The Problem with COVID Contrarianism

The clash is complicated by the fact that in recent months, a number of politically liberal outlets, such as The Atlantic, have conceded that certain COVID policies supported by progressives—in particular, school closures and school mask mandates—have questionable value. Also, a number of jurisdictions in the U.S. and elsewhere have been lifting or easing mask mandates and other COVID restrictions. A number of “COVID doves” (most of whom are on the political right) see this as proof that the restrictive measures were wrong in the first place and that dissenters who argued for allowing normal life to continue were always right. I saw, for instance, this tweeted into my feed by a generally reasonable conservative:

(Many of the replies insisted that this epiphany would happen in a few months, not a few years.)

In fact, the restrictions are being lifted mostly because the situation is changing and the danger is declining. Yet there’s also a perception—no doubt true in some cases—that many liberals and progressives are unreasonably clinging to COVID restrictions even when they are unwarranted, simply because of political tribalism.

So, what to make of all this?

The political and cultural alignment on COVID-19 formed and solidified almost immediately after the pandemic came to America, with the right broadly taking the “dovish” position (opposing restrictions and generally tending to downplay the severity of the threat caused by the virus) and the left and mainstream liberals taking the “hawkish” side (seeing the virus as a serious threat and supporting lockdowns, later mask mandates, and later still vaccination mandates).

To some extent, this alignment was an accident. There’s nothing inherently conservative about COVID “dovishness,” or inherently progressive about COVID “hawkishness.” While strict government regulation of businesses and personal activities runs against the conservative grain, emergencies can certainly be seen as an exception (particularly from the standpoint of populist Trump-era conservatism). Conversely, many aspects of “hawkish” policies were not exactly a good fit with progressive values. Early on, many feminists voiced alarm that lockdowns would worsen gender inequality by making it harder for mothers to work (due to school and daycare closures) and for abused women to leave or seek help. There were also concerns that the Trump administration was using pandemic-related quarantines to cut immigration.

In another ironic twist, ultra-woke Sweden became a Mecca to many conservatives for its relatively laissez-faire approach to COVID, while unwoke Israel, generally a darling of cultural conservatives, has been consistently COVID-hawkish. In March 2020, that notorious wokester Benjamin Netanyahu imposed a state of emergency that made the harshest U.S. lockdowns look dovish: Israelis were subject to fines if they ventured outside for anything except food shopping, medical reasons, or work that couldn’t be done from home.

In the U.S., though, the reaction to COVID on the right was largely shaped by the belief that the pandemic was being used—and overhyped—by Democrats and the “liberal media” in an election-year plot against Donald Trump. (Trump was getting clobbered, not always fairly, for the country’s poor early response to COVID-19.) This narrative was fully in play by late February 2020. The late talk radio king Rush Limbaugh, who asserted that the coronavirus was just “the common cold,” complained about “the Drive-By Media hype of this thing as a pandemic” as part of “an effort to bring down Trump”. Fox News host Laura Ingraham echoed those claims. So did White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney at the Conservative Political Action Conference.

At a rally in Charleston, North Carolina on February 28, Trump downplayed the coronavirus as a lesser problem than the flu and suggested that the hype about its dangers was the Democrats’ “new hoax” after trying to get him on Russia. The next day, Trump argued that he didn’t call the disease a hoax, only claims that his administration was handling it badly—which I think is true if you unscramble his word salad. However, there is no question that his rambling remarks both linked the coronavirus outbreak to the idea of a “hoax” and suggested that it was being overhyped for political reasons. Remember the #PlanDemic and #DemPanic hashtags? (Which, by the way, are still going; but I don’t recommend looking without goggles to shield from brain damage.)

COVID minimization and hostility to aggressive mitigation strategies on the right drove many liberals and progressives more decisively into the “COVID hardliner” camp. (That’s how polarization works.) Social distancing, lockdowns, and later masking—initially rejected but quickly embraced by the medical mainstream—became, for many people, not just public health measures, but badges of cultural and political virtue, and membership in the right “tribe.”

