People who are willing to let their guard down have faced far harsher criticism. Last month, my colleague Yascha Mounk suggested on MSNBC that “there’s no reason why we should be stopping ourselves from living a normal life because people who have chosen not to get vaccinated are still vulnerable” to COVID-19. The author Wajahat Ali dismissively responded, “Yes, I’m glad we’re now in the pro-death, pro-COVID, eff-them-kids portion of the pandemic. We started with eff Grandpa and Grandma, right, to get to herd immunity.”
Pro-death?
Prior to the rollout of vaccines that provide excellent protection against COVID-19, I too was a COVID hawk. Since then, I’ve received three vaccine shots and gone back to swimming at the gym and dining indoors. If asked to wear a mask, I comply. But I get frustrated when I see that young children are still being forced to wear masks in schools. And when people at an academic conference that I recently attended decided to sit unmasked during presentations in a conference room, I was heartened—not upset—to see everyone’s faces. Does that mean I am “over the pandemic”?
Not quite.
What I’m over are scolds who treat ongoing infections and deaths as an indictment of the public’s moral character—as if wanting to unmask and un-distance is rooted not in deep yearning for the human connection we evolved to crave, but in the selfishness of uncaring sociopaths.
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