Welcome to the Forever Pandemic

This week, as President Joe Biden attempted desperately to distract from his ongoing surrender in Afghanistan and the attendant chaos in its wake, the White House turned its eyes once again to the issue of COVID-19. 

On Monday, Biden pressed private industry to mandate vaccination, stating, “Do what I did last month, require your employees to get vaccinated or face strict requirements.” Meanwhile, the ubiquitous Dr. Anthony Fauci told CNN’s Anderson Cooper, “I respect people’s freedom, but when you’re talking about a public health crisis … the time has come, enough is enough. We’ve just got to get people vaccinated.”

Meanwhile, the Biden administration also pressed private sector vaccine mandates. Fauci announced on MSNBC that everyone should mask, vaccinated or unvaccinated: “Instead of worrying what kind of mask, just wear a mask. Wear a surgical mask, a cloth mask … We need to wear masks.” Biden went further, extending his push for masks to small children: “You have the tools to keep your child safer … make sure that your child is masked when they leave home.”


Put aside the fact that the data support none of these policy prescriptions: There is little evidence that vaccine mandates will push the unvaccinated into overcoming their hesitancy; vaccine mandates are likely to press the unvaccinated into common spaces in which they are more likely to transmit the virus to other unvaccinated people, who are in far more danger than the vaccinated; the delta variant, according to former Obama adviser Dr. Michael Osterholm, makes a mockery of cloth masks; according to the University of Waterloo, surgical masks are essentially ineffective against delta; there is literally zero data demonstrating that masking children in schools has been effective in reducing transmission of the coronavirus; and children are at exorbitantly low risk from the virus, given that according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, just 361 Americans under age 18 have died of COVID-19 during the entirety of the pandemic.