Along the way, progressives dropped the ball on some issues by adopting a knee-jerk hawkish stance. They hyped the perils of beaches and parks in summer when it was already fairly clear that transmission was less likely outside, especially under bright sunlight. They embraced school closures and distance learning even when it was clear that these measures would disproportionately hurt children from poor families, often minorities, with suboptimal conditions at home. We already know that, as the education website Chalkbeat reported last July, the pandemic widened racial and socioeconomic disparities in test scores.

Meanwhile, many of those in dissent from progressive conventional wisdom—conservatives, centrists, and even “anti-woke” liberals—settled into varying degrees of COVID dissent, inaccurately claiming that the disease was not dangerous except to the very old and sick, and therefore that the best approach was to shelter vulnerable populations (the elderly and people who are at risk due to various health conditions) while allowing everyone else to enjoy freedom and go about their normal lives. Just how this could be accomplished short of drastic measures to isolate the vulnerable—not only the elderly, but cancer patients, the immunocompromised, the obese, people with respiratory problems or high blood pressure—from their younger and healthier family members, friends, and neighbors remained unclear, especially since ensuring such isolation would require severe curtailment of freedom.

Fast-forward almost two years to spring 2022. The COVID situation has changed drastically thanks to the availability of vaccines, which have turned out to be less effective than hoped in curbing the transmission of the virus, but incredibly effective in reducing the risk of hospitalization and death. At the same time, new waves of SARS-COV‑2 mutations (Delta, then Omicron) have led to new spikes of infection and, to a large extent, thwarted (or at least delayed) the hopes of a return to normality. On the bright side, new COVID treatments greatly improve the prognosis for those infected, and those treatments are improving all the time. It’s clear that, as many have been saying all along, we will not get to “COVID zero,” but will learn to live with a milder, endemic version of the disease.

The COVID culture wars, though, continue to be a dumpster fire. A large portion of the conservative “base” is mired in paranoid conspiracy theories that depict the COVID-19 pandemic as an intentionally engineered (or, at best, blown out of proportion) scheme to establish and justify tyranny—a derangement that has led to Trump being booed for praising vaccines at a couple of his rallies.

And a large swath of the “anti-woke dissident” community, to which I loosely belong, has embraced various degrees of COVID contrarianism.

This ranges from the truly deranged off-the-deep end conspiracism espoused by James Lindsay and Maajid Nawaz, to the more modulated, less obviously nuts, but still deeply insidious anti-vaxxism of biologists Brett Weinstein and Heather Heying, to the maverick populism of Joe Rogan.

The underlying theme in much of this backlash, I think, is simply being anti-establishment or anti-mainstream. There isn’t a particular rhyme or reason to it. The contrarians often claim to be “anti-elitist,” but they also emphasize, like Rogan, the elite credentials of the maverick scientists they embrace as vaccine or lockdown skeptics, such as infectious disease researcher Robert Malone or the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration. They often rail against “Big Pharma” as the self-interested peddler of COVID vaccines; yet they peddle the anti-parasitic drug ivermectin, which is manufactured by Merck—not exactly a mom-and-pop outfit—but is apparently fine because it’s rejected by the “establishment,” at least as a COVID remedy. (Incidentally, while it’s true that Rogan got CNN medical expert Sanjay Gupta to admit that CNN was wrong to mock him for taking “horse dewormer” when he was treating his COVID symptoms with ivermectin—Rogan was taking a version of the drug approved for human consumption—his fans overlook the fact that Gupta categorically stressed it had not been approved for COVID treatment; no, not even in Japan, as Rogan has wrongly claimed.)

I’ll be the first to say that, at this cultural moment in particular, there are excellent reasons to be skeptical of “the establishment,” given the frequent politicization of science. The stance of doctors and public health experts who defended anti-racism protests in June 2020 after telling everyone to avoid gatherings—as Johns Hopkins epidemiologist Jennifer Nuzzo put it, “the public health risks of not protesting to demand an end to systemic racism greatly exceed the harms of the virus”—certainly didn’t help. (It should be noted that by no means all “experts” agreed: Mr. Medical Establishment himself, Dr. Anthony Fauci, voiced concerns about protests as a transmission vector. It is also worth noting that the protests did not actually lead to a spike in infections, likely due a combination of outdoor location, seasonal infection patterns, and masking; this discovery contributed to a shift in medical opinion on outdoor gatherings.)

