As with Robert Frost's two paths diverging in the woods, the COVID pandemic has hit a fork in the road.
Back in 2020, when the virus first presented itself, anything could be forgiven. Trump could shoot hydroxychloroquine up his butt; Fauci could sneer at masks, then a week later demand that we wear 17 masks; governors could order everyone to stay home, while they cavorted at parties, restaurants, hair salons and protests.
The lies, hypocrisies and idiocies were all stuffed in our burlap bag, as we bounced along Coronavirus Road.
Then, in a triumph of Western medicine, A VACCINE APPEARED! That's when our path in the woods diverged into the sane and insane.
It's pretty clear now that the vaccines work, with few side effects -- although our public health experts would really do us a solid if they'd stop lying about there being no side effects. At a minimum, the vaccines prevent serious illness and death. They're even more effective than the flu vaccine, and that's pretty good.
Between widespread natural infection -- something else it would be nice if authorities would stop lying about -- and mass vaccination, COVID IS NOW OVER. It wasn't "the flu" in 2020, but it is in 2021.
Liberals sulked as people began getting vaccinated and living their lives again, but then seized on the delta variant to announce: Let's lock down again!
The very people demanding that everyone get vaccinated are the same ones telling us vaccines don't work all that well, so maybe we'd better just keep wearing masks, quarantining, working remotely and staying home from school.
Do the vaccines work or don't they? If they work, we'll thank you to stop bossing us around now.
Going further into crazy town, liberals decided to pretend that Anthony Fauci was not an escaped mental patient.
Our most visible "public health" authority continues to issue lunatic pronouncements like a third world despot: The vaccinated must wear masks! Children should be vaccinated! Even 2-year-olds need to be masked! Everybody has to get a third vaccine shot! (That last bright idea led a couple of experts from the Food and Drug Administration advisory panel to resign in protest, followed by the panel unanimously voting to recommend booster shots only in certain cases.)
Apart from just coming out and telling us he doesn't believe the vaccines work, Fauci is telling us he doesn't believe the vaccines work.
This is the nut, you will recall, who knowingly lied to the public at the outset of the pandemic for what he, Anthony Fauci, in his sole discretion, decided was a higher cause. Without a scintilla of scientific evidence one way or the other, he condescendingly announced that masks don't work against COVID -- simply for the greater good of preventing a mask shortage.
What if he considers it a greater good for Anthony Fauci to keep appearing on TV? Like an aging football star who dreams of being back in high school, Fauci longs to be in the spotlight.
Except we have vaccines now! So thanks, but we've heard enough from you, Fauci.
Also, we know things that we didn't in 2020.
We now know, for example, that COVID is bad, but it's not Ebola. Eighty-year-olds have survived it. Trump survived it. The 800-pound Chris Christie survived it. And that was before we had all the therapies we have now. Or, come to think of it, any idea what we were doing at all. (Remember the mad rush for ventilators?)
We know that cases are good; deaths are bad. The media frantically report "cases" only because their panic porn attracts readers, so who cares if it's irrelevant?
As long as you don't die, which would be bad, a COVID infection is nature's vaccination shot! As multiple studies have shown, immunity from prior infection is stronger and more durable than that from vaccination.
Infections are especially good if you're already vaccinated. Then you'll have super-immunity. You won't die of COVID -- although you might die with COVID, especially if you're old or sick or have just taken a massive dose of fentanyl.
Like George Floyd. Remember? He had COVID when he died. But unlike Floyd, the media will broadcast your death as a cautionary tale to again harangue us to wear masks and get vaccinated. How dare you not get a vaccine and put the vaccinated at risk!
But the vaccinated aren't at risk. You know why? Because the vaccines work.
We also know that COVID poses virtually no risk to young people. We knew this early on, and for some reason ignored it, but by now the evidence is overwhelming.
Since COVID landed on our shores, 95% of dead the U.S. have been 50 or older. Nearly 80% of the dead were 65 or older -- and not only are they heavily vaccinated, but they make up only 16% of the population. The 64.5% of the population under age 50 -- in its entirety -- has a 5% chance of dying from COVID.
Combine the minimal risk of death to young people -- less than the flu during a normal flu season -- with what we now know about the strong immunity from prior COVID infection, and, throughout 2020, we should have been putting little kids into giant, Japanese-size classrooms and encouraging young people to blow beer foam in one another's faces, get drunk and make out with strangers. Our entire under-30 population would be immune.
Remember the college kid on spring break when COVID first hit the news in February 2020, who had his life destroyed for nonchalantly telling a TV interviewer, "If I get corona, I get corona"? If only we'd listened to him instead of Fauci!