COVID Made Us All a Little Insane

The following story is co-published with Freddie deBoer’s Substack.

I guess you would say that, in the context of 2024, I’m a Covid hawk. Maybe? It’s hard to say. I’m four-times vaccinated. (Pfizer, if you’re curious.) I have never regretted those decisions for a moment, in part because I’m willing to read the data and I’m not a deranged conspiracy theorist. I believed that the lockdowns were an appropriate temporary measure given the state of things at the time. I was perfectly happy to wear a mask during mask mandates, though I felt it was kind of nutty that some people insisted on masking outdoors or when they were alone in their own private car. In hindsight we perhaps should not have pushed vaccine mandates on the young and healthy, given what we now know about their risk profile, but public officials were making difficult decisions in the middle of a disaster. I think Covid was obviously a very deadly disease, even though it only killed a very small portion of the people who got it, and I agree with those that say there’s been a disturbing memory-holing going on with regards to a global pandemic that killed millions. It was a very big deal. I do, however, think it’s “was” and not “is.” Because the data tell us the pandemic is a past-tense phenomenon. And I think it’s crazy to suggest that that’s offensive to say.

I guess I should say that I’m part of the very slim portion of the population that believes that the world’s establishment governments and the United States specifically did a pretty good job managing an unprecedented pandemic. On one side, increasingly emboldened, are the hordes of right-leaning people who insist that Covid was a minor illness, that the vaccines were poisons ginned up by Bill Gates and Big Pharma to defraud the public, and that various restrictions on movement and behavior were simply a tool of leftist control. They think every death that occurs, anywhere, ever, is proof of the danger of the vaccines. On the other, increasingly obstinate, are the Covid dead-enders, the left-leaning types who have not been in a public place since March of 2020, who continue to douse their houses with anti-bacterial soap, who believe that the next big outbreak is mere days and way and who (and I am not exaggerating) think that we should today, in 2024, have lockdown policies in place as aggressive as those under China’s Zero Covid policy. (If you think I exaggerate, take five minutes to look around in the online spaces of the Covid ultra-hawks and see for yourself.)

At some point in the blogosphere days, “both sides” constructions became so thoroughly satirized that employing one is now déclassée, but I must: it is indeed the case that when it comes to Covid, there are crazies on either side of our culture war divide. I invite you to peruse the subreddits for people with ongoing extreme fear of Covid. I feel sympathy for those people, but it’s a sympathy derived from the fact that many of them seem to clearly be mentally ill.

I’m not suggesting that each side is equally destructive, nothing so crude. For one thing, there’s simply far more of the right-wing Covid skeptics than the left-wing Covid shut-ins; after all, there’s a greater personal cost to actually living the extreme Covid-avoidant lifestyle than there is to yelling on the internet about “the jab.” And the conspiracism surrounding the vaccines has become positively surreal, to the point that I fear it’s created the same kind of charged atmosphere that led someone to bring an assault rifle to Comet Ping Pong. The belief that the vaccines have killed vast hordes of people, thanks to guys like the addled omni-conspiracist Brett Weinstein, has grown despite the utter lack of evidence that any such thing has occurred. I had a particularly persistent emailer who kept insisting that I write about this supposed conspiracy, to whom I would just as consistently ask for evidence. His response was always to send me links to obituaries for individual people who had (supposedly) died of cardiac issues, with no proof whatsoever that those deaths were caused by the vaccine. Eventually he produced a crowdsourced spreadsheet, but it was more of the same – these people had named hundreds who had died of various cardiac issues, but not a single one I found could be responsibly attributed to the Covid vaccines.

