I’m reevaluating Washington Post opinion writer Matt Bai. I gave him the benefit of the doubt with his last article. Opinion writers work fast under deadlines, and I thought he could have filled in his gaps with more time. And then I looked back at his earlier columns. They were filled with similar broken logic, misinformation, and intellectual missteps. It’s not a mistake; that’s what he does for a living. I wonder why the Post doesn’t correct him?
In “It’s time to let go of the culture war over the virus and stand up for normalcy,” Bai argues that COVID has morphed from a deadly threat to a policy issue. Since the death rates have dropped, we should be balancing virus restrictions against other priorities: “economics, education, and individual liberty.”
Yes, that last item was the first click of a wheel going off the rail.
Bai divides the population into the vaccinated, the immunocompromised (the very young, the old, and the immunocompromised), and the deliberately unvaccinated.
At this point, the unvaccinated are like unrepentant smokers. We’ve spent decades telling them they might get lung cancer. We’ve plastered warnings everywhere.
But you know what? All of us get to make our own idiotic choices — that’s the American way.
We don’t shut down the highway just because a bunch of yahoos are riding their motorcycles without helmets. And thanks to the new antiviral drugs, the risks even to the unvaccinated might soon be less lethal than that.
Washington Post, Jan. 7, 2022, “It’s time to let go of the culture war over the virus and stand up for normalcy.”
And I have to sigh. Really? If nothing else, I object to the overworked cliché of “riding without a helmet.” It’s both banal and so old, I get 60s flashbacks. And let’s not start with Bai’s vision of the ‘American Way.’
As for his arguments? Basically, no. That’s not how risk works for infectious diseases. Bai’s smoking example is a straightforward failure. Yes, lung cancer is horrific, killing over a hundred thousand Americans annually. But no, it isn’t contagious. If someone with cancer could infect ten other people with lung cancer before they died, I’m guessing the public would react quite differently. Remember how we responded to secondhand smoke, a much lower risk.
On to his “riding without a helmet” chestnut. Consider it epidemiologically. First, let’s give Matt his old-school motorcycle gang (Diablos, say, flying colors) roaring maniacally up and down our highways without helmets. Sometimes they crash and die. We mostly feel schadenfreude. Except that now, instead of lightweight, fragile machines, they’ve gone full Mad Max, weaving about with monstrously large, armoured monstrosities. (I realize I might be describing Ford F-150s, but never mind that.) These tanks glitter with protruding blades designed to penetrate auto bodywork and eviscerate the passengers inside. And these gang members roar about, searching for cars to attack, focusing on the most vulnerable first: the small, the old, the damaged. Because we, as a society, are bad at stopping these road warrior criminals, they end up crashing seven to ten innocent people for each gang member we stop.
Spreading an infection isn’t only self-destructive. The analogy is only broken logic.
At this late date, remaining ill-informed has become a deliberate choice. If you still believe you wear that N95 mask to protect yourself from getting COVID, then you’re an idiot or, more likely, a liar. Masks only offer limited protection from contracting the virus, but well-fitting masks strongly reduce your ability to spread COVID to other people. I don’t wear my mask to protect me from you; I’m protecting you from me.
So, either Mister Bai is arguing in bad faith – the most likely case – or he’s an idiot. He’s spreading misinformation with subtlety, but broken logic doesn’t help anyone.
Bai’s goal might have merit. Perhaps it’s time to let COVID spread faster. Maybe the benefits of easing restrictions surpass the costs of broader infections and new variants. But that’s a cost/benefit argument that Bai hasn’t made. Worse, he doesn’t even acknowledge a role for medical science.
He ends with:
It’s time to say that the unvaccinated get to make their own dumb choices, and for the rest of us, this is no longer the kind of public health crisis that should derail our schooling and our jobs.
That’s good public policy — and good politics, too.
But what if that good political policy is terrible science? Reality responds indifferently to either legislation or poll results.
