THE RADICALIZATION OF A COVID MODERATE: The pandemic is real and serious. But for most of us, it’s time to return to normal. “But it’s far less common to point out that, at this point in the pandemic, there are almost no non-pharmaceutical interventions that make any sense at all. And if mask mandates, physical distancing, capacity restrictions, and other rules put in place before widespread vaccination don’t make sense, they should be dropped — not reluctantly, but enthusiastically.”

In truth, our policy response was a wild overreaction. It might have been appropriate for something like smallpox, but this was more like a rather bad flu. Maybe 3 times worse than regular flu, justifying a response that was maybe 3 times farther-reaching than the response to the regular flu.

Plus: “Early in the pandemic, we needed to buy time to understand the virus better, to develop treatments, and to stand up a full-fledged testing-and-tracing infrastructure to facilitate containment, which we never did. Since containment has comprehensively failed, most everyone on earth will either be vaccinated or infected eventually. We now have enough vaccines domestically to cover everyone multiple times over. So what exactly are we buying time for?”