There have been a few cases of myocarditis that have been linked to the vaccines, but every piece of responsible evidence suggests that they’re incredibly rare. The M.O. of the anti-vaccine cranks, meanwhile, amounts to “post hoc, ergo propter hoc” and to attributing any heart-related death to vaccines, despite the fact that cardiac issues have been the number one cause of death for as long as I’ve been alive. I saw an Instagram post recently that shared the news that former baseball superstar Darryl Strawberry had suffered a heart attack; predictably, many of the top comments suggested that this was the result of “the jab.” Darryl Strawberry is 62 years old; he’s Black, which carries with it higher risks of cardiac disorders; he has by his own admission lived a life filled with substance abuse and general hard living, which raises the risk of heart attack. But, nope – Covid vaccines exist, Darry Strawberry maybe(?) got one, like 800,000+ other Americans every year he suffered a heart attack, ergo he must have been the victim of the vaccines. If there are vaccine skeptics who are more responsible than this, they sure seem uninterested in combatting this kind of absurd reasoning. Nobody in that “movement” seems to have any interest in policing the relentless assertions of death-by-vaccine that crop up without a shred of evidence.

It’s true, though, that there’s also an ongoing kind of liberal denialism about Covid, an addiction to being the only serious people in class, that depends on a refusal to acknowledge that Covid is no longer a pandemic, that we are in most important ways in a post-Covid era. It’s an addiction not just to the fear of Covid but to the purity of the culture war of the height of the coronavirus, when everyone had nothing but time, time in which to yell on Twitter from the usual battle stations. You can see those problems clearly in this newsletter missive from Tom Scocca.

Scocca, probably best known for his work at (original flavor) Gawker, is obviously very talented, and I recommend his book to people all the time. Beijing Welcomes You is a kind of cultural-immersion nonfiction that’s remarkably easy to get wrong, a book that he could have sold on the premise alone and then turned into a low-effort “Beijing is a land of contrasts” say-nothing snooze for readers who just want to be told that the Chinese are just like you and me, except in the ways that they aren’t. Scocca’s book, which was published in 2011 and describes the city’s furious efforts to prepare for the 2008 Olympic games, is consistently deft, and pulls off the rare feat of never exoticizing a foreign population while also never letting you forget that they are indeed foreign, not like us in real ways. The temptation to blatantly exoticize is pecuniary; the temptation to wave away human difference is self-defensive. The book avoids both. I also always liked his weather reviews at the Awl and I subscribe to his newsletter. He is Not A Fan of Mine, but this is always to be assumed. I do think though that this essay of his reveals not just a resistance to paying attention to epidemiological evidence among the left-leaning but also some inherent weaknesses of the social and professional culture he’s belonged to – the cult of the endlessly superior who ruled media from the mid-2000s until quite recently.

Scocca’s target is this piece by Malaka Gharib, in which she (to use the headline’s term) wrestles with her husband’s fears of being reinfected with Covid. I personally thought that it was an unobjectionable example of what’s become a large genre, but Scocca, himself immunocompromised, finds Gharib lacking in empathy for her own spouse.

Right away, the focus was slipping. Was the problem that her husband is afraid of Covid, or was it that her husband and his doctors have decided that he will be vulnerable to extra harm if he catches another case of Covid? For the purposes of the essay, the real problem was how all of this affected Gharib. “I want to keep my husband safe and healthy,” she wrote. “But I also want our old life back.” …

Gharib was airing out her unexamined unhappiness. Her guilty feeling, here in 2024, was that she wanted her pre-Covid life back. Wonderful. Guess what? Everyone wants their pre-Covid life back! I wrote about this myself less than a week ago. Movies! Restaurants! Oysters! Crowded bars with friends! I want all of these things again. But since I’m also someone with an autoimmune problem complicated by Covid, people like Gharib are helping to make that impossible. 

