Fade to Vague

fudging the inflection point

We wanted to imprison you ten minutes ago, and we excluded you from the family and fantasized about your death, but let us not dwell on the past. It may be that some mistakes were possibly made, but let’s move on.

Toronto Star @TorontoStar

“I have no empathy left for the willfully unvaccinated. Let them die.” Online, comments like these, where the vaccinated say the unvaccinated deserve what they get, are becoming increasingly common. But it's also proving true on the street.

thestar.comWhen it comes to empathy for the unvaccinated, many of us aren’t feeling itWith even burned-out health professionals struggling with emotions, and a polarized debate, how do we begin to heal?

Here’s how change works after failure, and here’s what’s coming next in the mRNA disaster.

My small town in the Los Angeles suburbs was in obvious crisis, a very few years ago, and a long list of basic city functions fell apart. We had six finance directors in three years, and the streets are currently a disaster — because, in the game of musical chairs in the public works department, no one was around long enough to plan to maintain them. The crisis grew severe in 2019, soared to its peak in 2020, and then began to lose steam as a series of terrible city leaders were driven out. Today, most of the city council from those very recent crisis years is gone, and we have a new city manager, a different city attorney, a different public works director, and so on. (The city has been trying to hire a permanent finance director for over a year, but no one wants the job.) So we fixed the crisis, more or less.

However. During those very recent crisis years, people who said that the city was in crisis were liars and saboteurs and LITERALLY NAZIS. The first domino to fall in the transition out of crisis was that a member of the city council was caught using fake names and Gmail alias addresses to send out email blasts warning that critics of the city government were white supremacist child molesters who beat their wives. And then, with remarkable speed, we transitioned from

Everyone who says the city is in crisis is a liar and a Nazi

to

Of course the city was in crisis at one point, but there’s no use dwelling on the past.

There was no intermediate phase. We went directly from there is no crisis to that’s in the past, let’s move on. (It’s the famous Clinton pivot: I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky, and also, that’s old news.) To give just one example from a looooong list, the city is preparing a plan to begin maintaining the streets again, and our new mayor gave a recent interview in which he blamed the current condition of the streets on “a lot of complications” from “internal and external factors.” It’s hard to find words that occupy space on a page without conveying any information at all, but there you go. It may indeed be said that, in some sense, various things may possibly have maybe occurred. But anyway….

In the case of the mRNA injections, we’re at that fudgy, murky transition point now, with Emily Oster as the recent climate tester. Covid vaccines will be old news that’s no longer worth discussing by roughly next week. So now the vaccine champion Paul Offit says that perhaps maybe the recent boosters are possibly somewhat, shall we say, non-perfect:

Of course, Offit allows, vaccination is very very very good, but “I believe we should stop trying to prevent all symptomatic infections in healthy, young people by boosting them with vaccines containing mRNA from strains that might disappear a few months later.”

And as Igor Chudov notes, members of the FDA’s vaccine advisory committee have suddenly discovered that they’re by God angry — watch me thump my fist on this table! — that they didn’t get all the data on the vaccines before they were forced to make recommendations. Ohh, why was this done to us, they ask, checking to make sure the pharma cash is still all available in that money market account.

We’ve entered the leading edge of the whoopsie phase, in which the people who’ve driven the crisis discover to their astonishment that it appears mistakes may have been made. Expect this conversation to transition very rapidly to the wisdom of moving on and not dwelling on the past.