But knee-jerk anti-establishmentarianism, as I wrote a while back with regard to Lindsay and Nawaz, can easily devolve into the embrace of crackpot ideas. As far as I can tell, Rogan definitely falls into that category where COVID-19 is concerned. (For what it’s worth, I think the collective effort to get Rogan booted from by the Spotify hosting service is bad for all sorts of reasons—from thorny questions about freedom of expression to the likelihood that deplatforming would only increase his appeal—and I’m glad the effort isn’t succeeding if only for the precedent it would set.)

Knee-jerk “anti-elitism,” very much on display in some cultural dissidents’ response to the truckers’ protest, is in the same league.

Consider, for instance, this from Newsweek opinion editor Batya Ungar-Sargon:

I should add here that I’ve worked with Batya, consider her a friend, and plan to write about her new book, Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy, which I think has many valid points and observations. I also agree with Jon Kay that many progressives’ hysterical reaction to the trucker convoy was absurdly over the top. But the working-class worship is off-base. (Also, no one actually sent troops, and the peaceful protest was blocking roads and paralyzing a city.) As Kay notes, 90 percent of Canadian truckers are vaccinated. The “uprising” had to do with a law requiring Canadian truckers returning from runs to the U.S. to show proof of vaccination. While I certainly think that for governments to require universal or near-universal vaccination for adults would be unacceptably intrusive, it seems to me that this is a narrowly tailored policy that can be justified as part of fairly minimal border control during a pandemic. There’s no evidence that it’s rejected by more than a small fraction of Canadian truckers, or that non-truckers who came out to oppose mandates are primarily working-class.

There’s a real (though far from absolute) class divide on COVID. In a recent Monmouth University poll, for instance, 55 percent of college graduates supported “requiring people to show proof of vaccination in order to go to work in an office or setting where they are around other people,” while 43 percent opposed such a measure. Among those without a degree, 43 percent were in favor while 57 percent were opposed. (The gap on renewing masking and social distance mandates in one’s state was smaller: 49 percent of those without a college degree favored such measures while 46 percent opposed them, compared to a 58/41 split among college graduates.)

But what this means is another question. Is it working-class-friendly to be against vaccination passports? Or should being pro-working class imply more concern about the fact that working-class respondents in the same poll were less likely by 14 points to report having received at least one dose of the vaccine (72 percent vs 86 percent) and twice as likely to say they would never get vaccinated (20 percent vs 10 percent)? Should we worry about being more respectful toward opinions more frequently held by non-college-grads—or about the fact that meatpacking plants, for example, have experienced some of the largest COVID outbreaks in the country?

That brings us to Bari Weiss (whom I also know and like, and have defended against unfair attacks) and to her “I’m done with COVID” cri de coeur.

I think that pretty much everyone wants to be “done with COVID” and return to normal life. My Reason colleague J.D. Tuccille argues that many people are reluctant to let go of COVID restrictions—some because they get a thrill out of living in a state of crisis, others (especially well-educated professionals) because they enjoy the extra leisure and family time that working from home affords. But I’m not convinced that’s a big factor. Yes, of course there are crisis junkies, though I bet there isn’t a single person who misses spraying and scrubbing packages and cans with disinfectant. Yes, plenty of people saw working from home as an upside of the pandemic. (Not all of them are in “elite” professions; one person I know who hoped her state’s shelter-in-place orders would be extended works as a clerk in a real estate office.) But they too want to be “done with COVID,” and were frustrated and annoyed when it turned out that widespread vaccination did not put an end to the pandemic.

Weiss in particular seems to see the failure to restore normality post-vaccination as a colossal failure on the part of the powers that be, even a betrayal. As she told Maher:

But this is a bizarre and petulant complaint. First of all, I don’t recall leading officials saying that things would get back to normal once we got vaccinated—at least not if too many people remained unvaccinated for us to reach herd immunity thresholds. The uncertainty posed by future mutant variants of the virus was discussed long before Delta became something more than an airline and Omicron became a household word. And yes, scientific understanding evolves, especially as the situation changes and new data come in. The lack of 20/20 foresight is an odd thing to hold against “the establishment.”

