We are about to see a dramatic shift away from heavy reliance on vaccines and toward ever greater reliance on antivirals to treat COVID. Within the coming year, antivirals may well replace vaccine boosters as the primary means for combatting COVID-19 and its variants. Several factors make this shift an inevitable course. The shift will make an already insurmountable set of legal obstacles to Biden’s mandates even more formidable.
The shift will eventually cause all of America to emulate Florida. Governor Ron DeSantis’ early appreciation for the need to make available effective treatments, in addition to the vaccines, throughout Florida has led to a great reduction in hospitalizations and deaths. Without mandates but by ensuring that vaccines and treatments (principally monoclonal antibodies) were widely available, Governor DeSantis has combatted COVID more successfully than any Biden Administration official and any blue state Governor or Mayor. He has achieved a ninety percent reduction in COVID-19 cases between August 2021 and the present, while US COVID deaths overall in 2021 are higher than they were in 2020.
Medical technology is rapidly filling the vacuum created by vaccines that operate imperfectly. Oral antivirals promise to avert hospitalizations and deaths. The move to embrace antivirals responds to public need not only because vaccine immune protection wanes but also because the public cannot be expected to remain as compliant year after year with federal and state booster demands as it has been with initial vaccination demands, not only due to vaccine fatigue and awareness of treatment alternatives but also because of widespread distrust of public officials. The government oversold vaccination as a perfect solution and has given conflicting disease transmission, masking, and lockdown representations and recommendations often from the mouth of its infamous, gain-of-function-conflicted, mouthpiece, Dr. Anthony Fauci. There is to this day, for example, little science to support indoor cloth face masking or six feet of separation as effective preventives.
Pfizer’s new paxlovid, which may be given Emergency Use Authorization by FDA this month, reduced hospitalizations by 89% in clinical trials and resulted in no deaths. Already on the market, monoclonal antibodies (including bamlanivimab plus etesevimab; casirivimab plus imdevimab; and sotrovimab) have helped prevent or reduce hospitalizations and hasten recovery of infected individuals. Detested by the Biden Administration, evidence continues to mount concerning the effectiveness of ivermectin in reducing COVID viral loads and averting hospitalizations and deaths. Market incentives greatly favor the production of more antivirals to address COVID, and there is underway significant research and competition to supply the antivirals needed.
Mass vaccination may have lessened the impact of the pandemic but COVID is resilient and can infect the vaccinated when immunity drops. Treatments are thus essential to avoid hospitalizations and deaths in the long run. Indeed, over time, it is likely that everyone will be infected with some form of the virus. The prospect of getting boosters every six months and experiencing COVID jab side effects twice or more times a year will likely dissuade many and reduce overall vaccination rates. That is particularly true when the evidence suggests post-vaccination immunity is unreliable and short-lived for those in high-risk categories, such as the immune-compromised, and may be less effective against variants.
Of medical and practical necessity, treatments are destined to become the primary means of combatting COVID in the future as the disease enters its endemic phase. Ironically, Governor Ron DeSantis, the political figure the Biden Administration hates most next to President Trump, is the author of the best plan for handling COVID—a means that the federal government will inevitably be forced to accept: voluntary vaccination and prolific availability of treatments. By focusing on expanding individual freedom of choice rather than mandating a one-size fits all vaccination regimen, Governor DeSantis has not only protected the rights of his constituents, he has also proven himself best able to combat the virus.
Moreover, no amount of Biden Administration effort to breathe life into constitutionally and statutorily deficient vaccine mandates will overcome public and federal judicial hostility to them. Arguments for mandates ring hollow when “emergencies” never end and treatments become viable medical alternatives to incessant vaccination. As Dr. Marty MaKary explains: “There’s very few people left who have not had the virus or the vaccine . . . [W]e’re headed to the endemic phase where we have to learn to live with this, and it’s going to be downgraded from a serious public health threat to a seasonal virus.”
The medical and popular demand for effective treatments and the judicial rejection of tyrannical Biden mandates spells an eventual end to collectivist control of COVID and a return to individualized patient care where independent physician diagnosis and prescription and patient choice are respected and protected. That individualized care, in line with personal freedom and free markets, will express itself in case-by-case treatments, tailored to the specific needs of each patient, which approach has proven highly effective historically and certainly so now in Florida.
The millennial authoritarian rule that the far-left thought could be achieved through fear-induced relinquishment of rights in the face of COVID will not likely come to pass. The Biden mandates should give way across the board in 2022. Federal courts can be expected to continue to restrain and enjoin them. Federal and state elections will likely bring Republican majorities hostile to mandates to the Congress and in more states. And medical policy and law will increasingly accept COVID treatments as necessary alternatives to incessant jabs.