When Will The U.S. Be Released From COVID Prison?
By I&I Editorial
IssuesInsights.com
apan announced Tuesday that it was lifting its coronavirus state of emergency. The country joins Norway, Sweden, and Denmark in returning to normal. America, however, will continue to be largely under the boot of politicians, bureaucrats, and meddlesome public health officials. Even convicts have release dates. But we have no idea when we’ll be liberated because there are no objective standards, only political whim.
When asked Monday “how many Americans need to be vaccinated for us to go back to normal,” President Joe Biden replied: “I think we get the vast majority … 96, 97, 98 percent.”
First of all, that’s unrealistic. There is no single activity that more than 95% of the population, any population, will agree to participate in. Even if Biden said that Washington was going to hand out $1 million to every American next week, there would be holdouts. So the president’s benchmark is never going to be met. Which might very well be by design.
Second, herd immunity can be achieved when as little as “70% of the population – more than 200 million people” have recovered from COVID-19, says the Mayo Clinic, which also acknowledges that “reaching herd immunity through vaccination against COVID-19 might be difficult for many reasons.”
Of course a combination of those who have recovered and those who’ve taken the shot(s) could provide herd immunity.
Opinions, of course, vary. Others say the threshold is higher. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, whose credibility is suspect at best, said at one time that herd immunity could be reached at a 60% to 70% vaccination rate. He then changed it to 70% to 75%, then to 80% to 85%, even suggesting but not claiming that the minimum is 90%, while also admitting that he’s basing his estimates on a gut feeling.
Seems obvious where Biden is getting his “science” from.
Incidentally, the full-vaccination rate is 59% in Japan, 64% in Sweden, and 68% in Norway, all higher than the U.S. rate of 56%, but nowhere near the impossible rates that Fauci and Biden are demanding. Even Denmark, where the rate is 75%, falls short of the ruling class’ minimum.
While some red state governors have restored basic freedoms, Biden and blue state governors seem they’d rather follow the uncompromising models of Australia, which has suffered from “a mad rush into totalitarianism,” and New Zealand, also a “prison nation.” The Democrats and media are deeply invested in both stoking fear and putting as much of the country under their control as is possible.
Not only have tighter restrictions robbed people of their freedom, they have caused outcomes worse than if officials had done nothing in response to the pandemic. According to investigative journalist Jordan Schachtel, “you can now make the case that these ‘public health’ solutions actually caused far more health problems than COVID-19 ever could by itself.” He didn’t go by his gut. He arrived at that conclusion by following the facts, which led him to observe:
In America, due to government edicts, our overall health declined, we got sicker, we saw an unprecedented obesity increase, among other issues caused by ‘public health’ interventions. Far from solving the virus issue at hand, it’s become clear that all of these mandates and restrictions just added additional problems on top of the issue of an endemic seasonal virus.
Democrats have insisted theirs is the party of science and it is science that has determined their responses to the pandemic. But it’s clear that politics dictate their decisions, and that their rules will be lifted only when doing so benefits them and their agenda. The coronavirus outbreak has been a gift to the party that has come to exist solely to perpetuate and increase its ruling class powers and privileges.