'We few, we happy, boosted few...'
As the mRNA vaccines both literally and figuratively face-plant, failed Public Health communicators ready themselves for one last opportunity to hawk their unpopular and overprocured wares.
“There’s strong clinical evidence that Covid doesn’t cause that much morbidity at this point, and it’s still a changing landscape. To make any recommendation on Covid vaccination in perpetuity is lunacy.”
These words belong to a trusted friend and celebrated expert in infectious diseases, who has been kind enough to share his anonymous insights here before:
'I would never support a mask mandate now': Five questions with an infectious diseases expert
In parts of blue-state America, but particularly in Ontario, Canada, the public discourse surrounding how to best manage the lingering challenges of the pandemic and the shadow pandemic of missed diagnoses, harms, and immunity debt, has again been hijacked by the same fringe minority, holding views only acceptable to a select few in media, academia, hos…
It appears that Bob Wachter never heard those words; so when he fell, he fell hard.
In rational circles, Wachter, who, as one of the last of the ‘Covid zeroes,’ has been known to debase himself on many an occasion — be it through documenting his family’s propensity for Covid hijab, or endless, white-knuckle threads on how his son felt better in a few days — has served as a poster boy for the unhelpful hyperbole-laden discourse that came to define (and divide) the Covid response.
As a self-professed proud poli sci major turned Department of Medicine Chair (editor’s note: as a fellow poli sci major, there’s nothing to be proud of), Wachter, like many prominent mainstream legacy media Covid commentators has also made a habit out of dining out on two years of incurious vaccine rhetoric and recommendations — but never quite like this.
By the time the ink had run dry on his digital typewriter, there was, of course, the obligatory political message that he was “thankful for the protections the vaccine provided,” and that it could have been worse if not for his umpteenth bivalent dose (we sure about that?), and that the billions who are already done with Covid because they have to be, shouldn’t be, because a self-indulgent, boosted to the gills, dear-diarist of an advanced age fell in the shower while dehydrated and sick.
Impressive shiner and neck brace aside, this little mishap, and such screeds into void, appear unremarkable on the surface, but folks like Dr. Bob still aren’t finished trying to reclaim that ‘new normal’ that was so rudely ripped away from them by the rest of the world having hierarchies of needs (and health matters) that didn’t fit Covid and only Covid.
In fact, they’re readying for one last kick at the can. There’s still wildly overprocured expiring product to move, and, to the lament of many of us ‘minimizers,’ to borrow from the ‘maximizers,’ our mayors, premiers, governors, prime ministers, and presidents are oft-still the same unserious lot who dance and sing amongst the wreckage of the functioning cities of our youth, and who will not hesitate to be wrong again, for it is in their very nature to chase the perception of having done something, over doing something right.