There are just too many fresh graves pocking the land to entertain these objections. And too many lives disrupted, as people grieve lost loved ones, alter their employment, and keep their children home from school.

When this pandemic first exploded, I thought that it would be a disruption of a few months. We are now closing in on year two, and while some offices and schools have reopened, cases are again surging in many parts of this country, and the Omicron variant has spooked markets around the world.

We now have to consider the very real possibility that the virus will not be eradicated, but will become endemic. The journal Nature put this more directly in February: “The coronavirus is here to stay.” In a survey of more than 100 immunologists, researchers and virologists, the journal found that almost 90 percent thought that the coronavirus would become endemic. As Nature put it at the time, “it will continue to circulate in pockets of the global population for years to come.”