Perhaps this irrational mindset is explainable by the fact that COVID hospitalizations and deaths are more dramatic than the more insidious, lurking harms from sustained life disruptions. Perhaps the rapidly declining rates of child-rearing in the West make it more difficult to observe or care about the damage all of this is doing to the developmental abilities and mental health of children. Perhaps other factors — from a psychological desire for parental protection in the form of authoritarian power or a warped sense of “safetyism” — is rendering any cost-benefit analysis morally unacceptable. None of those speculative theories, however, accounts for the virtually unanimous refusal to consider a ban on cars or a 25 mph nationwide speed limit; that willingness to sacrifice huge numbers of lives by opposing life-saving automobile policies seems driven by the inconvenience such policies would impose on particular groups of people.

Whatever is true about motives, what is unacceptable — sociopathic, really — is the insistence on assigning severe costs to just one side of the ledger (harms from COVID itself) while categorically refusing to recognize let alone value the costs on the other side of the ledger (from severe, enduring anti-COVID disruptions to and restrictions on life). Given the reflexive rage that is produced when one tries to make this argument — what immediately emerges are accusations that one is indifferent to COVID deaths — I wanted to walk through the evidence and rationale demonstrating why this approach is reckless, immoral and irrational. That is the argument I examine in both this article and in the 30-minute video I produced for Rumble (which you can view on the player below, for now in a YouTube format, pending Substack’s enabling of the embedding of our Rumble videos).