The first thing that we have to attend to is this ineradicable liberal assumption that Covid was, somehow, a choice – that we could have simply chosen not to have a pandemic in the first place if only our feckless leaders/Trump specifically/those idiot conservatives/that bitch I hate in accounting had been Serious about it all. I remember when Covid deaths were at their peak, how often I saw liberals saying some version of “Why are they letting this happen?!?” There were no doubt some steps that could have been taken that would have reduced deaths, some mistakes that could have been avoided. But as I felt moved to say constantly during the pandemic, nobody was “letting” Covid happened; Covid killed millions of people because it is a highly-transmissible respiratory infection that spreads effortlessly through our incredibly interconnected world. That’s why Covid happened, because the world is indifferent, life isn’t fair, and epidemics arise from the ether to kill people; they always have, they always will. By all means, get mad at the missteps. But in contemporary times there’s this intense progressive attachment to the notion that we could be living in a perfect world, if only there was no such thing as a Republican. It’s born of privilege and of a false understanding of what socialism promises and of our journalist class being made up of dreamers. Sadly, in real life, bad things happen for no reason every single day, and sometimes they happen at global scale.

And so you see this with Scocca here. “People like Gharib are helping to make [returning to normal] impossible,” he says. But how? Where’s the evidence? I see this suggestion all the time, that the immunocompromised could be living lives of freedom and confidence if the rest of us committed to (generally vague) additional Covid measures. But these claims seem both insufficiently specific about what behaviors are demanded of the rest of us and insufficiently supported in terms of providing responsible scientific evidence to prove their efficacy. Let’s say that ordinary people would consent to masking everywhere again, to universal vaccine mandates for public spaces, to the (dubious, to say the least) practice of “social distancing.” I don’t think most people would consent to that, which is a whole other wing of this discussion, not what’s ideal but what’s achievable. But setting that aside, would the immunocompromised feel safe to leave the house then? I guess Scocca is suggesting he would. But given the extravagant level of safety many people demand from Covid, I doubt most would return to anything like ordinary life. Indeed, it has always seemed plain to me that there are some people who do not want to return to ordinary life and thus are Covid extremists, not the other way around; I apologize if that’s not polite but it seems to clearly be the case when you look at communities like that subreddit. Either way, you can’t just wave vaguely at some higher standard of behavior that the rest of us should follow to make the world safer. You have to actually express what behaviors, specifically, enforced how, and based on which evidence. I don’t see that very often.

There are, of course, those who are so immunocompromised that they were already forced to take extreme measures to avoid getting sick before Covid. They’ll presumably be forced to do so not until the public makes some sort of ill-defined commitment to caring for them but when better medical solutions arrive. Scocca has described his own health battles which, I’m assuming, explain his need for extra protections against the virus. But with the question of the immunocompromised in general, I think the conversation became something very much like one we had (or really, didn’t) about PTSD.

In the mid-2010s, when the demand for trigger warnings¹ and other forms of luxurious emotional protection were moving busily from academia to the rest of adult life – a movement I was told again and again in the late 2000s and early 2010s, by people like Scocca, would never take place – the rhetorical role of post-traumatic stress disorder took on a curious kind of prominence. The “trigger” in trigger warning stemmed originally from the concept of a PTSD trigger, a sense impression or experience that prompts panic and fear in those who suffer from PTSD. (In actual PTSD medicine, it’s widely acknowledged that triggers are rarely things like references to slavery or the word “hysteria” but instead uncontrolled sensory inputs like patterns of sounds, specific smells, or a particular play of light, but nevertheless.) The invocation of PTSD lent trigger warning discourse the imprimatur of medical necessity. If you didn’t support trigger warnings, you hated people with PTSD! This was nonsense for a variety of reasons. But it also inspired what I thought was a sensible question: when on earth did so many college students start suffering from PTSD? I didn’t see any evidence to explain a sudden, incredible explosion in what has been a rare disorder, particularly among students at our nation’s elite colleges, who are in general a very privileged class. PTSD was once associated with combat veterans, war orphans, refugees. (In fact some believe that what we think of as PTSD is actually a form of post-concussive syndrome driven by the proximity to repeated explosions). Now suddenly everyone was taking as given that the average college student suffered from the disorder; otherwise the stated rationale for universal trigger warnings makes little sense. So I started asking, uh, why do you all think that is true? Got a study?

