Ha! This is to be the Flyer’s last issue of 2021, and true to form, this strange year had one more trick for me. I began this column frustrated with recent messaging from the White House on Covid. I’ve been disappointed with the federal response to (again) rising case counts driven by the highly transmissible Omicron variant, a response that can be boiled down to, “Get vaccinated. It’s on you. What do you expect us to do?”
I had planned to suggest that at-home tests and disposable masks be sent to anyone who wants them, free of charge. Well, today, news has broken that President Joe Biden intends to send 500 million at-home tests to anyone who requests them. I’m glad our president made that decision. It’s the right one, but I wish he would have thought about how inconvenient it will be for me to have to rework the column I had just finished.
This is how we should have been fighting the pandemic all along. Personal responsibility is all well and good, but combating a global crisis requires teamwork. Anyway, if the government doesn’t exist to coordinate in a crisis, to protect the citizenry it represents, then it’s just a glorified caretaker of capital and property.
Some anti-vaxxers will throw away test kits or masks sent to them. They might see the move as government overreach. So what? Who cares? They already think almost everything is government overreach. Why let other people suffer because a vocal minority has overdosed on the conspiracy theory Kool-Aid? With all due respect to former President John F. Kennedy, it’s fine to ask what you can do for your country, but I don’t think the country should worry about doing too much for anyone. If one out of every 10 tests gets tossed (or burned on TikTok while someone rants over an audio clip of a Lee Greenwood song), but those other nine tests help prevent super-spreader events, isn’t it worth it?
This message, excerpted from a press briefing by Jeff Zients, the head of President Biden’s coronavirus task force, can be found on whitehouse.gov: “For the unvaccinated, you’re looking at a winter of severe illness and death for yourselves, your families, and the hospitals you may soon overwhelm.”
Harsh words, but they’re likely true. Still, very nearly two years into this pandemic, we continue to do the same things while expecting different results. It’s a mistake to frame the ongoing pandemic as a “pandemic of the unvaccinated.” Setting aside that all children younger than 5 years old are unvaccinated, that some immunocompromised people can’t get vaccinated, it’s a failure to imagine we can ever extricate ourselves from this mess by dint of personal responsibility alone.
So send tests and masks to every home in the United States. I also can’t help but wonder what would happen if we issued a new stimulus payment contingent on vaccination status. Oh, and those vaccine patents? Waive ’em. Send vaccines to every country. Again, this is a global pandemic. What good will it do us to get Covid under control in the U.S. if the Pi or Sigma variant appears elsewhere? How many variants have to arise before we accept that national borders do not make for effective protection against disease? Even if its first emergence is on another continent, it just takes an asymptomatic case and a nonstop flight for us to be right back at square one.
And no, this doesn’t mean I want everything to be free for everyone. I know I’ll get my fair share of emails from burner addresses and unsigned letters calling me a filthy communist (I do already), but I would like to think we can have a more nuanced discussion. In matters of life and death, of ever getting off the Covid carousel, I think it’s worth considering bold actions.
That’s my hope for 2022 — that we take the wider view, that we worry about who needs help instead of getting hung up on the idea that someone might get more aid than they need. So, to our president and his administration, I say that these 500 million at-home Covid tests are a nice start.
Now … what’s next?
