COVID safetyism has broken our liberal elites
Zachary Faria
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The safetyism promoted during the COVID-19 pandemic was never going to fade because liberal elites were never going to give up the lifestyle changes that came with pandemic restrictions.
Among those utterly broken by COVID safetyism is Taylor Lorenz, the TikTok reporter and chief censorship advocate at the Washington Post. In response to her own outlet’s reporting on China’s zero-COVID strategy, which has led to a “vast population without natural immunity,” Lorenz declared that China’s strategy did not have a “critical flaw” and implied that the United States was choosing “to kill off millions of vulnerable people” by not pursuing China’s draconian lockdowns.
CHINA ‘ZERO-COVID’ POLICIES SPARK MASS PROTESTS
China, which welded people into their homes, is now facing mass protests over its zero-COVID strategy. The country has taken to limiting World Cup footage to prevent images of the mask-free crowds in Qatar from reaching its citizens and is building quarantine camps to detain tens of thousands of people at a time. No “critical flaws” here, though, according to Lorenz.
The insanity extends to academia and the opinion section of NBC, where two research associates and an assistant professor now claim that we must bring mask mandates back not just for COVID but for the flu and respiratory syncytial virus. They say that not only should we mask forever to avoid any and all diseases, but mask mandates actually have “helpful psychological benefits” because having the government mandate masks “removes the onus on individuals to figure out ‘what is safe.’”
In other words, mask mandates breed complicity. All you have to do is listen to our liberal elites, and you will be safe. How convenient for them.
These ridiculous claims would be forgettable if they were limited to the liberal media silos they originated from. After all, there are pundits of all political persuasions that have absurd, authoritarian takes. But liberal safetyism has continued to bleed into governance across the country. Several liberal cities wanted to bar children from attending school if they did not get the COVID vaccine, even though most children are not at serious risk from the virus. Washington, D.C., is even mandating students to provide negative tests to return to school after the holidays.
Our liberal elites have been completely broken by COVID, bringing down the might of the government on children trying to go to school and regularly hinting (or, in Lorenz’s case, openly stating) that China did things right. They must be ignored and frozen out of policy discussion entirely and run out of government power wherever they have it. Otherwise, we will be paying the consequences for safetyism for years to come.
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