“Living with Covid”, now that science has largely defanged it, involves ensuring widespread vaccination, as well as creating schemes such as the US government’s “test to treat”. The latter involves Americans going to pharmacies to get tested for Covid and if positive, immediately receiving antivirals on the spot, free of charge. Testing, treatments and vaccines mean that governments can find their “exit” from the pandemic and manage Covid as another one of the many infectious diseases they have to deal with.

But instead of evolving their position based on new data, some, instead, keep trying to show how they were still right in early 2020, digging themselves an even deeper hole. A case in point is Stanford professor John Ioannidis, who, in March 2020, argued that governments were overreacting to the threat of Covid. He mocked those who worried that the “68 deaths from Covid-19 in the US as of 16 March will increase exponentially to 680, 6,800, 68,000, 680,000”. He estimated that the US might suffer only 10,000 deaths. He also was cynical that vaccines or treatments could be developed in any timeframe that would affect the trajectory of the pandemic.

Two years later, the current US death toll stands at 969,000, with almost 250,000 of those being people under 65.