(Also, the CDC did not, as Weiss and a number of other COVID dissenters seem to think, concede that “cloth masks do not do anything”; it conceded that they are less effective than surgical masks and N95/KN95 respirator masks, which was basically the message in spring 2020.)

The evolution of COVID mitigation policies also contradicts the idea that “the elites,” “the establishment,” “the bureaucrats,” etc. want to keep draconian restrictions in place forever. The Centers for Disease Control changed its masking guidance in May 2021, after the vaccine rollout, to say that fully vaccinated people did not need to wear masks indoors. In late July, after the Delta variant showed up and it became clear that even fully vaccinated people could transmit this variant of the virus, the agency issued another update, now advising the vaccinated to mask up if they lived in high-spread areas. Here in New Jersey, in solidly blue “coastal elite”-land, “Masks required” signs in the stores disappeared in the late spring/​early summer of last year, though there were still signs asking the unvaccinated to mask up. In the late summer as Delta hit, the signs changed to a general recommendation to wear masks, and many stores brought back masking requirements for staff.

At the time, CDC director Rochelle Walensky acknowledged that people were “tired and frustrated,” so it’s not like this is a huge discovery.

I also fully agree that “normal life” should resume as quickly as it is feasible. In the Monmouth University poll in late January, 70 percent of Americans—including 71 percent of independents and nearly half of Democrats—agreed that “it’s time we accept that Covid is here to stay and we just need to get on with our lives,” a finding Weiss retweeted with obvious satisfaction. Of course, when you look into the details, it turns out that public sentiment is complicated and at least for some people, “getting on with our lives” includes accepting some restrictions when necessary: More than half in the same poll supported “instituting, or reinstituting, face mask and social distancing guidelines” in their state amidst the Omicron surge.

Still, the new consensus seems to be that “zero COVID” is an unrealistic goal and that the best-case scenario is one in which it is endemic and manageable. That’s fine. But I think some caveats are in order.

Specifically: This move to normality is possible, first and foremost, because of vaccination (and to a lesser extent because of better treatments for those already sick).

This means at least two things.

One: Just because “Normality now!” is a justifiable position in February 2022 doesn’t mean it was a justifiable position in March-April 2020, when there were no vaccines, no treatments, very little knowledge of how to help the sick—or even of what kind of disease we were dealing with—and when case fatality rates were frightening (as high as 13 percent in Italy, 12 percent in the United Kingdom, and 11 percent in Belgium and France, with the global case fatality rate peaking at 7.2 percent during the week of April 22–28, 2020). So current “back to normal” moves should not be treated as a vindication of the early “dissenters.”

Two: If your goal is “normal life,” antivax propaganda should be your Public Enemy No. 1. The reason Denmark can lift all COVID restrictions, for example, is that it has one of the world’s highest vaccination rates (81 percent of adults have had a double dose of the vaccine and 65 percent have had the booster shot). The evidence is overwhelming that even if the vaccination don’t stop the spread of the virus as much as originally hoped, it does reduce transmission, and drastically lower the risk of serious illness or death.

Yet looking at Weiss’s Substack newsletter, one finds that after an initial piece on May 2 which urged readers to get vaccinated and start living a normal life (and urged the vaccine-hesitant to “consider the data,” get the vaccine, and thank modern medicine), Weiss’s coverage of the issue shifts toward being accommodating toward vaccine skepticism. True, she has published a good and balanced roundtable on mandates, and being critical of vaccination mandates (at least ones imposed by government) doesn’t make one anti-vax. But the newsletter has also featured a sympathetic feature on vaccine refusers with no “get vaccinated” message to balance it, and with respectful treatment for the vague grievances behind the resistance. (There is no comparable piece looking, for instance, at vaccine refusers who came around.) There’s a piece by Johns Hopkins professor of medicine Marty Makary expressing the view that young people should not get the booster—which is a mainstream position but hardly the only one—with no space given to the counterargument. The recent coverage of the Joe Rogan imbroglio appropriately highlights the free speech/​deplatforming issues, but never mentions that Rogan was under fire for promoting vaccine misinformation, not just unpopular opinions.

