COVID-19 has taken more than 98,000 American lives, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a tragic tally. And yet, so far it rates as a relatively mild contagion, along the lines of the 1968 flu virus, which killed 100,000 in the United States, or the 1957-1958 virus, which killed 116,000. In both of those earlier epidemics, of course, the population of the nation was much smaller.
The level of wokeness has been, well, bubonic. Some of that ostentatious political correctness was evident in February, when public health officials, led by the president of the “Woke Health Organization,” told us that the real danger from coronavirus was an upsurge in racism and xenophobia, against Asians or anyone else. Thus the initial dubbing of the malady as the “Wuhan virus” — in keeping with past practice, focusing on a bug’s geographic origins — was quickly canceled.
Here at American Renewal, I published a piece headlined, “How Wokeness Endangers Public Health.” As I put it, “The coronavirus will hopefully not be the worst pandemic, but it’s surely shaping up to be wokest pandemic.” At the time, I had no idea as to the lethality of the virus — and only an inkling as to the extremity of the wokeness.
In that piece, I quoted Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health, who spoke for the new PC orthodoxy when she declared, “fighting coronavirus with travel bans is a mistake.” In other words, the most basic idea of public health — separating the pathogen from its potential targets — was not to be considered, because it violated the borderless ideology of John Lennon’s utopian ode:
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