Yet more evidence came Wednesday that the COVID hysteria is bringing out the inner totalitarian in every Leftist: Dr. Leana Wen, who enjoys exalted status among the hysterics as a CNN medical analyst (she was previously a Baltimore commissioner of health and president of Planned Parenthood), called upon Old Joe Biden to violate the civil liberties of millions of Americans by placing further restrictions on the unjabbed — for the safety of us all, of course.
“I think what we will see with Omicron is a very large number of infections due to Covid-19,” Wen remarked sagely. This isn’t really news: as Stephen Green has noted, Richard Friedland, the head of the largest health provider in South Africa, where the omicron variant originated, said that the deadly new variant that is going to kill us all every day and twice on Sunday really isn’t that big a deal: “I actually think,” Friedland said, “there is a silver lining here and this may signal the end of COVID-19, with it attenuating itself to such an extent that it’s highly contagious, but doesn’t cause severe disease.”
Wen showed no awareness of the fact that omicron “doesn’t cause severe disease”; she was in full the-sky-is-falling-we’re-all-gonna-die mode. Wen said: “The question, though, is are we going to see a decoupling of infections with hospitalizations and death? That would be ideal, the entire point of vaccination, the main point of vaccination, I should say, is to reduce severe illness. And so, if we’re able to avoid overwhelming our health care systems, that would be the goal.”
Well, up until recently, we assumed that the entire point of vaccination was actually to make us immune from the disease, the way vaccines for other diseases have worked. Only after vaccinated people started getting COVID did we hear that the vaccines actually just make one’s bout with COVID much less severe than it would have been otherwise, which, since it is entirely unproven and unprovable, is more of a religious dogma than a scientific finding.
Wen is itching for more totalitarianism: “I do have a lot of concern about what happens to parts of this country, for example, that have very low vaccination rates. This is another reason why I think President Biden’s message yesterday was the right one in some way — in saying vaccinated people should move on with their lives with precautions. But I wish that he would go further to restrict the activities of the unvaccinated because they are the ones who are still spreading Covid and prolonging the pandemic for all of us.”
No matter how many times we are told that the unvaccinated are “still spreading COVID and prolonging the pandemic for all of us,” it never makes any sense. Never before in history has there been a vaccine whose efficacy was affected by those who did not receive it. If those who are unvaccinated can give COVID to the vaccinated, then what good is the vaccine? But instead of coming to this common-sense conclusion, Wen opted to call for new restrictions on the unvaccinated.
We all know such restrictions are in the offing. As the COVID hysteria continues, Old Joe Biden’s handlers will almost certainly try to give the appearance that he is in command and is taking decisive action by issuing more vaccine mandates. As Biden himself admitted on Wednesday, “Nothing’s been good enough” in fighting the pandemic. The ominous edge of his admission was unmistakable. Nothing’s been good enough, but that doesn’t mean that his handlers are going to step back and reconsider the efficacy of their draconian restrictions. Instead, for Biden’s handlers, the fact that nothing has been good enough just means that they have to shut down America’s social life and economy even further and restrict the activities of Americans even more than they have done up to now. Then, when the virus inevitably runs its course, they can point to their authoritarian measures and claim the credit for defeating the pandemic.
Meanwhile, all manner of negative precedents will have been set regarding the power of the federal government to override the Constitutional freedoms of Americans in order to deal with a public health crisis, but they will be buried in the establishment media under all the Pravdaesque coverage of Old Joe as a true leader, a fearless man of action who faced down the deadliest of viruses. If he can continue to pretend to be president until 2024, it might even earn him a renomination. And then we’ll be really in for it.
Source: PJ Media