My efforts were swiftly corrected: it was offensive to ask what percentage of America’s college students had PTSD, I was repeatedly told. I was rejecting their lived experience; I was calling them liars; I was invading their medical privacy. Never mind that I had never questioned any individual person’s diagnosis, but instead asked about a supposed sudden explosion in a complicated disorder that had, until recently, been broadly understood in the medical world to be rare. But it wasn’t to be countenanced. The scenario we were in was that an asserted epidemiological fact (that PTSD is epidemic on college campuses) had great argumentative force, was in fact core to the whole debate, but was not subject to questioning, no matter how respectfully voiced. You had to accept any claim to PTSD at face value, even if the disorder was invoked as a purely argumentative move. People would move very swiftly to saying that actually, trigger warnings are for all kinds of students, not just those with PTSD, but it was the medical argument that was the real club that people liked to wield. And this was all very handy for social justice types, who had developed an iron-fisted attachment to trigger warning for pure culture war reasons. Which, to complete this overly long analogy, was very similar to Covid, in that I regularly grappled with this question: When the fuck did everybody become immunocompromised?

I think it’s really essential, in both of these cases, to clearly separate respect from people who do suffer from a condition (PTSD, being immunocompromised) with asking for evidence of the prevalence of that condition generally. We need to practice the former, to be fair and kind; we need to be able to practice the latter, to make good public policy. And I became regularly frustrated with the hand-waving insistence, from political progressives, that our country was absolutely stuffed full of people with severely compromised immune systems, a novel and unsupported claim of fact which was then used as a cudgel to beat those who resisted particular policies. But knowing how many people are actually immunocompromised, as diagnosed by medical professionals instead of self-assessed, is essential to making sound public health decisions. The larger that population, the more likely public policy is to bend to meet their needs at the cost of the needs of the general population. I’m sorry if this offends anyone’s sense of justice, but we constantly make decisions in society that favor the desires of the majority over the health of small minorities. Some people are alcoholics, but we don’t reinstitute Prohibition to support their sobriety. Some people are allergic to peanuts², but you can still buy them at Trader Joe’s. Some people (like, a very very few) have photosensitive epilepsy, and though warnings are now becoming ubiquitous, we don’t ban shows, games, or movies from having strobing effects, because the impediment to artistic expression for all is too great to be offset by the health benefits of a small few.

That might sound insensitive, but that is just literally what public health policy is, a weighing of interests. And we can’t do that when you’re not allowed to ask how many people are actually immunocompromised. When that information is sought out, though, the person asking for it is often told that they’re guilty of “eugenics,” which has no earthly connection to public health data about the actual rate of being immunocompromised but does sound like a big important word. Sadly, you can’t do an end run around the various forms of public health calculus that we are inevitably forced to perform when an epidemic rears its head. Saying that a vulnerable population exists cannot imply the need for a given policy, certainly not without a) a firm grasp on whether a given intervention will actually help that vulnerable population, b) that population’s actual relative risk, and c) the size of that population as a portion of the whole. So much of Scocca’s essay proceeds from this same incorrect thinking – that the existence of immunocompromised people, in and of itself, dictates a particular Covid policy. But, for one thing, we really, genuinely do not know how effective the NPIs were, even lockdowns, for the immunocompromised or anyone else. More broadly, it was just always going to be true that governments would make calculations about what to do, and when, that drew in part on a sense of the size of various vulnerable groups.

Nothing is going to bring Gharib’s old life back. More than a million people are dead in the United States. Her husband suffered a life-changing injury to his health. Also—she has a two-year-old child around the house? “My husband and I used to host big parties, go to concerts, travel on a whim,” she wrote. Ma’am. Parents of toddlers were writing that essay years and years before the spike protein ever mutated. 

