COVID was deliberately deceptive.

Nobody is really saying much about this in current public discourse -- even Trump himself has tended to drop claims that he often made last year that the 2020 election was "stolen" -- except that we might even say he's made that particular point, or perhaps more accurately, he's more recently been making a slightly different point that they're now trying to steal the 2024 election.

There can be no question, though, that respectable opinion has completely missed the effect of the great COVID reassessment on the country's political mood. There's been an unspoken reassessment of COVID, an unspoken reassessment of the 2020 election, and an unspoken reassessment of Trump.