I don’t know that the tide has much impact on things. Mask mandates have always been very popular. Vaccines have always been extremely popular (70% of eligible people have gotten their shots), and vaccinate mandates have always been popular too. There has always been a solid majority in favor of taking strong, decisive, effective action to defeat COVID, because normal people realize it’s a big fucking problem that needs a well thought out response.
The problem has always been that the government is too sclerotic and chaotic to actually mount that response. Every obvious, commonsense policy gets vetoed by some obscure vested interest. Require vaccination for teachers? Unions say no! Mandate masks indoors? Police unions say they won’t enforce it. Mandate vaccination for all people? Medical ethics won’t allow it. Actually approve the safe and effective vaccine that’s the cornerstone of our fight against the virus? bUt yOU hAveN’T FillED OuT aLl tHE fORMs iN tRIpliCAte! Trump’s malevolent narcissism and ineptitude aggravated all of this and covered up the extent of the problem, but now that he’s gone, the extent of the rot is clear.
It’s tellingly random that the only area where the CDC has really led is the eviction moratorium. Sure, it’s a fine idea, but the public health justification for the moratorium was that people need a safe place to self-quarantine and homeless shelters are unsafe. Have we used the year of time we bought to resolve those problems? L. O. L. No, instead the CDC is just going to ride that horse into a maximally unfavorable Supreme Court opinion restricting their powers under the Public Health Service Act.
It’s ~engaging~ to look at nutters at school board meetings, but to focus on that is to forget that it’s absolutely fucking preposterous for school boards to have any role whatsoever in making public health policy during a deadly pandemic. What you’re really seeing, what we’ve been seeing for the whole pandemic, is that the parts of the government that are actually supposed to be handling these things have totally abdicated their responsibilities, and de facto power is being handed further and further down the chain. That’s how you end up with a bunch of crazy people screaming at bewildered normies in the Bumblefuck County School Board meeting that’s tasked with choosing the right public health interventions to combat Delta.
Clearly the grifters and the ghouls drive the policy failures to some extent, but I’m starting to think that policy stasis also empowers the grifters and the ghouls. Should vaccination be required to board an airplane? Yes, of course, everyone knows that. But if the people in charge of requiring vaccinations to travel on planes conspicuously fail to do so, does that not lend credence to the spittle-flecked gentleman on YouTube insisting that it’s a fundamental American liberty to breed virus and exhale them on your fellow citizens? Like, we’ve spent the last 15 years walking through airport metal detectors in our socks because some nutter set his balls on fire one time with some Wile E. Coyote scheme to bring down an airplane. Our rights to be virus factories must be pretty fundamental if we’re not requiring much more logical things like vaccination in the face of an infinitely deadlier threat.
Anyways, the tide that matters isn’t going anywhere. Our COVID response will continue to be planned with the creativity and humanity of a British World War I general plotting out the optimal sequence of artillery barrages and poison gas attacks to employ before ordering his division to charge through barbed wire into a bunch of machine gun nests. And the results will end up being about the same.