More than a million dead is tragic, but many or most people have returned to lives that are indistinguishable from their old lives before the pandemic, at no personal cost to themselves. Gharib’s entire essay is about working through her feelings about balancing her husband’s health needs with her perfectly-understandable desire to live a normal life, and fair or unfair watching the rest of the world move on is going to affect the emotions that she is explicitly writing about in that piece. I think the notion that not writing such a piece for fear of hurting feelings is not a productive approach to these very common personal crisis. And, yes, children change your life. But we aren’t talking about that right now, are we?

Right—you do those things because you don’t want your husband to catch Covid. For your husband, it is still 2020, which was actually 2021, since the vaccines weren’t out to the public until the spring of that year. His risk profile is not the same as the risk profile for the general public (although there are a lot of people like him—like me—in the public). 

But how on earth does Scocca know that? There is no such thing as a unitary immunocompromised state, and every body reacts differently to different epidemiological conditions. We don’t know how Gharib’s husband’s immunodeficiency actually functions, other than the information that it stems from an autoimmune disorder. We don’t know if more people taking Covid tests and constantly measuring CO₂, Scocca’s preferred practices, would actually result in a world that would be safer for him. There are vast spectra of immunodeficiency, and to speak about a stranger as though we know what would or won’t work for him doesn’t help anyone.

Yet the entire essay was dedicated to the premise that risk management is really a matter of managing one’s emotions and expectations. For expert insight into her situation, Gharib brought her complaints about her husband not to infectious-disease specialists but to various psychologists, who told her the couple needed to work on compromise and communication. One of them informed her, she wrote, that ‘the main problem area he sees with couples in this situation is their individual assessment of risk.’

This strikes me as the key bit, really: Scocca is mad that Gharib sees the assessment of Covid risk “as a matter of managing one’s emotions and expectations.” But of course a whole other set of people would argue that Scocca is doing the same and simply coming to different conclusions, and not all of them are rabid conservatives. Take a look at the graph at the top. It charts excess deaths, which is to say, the amount of deaths above that which would be expected given otherwise normal mortality conditions. That huge spike is Covid, and it’s a tragedy. The way that some people have decided to minimize what that awful graph means is indeed unfortunate, and constant “Intellectual Dark Web” suggestions that the risks of the vaccines outweigh the risks graphed above are not just wrong, they’re despicable. But you can also see that the number of confirmed Covid deaths has reached near-zero and been there for some time. And you can see that the confidence intervals for excess deaths represented on the graph include zero – that is to say, we are incapable of saying from current evidence that excess deaths are not zero. Put another way, they are statistically indistinguishable from zero.

Which is exactly what we should expect in 2024! The single most important epidemiological factor here is the level of communal prophylactic exposure to the virus, whether through vaccination or prior infection. And almost everyone has such exposure now. Combine that with the fact that the risk to those who were not old or sick was always very low, that the CDC said from the beginning that the vast majority of people who caught the virus would either be asymptomatic or have mild cases, that Paxlovid and various other treatments now amount to effective cures for the illness…. Well, most Americans appear to have responded to all of that by resuming normal life entirely. And it’s really difficult for me to say that they’re wrong to do so. Because as an excess death event, Covid is over and has been for a year. I know – conservatives were quick to move on and declare Covid over, we are the not-conservatives, therefore we must never say anything that suggests that Covid is over. But for those who have healthy immune systems (which, based on all available medical data rather than Twitter posturing, is almost everyone) the risks of Covid are now not worth major behavioral changes. Sorry if that all sounds a little Joe Rogan Experience to you, but for most people it appears to be pretty simply math. To quote Tom Scocca, “Risks aren’t feelings. They’re probabilities based on facts.”

