The Big-Name Journalists Who Are Trying to "Both Sides" Covid
There is a movement afoot just as insidious as right-wingers refusing to wear masks and get vaccinated. It’s progressives who are fully vaccinated but whose overcautious attitude toward Covid-19 is harming a generation of children and preventing society from getting over the pandemic.
Or so posits David Leonhardt, a journalist at The New York Times who has written about this phenomenon in his newsletter and appeared on the Times podcast The Daily on Wednesday—the day after more than 3,100 Americans died of Covid-19—to discuss the alarming trend of liberals who just won’t quit Covid. The fact that poll respondents who are fully vaccinated and boosted seem more worried about getting sick, Leonhardt wrote this week, suggests “both political tribes really do seem to be struggling to read the evidence objectively. As a result, the country is suffering thousands of preventable deaths every week while also accepting a preventable crisis of isolation that’s falling particularly hard on children.”
Leonhardt isn’t the only pundit or journalist to lean on false equivalency recently, or to fail to grasp the ethical problems with simply letting the virus rip now that some people are vaccinated. Other publications have also elevated voices with varying degrees of expertise who question the wisdom of masking in schools or vaccinating kids or offering flexible school options. Nate Silver compared schools closing due to staff shortages to the invasion of Iraq. When Bari Weiss appeared on the Bill Maher show last Friday, on a day more than 3,400 new deaths were reported, to announce she was personally “done” with Covid, she received supportive applause from the audience.
The through line in all these examples is the belief that, since the average vaccinated person’s risk, or the average child’s risk, of dying from Covid is low, it is irrational—even dangerous—for vaccinated people to modify their and their children’s behavior to avoid contracting the disease. This argument contains glaring omissions.
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