And then there’s the Janet Smith piece about the transfer from Bryn Mawr to Hillsdale, which elides Smith’s refusal to get vaccinated. (For what it’s worth, proof of vaccination for various infectious diseases is routinely required as a condition of school attendance, and last summer 61 percent of Americans backed such a requirement for COVID vaccination.) The letter Smith’s mother A.J. Kay sent to Bryn Mawr last May challenging the school’s vaccine mandate—which she posted on Twitter—cited claims about the vaccine’s alleged dangers from the “Association of American Physicians and Surgeons,” a far-right, rabidly anti-gay group that has promoted all sorts of wacky ideas from “HIV doesn’t cause AIDS” to “vaccines cause autism” to “illegal aliens are causing a leprosy epidemic in America.”

Also: not to keep carping on Bari Weiss, but while she is generally not hesitant to criticize (and publish criticism of) the right as well as the left, she has never, to my knowledge, spoken out about the avalanche of toxic anti-vaxx propaganda, deranged conspiracy theories, and COVID denialism on the right—some of it embraced by Republicans in Congress and in other elected posts. Surely if you are anxious to see a return to normality (I certainly am!), you have to see this as a big problem.

I am certainly not implying that progressives (or COVID hawks) have been right about everything concerning the pandemic. In his article on Weiss’s site, for instance, Dr. Makary makes some excellent points about the irrationality and hyper-stringency of many colleges’ COVID policies, such as requiring even vaccinated students to wear masks at all times, even outdoors, except when alone in their dorm rooms. School closures and universal masking for schoolchildren (policies not embraced in most other countries) increasingly look like a bad idea. I think the “COVID hawk” camp has seen some over-the-top fearmongering that exaggerated the risk to healthy young adults. (A fictional New York magazine story published in March 2020, graphically depicting the infection, illness, and death of a man in his early 30s, was an especially egregious example of the genre, bordering on COVID panic porn.)

At this point, I am not going to get into the question of whether various COVID mitigation strategies, including lockdowns, have helped or hurt. The impact of these strategies is extremely difficult to measure, since variables include human behavior (such as social distancing and “sheltering in place” regardless of official policy) and since “lockdown” means very different things in different places. It is equally difficult to assess to what extent the negative trends of the last two years, such as the alarming rise in drug overdose deaths in the U.S., have to do with pandemic policies rather than the pandemic itself.

But assigning the role of principal baddies in this story to the “COVID hawks” trying to deal with a once-in-a-century crisis while letting those who consistently minimized and dismissed the danger off the hook seems to me seriously misguided.

On Real Time, Weiss declared, “This is going to be remembered by the younger generation as a catastrophic moral crime”—“this” meaning excessive restrictions. I agree that school closures are not going to age well (they’re already not aging well). Sometime soon, they may even be lamented as an example of “systemic racism” that, despite non-racist intentions, helped the privileged and made inequities worse. But if we’re going to talk about moral crimes, perhaps we should also apply that term to the unnecessary deaths of tens of thousands of people, just in the United States, who chose to forgo vaccines because they got pulled into dumb-and-dumber culture wars.

Back in October, Fox News and right-wing radio made a hero out of a Seattle cop, Robert LaMay, who resigned from his job in protest against Gov. Jay Inslee’s vaccination mandate for state employees, despite acknowledging that he had received a religious exemption. (LaMay filmed himself in his patrol car on his last day on the job, telling Gov. Inslee to “kiss my ass.”) Last month came the postscript: LaMay died of COVID at the age of 51 after four weeks in the hospital.

Remaining unvaccinated was LaMay’s choice, and whatever one may think of that choice, what happened to him is a terrible tragedy. But it is also a fact that he was encouraged to persist in a literally self-destructive course of action and was rewarded for it, and that no one knows how many people were inspired to follow his example and “resist,” putting themselves and their loved ones in danger.

That’s a moral crime.