Writing in the Wall Street Journal late last week, Karol Markowicz noted, “Covid is suddenly funny and cool now that all the right people are getting it.”
Sadly, there’s truth in that claim.
The latest outbreaks in the liberal Northeast again exposed a fallacy that COVID-19 is some red-state phenomenon.
Washington, D.C., now the pandemic’s epicenter, has almost 200 COVID cases per 100,000 residents, more than a 500% increase during the last two weeks. This is much more than right-leaning Alabama or Mississippi, for example, which have fewer than 20 cases per 100,000.
Other places seeing significant case increases include Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, and Rhode Island. These are all blue states, for what it’s worth.
Again, the omicron wave finally ends callous left-wing claims that coronavirus is somehow fueled by Republican opposition to draconian mandates or school closures.
Embattled D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser is overly zealous with edicts, yet the omicron surge has hit the nation’s capital at a time when winter’s arrival simply means that Northeast and upper Midwest locales are particularly vulnerable because there’s a seasonal aspect to COVID. It can’t be contained by an omniscient government. The Southeast got slammed several months ago by delta, and now omicron is roaring through the North.
But for hyper-partisan blatherskites like New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, crass partisan opportunism is the preferred game.
Krugman said Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis “has effectively acted as an ally of the coronavirus,” and is running a “death cult.”
DeSantis and others like Texas Gov. Greg Abbott or South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem are not anti-vaccine, but they oppose vaccine mandates and passports. It is preposterous to suggest that their states would have been spared the delta variant with different policies.
"Why would Ron DeSantis do this?" energy but somehow real. https://t.co/5CUl3J3ljn
— Karol Markowicz (@karol) December 25, 2021
As even the Gray Lady recently confessed, vaccine mandates “have not provided the significant boost to state and local vaccination rates that some experts had hoped for.”
When President Joe Biden was inaugurated 11 months ago, there had been roughly 25 million cases of the coronavirus in the United States; now there have been 50 million.
A willingness to let individuals make their own calculations about the virus does not make a politician responsible for a highly transmissible variant hitting their state during the holiday season.
When everyone was shouting that he had “blood on his hands,” DeSantis explained that there’s no end to the pandemic, and vaccines or treatments were the best weapons against it.
His view remains correct.
Source: PJ Media
