An Epidemic of Arrogance

I've run into a number of people (online) who've remarked about unvaccinated people "clogging up the hospitals" and suggesting that hospitals refuse to admit them. Even some doctors are jumping on the bandwagon. This, even though we treat people with self-inflicted wounds, we treat criminals in prison, we even treat wounded enemy soldiers. They've gotten a booster of narcissism.

Pets and livestock get shots, too. It doesn't make them special. Yet corona hysterics think THEIR shot makes them special enough to decide who gets medical treatment.

The arrogance abounds. Government officials--many of them unelected--felt entitled to shut down businesses and schools and tell people they couldn't drive to their own homes, even as they flouted their own rules again and again. Offshore, they feel entitled to sic attack dogs on protestors and send COVID patients to internment camps. Some employers feel entitled to force their employees to get an experimental injection.

Likewise, the push to vaccinate every man, woman and child. Self-described aspiring philosopher Alexandros Marinos nails it when he fingers lack of humility as the biggest problem with the official response to the pandemic:

Vaccines based on entirely new to humans technology deployed at an unprecedented rate and scale. Mandated, even to children. Overriding natural immunity, underpinning a war on early treatment, steamrolling Adverse Events data, based on bogus data on efficacy from broken trials.
— Alexandros Marinos (@alexandrosM) November 10, 2021

The fall is starting to come, though, with highly contagious Omicron. To be clear, I'd rather both epidemics just go away. Nonetheless, now that COVID is spreading through the "Zoom class" like a prairie fire--thankfully in a milder form than delta--the tune is changing:

“Thousands who ‘followed the rules’ are about to get covid. They shouldn’t be ashamed,” headlines the Washington Post, [in]...a complete flip of the narrative they have long preached: anyone who gets Covid has failed to comply, disregards of Fauci’s advice, probably lives in a Red state, rejects the science, and otherwise bears the mark of selfishness and the desire to put freedom ahead of public health.

Getting Covid has heretofore been part of a human stain, consistent with the very long history of demonization of the diseased and the attempt to attribute sickness to moral sin. This impulse dates back to the ancient world, revived with a ferocity in 2020.

As all but the most delusional face the reality that much of what we've done for two years has been worse than useless, I hope the experience will leave us humbler.

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