Scocca and anyone else who’s immunocompromised has every right to be mad about the degree to which society accommodates their needs, and every right to advocate for change. I would probably help, if I could, depending on the details. But I would suggest a few things. The first is that what they’re really asking for now is not to have our relationship to the immunocompromised change in an emergency Covid setting, but outside of that setting, simply in the flow of day-to-day life, as a part of normal operating procedure. I honestly think that, politically and rhetorically, Scocca and people like him would benefit from decoupling their call for more accommodation for the immunocompromised from Covid, which is not only hopelessly partisan and polarized but also something even many liberals would prefer to no longer think about. I find it hard to believe that most Americans would consent to sticking something up their nose every time they want to go to a public place, as Scocca calls for, but if I was convinced that there was a strong scientific evidence that doing so would help a vulnerable population, I would. I do dearly wish that we would invest more in overhauling HVAC systems in a way that reduces exposure. And we always must hope for better medical choices in general.

But I also think that liberals really poisoned the well when they decided to wage war against anyone who dared to make any public health calculations during the pandemic, despite the fact that such calculations were inevitable and necessary. The relentless braying about “eugenics,” the insistence that anyone who was not an NPI maximalist hated the disabled and wanted them to die, contributed directly to the backlash that has resulted in so much Covid conspiracy insanity. And this gets to the unhealthy media culture I discussed at the top. It turned out that the height of the Covid era coincided with the last days of the dominance of a particular vision of ultra-confident left-leaning media pose, one that Scocca and the rest of the ex-Gawker crew exemplified but which was much larger than them. If you went anywhere near Twitter from 2008ish to 2022ish, you know what I mean, that kind of relentlessly uncompromising, self-satisfied type of engagement, “irony” run through the photocopier a hundred times until it was a dim impression of what irony is and is for. I’ve read Scocca faithfully for over a decade, and liked a lot of what I’ve read, but I can’t say I remember ever seeing him just take an L, admit fault and give it up to someone he had disagreed with and moved on. In that he was much like most of the people in this profession for a solid ten years.

Now, a “vibe shift” that’s wrestled some control of culture away from social justice liberals, relentless media layoffs, and the death of Twitter have ended the discursive conditions under which that approach flourished. And maybe now is a good time to get used to occasionally, very occasionally, admitting that the other side might have a point, that social justice liberalism actually does have some deeply unhealthy aspects, and that our grudging acknowledgments that (for example) public health officials got some major things wrong would benefit us in the long run. But it’s like the trigger warning thing; a lot of liberals seem vaguely embarrassed about how hard they went to bat for such things, but can’t ever bring themselves to suggest that maybe they were on the wrong side. They seem to think that such behavior would only give succor to the enemy. Anyway – yes, conservative Covid conspiracism and the endless latitude it’s been given by the “dissident” media is much worse, has much greater negative consequences. Then again, to fight back, we must be relentlessly self-critical.

As for Scocca, well, I hope better health is ahead. We shall see how public health develops, although given the paucity of investment in overhauling various parts of our society to be more epidemic-resistant, I’m pessimistic. The broader question, of who to blame, will always been enflamed. Scocca says, “Society had given up on protecting Gharib’s husband, so now she felt left out of society. And she looked for a way to blame her husband for it.” Perhaps. Perhaps. But this looks like projection, to me – when you read Scocca’s essay, do you think, even for a minute, that it’s really Gharib’s essay that’s made him so mad? 

1. For the record, the constant liberal insistence that trigger warnings “are just warnings” is demonstrably false; at both UC-Santa Barbara and Brown, for example, students pushed hard for policies that would allow them to skip any material they deemed triggering, at any time, as many times as they felt appropriate, without penalty. ↩︎
2. There are compelling arguments that food allergy rates are dramatically exaggerated in this country, for a variety of reasons. The biggest is, simply, incentives – a doctor who says that you do have an allergy when you don’t will never face any kind of negative repercussions from that mistake, while a doctor who says you don’t have an allergy when you do faces potentially back-breaking malpractice liability. When a false positive is so much less costly than a false negative, you can assume that you’re going to get a lot of the former. ↩︎