Shriver brings up a fine point: Why do we bother with this elaborate process of separating the vaccinated and the unvaccinated? If you’re sitting in a room with lots of vaccinated people, you are at much the same risk you would face among lots of unvaccinated people. Granted, if you are vaccinated, the risk of suffering serious illness if you get infected is minimal. But this impulse to shun and banish the unvaccinated seems utterly pointless.

Shriver calls what we’re doing “COVID apartheid” and says it must end. Is she wrong? If vaccinated people can spread the virus nearly as easily as the unvaccinated, why bother making sharp distinctions? The answer, it seems obvious to both me and Shriver, is that elites simply have a knee-jerk loathing of unvaccinated people and want to socially sanction them with all possible weapons. “The myth of ultra-contagious anti-vaxxers dispersing plague like rats in the Middle Ages has fostered gratuitous rancour and division,” Shriver writes. “A friend in New York declared recently that she hoped all the unvaccinated would simply die.”