One: Just because “Normality now!” is a justifiable position in February 2022 doesn’t mean it was a justifiable position in March-April 2020, when there were no vaccines, no treatments, very little knowledge of how to help the sick—or even of what kind of disease we were dealing with—and when case fatality rates were frightening (as high as 13 percent in Italy, 12 percent in the United Kingdom, and 11 percent in Belgium and France, with the global case fatality rate peaking at 7.2 percent during the week of April 22–28, 2020). So current “back to normal” moves should not be treated as a vindication of the early “dissenters.”

Two: If your goal is “normal life,” antivax propaganda should be your Public Enemy No. 1. The reason Denmark can lift all COVID restrictions, for example, is that it has one of the world’s highest vaccination rates (81 percent of adults have had a double dose of the vaccine and 65 percent have had the booster shot). The evidence is overwhelming that even if the vaccination don’t stop the spread of the virus as much as originally hoped, it does reduce transmission, and drastically lower the risk of serious illness or death…

Also: not to keep carping on Bari Weiss, but while she is generally not hesitant to criticize (and publish criticism of) the right as well as the left, she has never, to my knowledge, spoken out about the avalanche of toxic anti-vaxx propaganda, deranged conspiracy theories, and COVID denialism on the right—some of it embraced by Republicans in Congress and in other elected posts. Surely if you are anxious to see a return to normality (I certainly am!), you have to see this as a big problem.