During a pandemic, no one’s health is fully in their own hands. No field should understand that more deeply than public health, a discipline distinct from medicine. Whereas doctors and nurses treat sick individuals in front of them, public-health practitioners work to prevent sickness in entire populations. They are expected to think big. They know that infectious diseases are always collective problems because they are infectious. An individual’s choices can ripple outward to affect cities, countries, and continents; one sick person can seed a hemisphere’s worth of cases. In turn, each person’s odds of falling ill depend on the choices of everyone around them—and on societal factors, such as poverty and discrimination, that lie beyond their control.
From its founding, the United States has cultivated a national mythos around the capacity of individuals to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, ostensibly by their own merits. This particular strain of individualism, which valorizes independence and prizes personal freedom, transcends administrations. It has also repeatedly hamstrung America’s pandemic response. It explains why the U.S. focused so intensely on preserving its hospital capacity instead of on measures that would have saved people from even needing a hospital. It explains why so many Americans refused to act for the collective good, whether by masking up or isolating themselves. And it explains why the CDC, despite being the nation’s top public-health agency, issued guidelines that focused on the freedoms that vaccinated people might enjoy. The move signaled to people with the newfound privilege of immunity that they were liberated from the pandemic’s collective problem. It also hinted to those who were still vulnerable that their challenges are now theirs alone and, worse still, that their lingering risk was somehow their fault. (“If you’re not vaccinated, that, again, is taking your responsibility for your own health into your own hands,” Walensky said.)
The Atlantic would like to ignore the bigger issue because it's actually fine with it: Once you give the government power to limit your rights, it never revokes that power. Yes, governments needs to overreach due to the public health emergency but the very real fear was that we would eventually have a permanent "state of emergency". The pandemic will come and go but 5 years from now the government will still be monitoring my cell phone, censoring the media and examining my private health information. One could argue that this is a price too big to pay.
ReplyDeleteWe are seeing it now. Omicron looks to be the end-game. We're all going to get it. The virus will then be endemic and we will have to live with it like we live with influenza. But will government say "Okay, pandemic is over, we're revoking all these draconian regulations now" or "CoVID is still here so we still need to micro-manage you"?