Reasons to Believe

We have risen to meet twin crises and victory is in sight on both fronts.

Typhoid Mary’s got nothing on this superspreader.

I waited for the CDC to recommend the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine, after the FDA approved it yesterday for use here in the USA. That’s done now, and by next week (a few days away) the first doses will start being delivered, the first people will start getting vaccinated, and the plague will slowly begin to abate. By March we should see case and death counts start to drop. By spring we should be back to where we were this past summer. By summer, if the citizenry don’t behave like complete fools, we might be able to declare the siege over. I believe those conditions will all be met, those modest goals achieved, because scientists already brought us the vaccine.

The FDA approval came yesterday, an hour or so after the US Supreme Court told The Republic of Texas, as Donald Trump’s surrogate, that the lawsuit that dynamic duo had brought directly to the highest court in the land, had no standing and would not be heard, and further that no such action by any state would be entertained by the Supreme Court. The attempt by a failed businessman and failed politician to pull a coup d’etat and overthrow the democracy this country has relied upon to maintain our peculiar social experiment for the past 244 years, warts and all, was thwarted.

The good guys are winning.

True enough, even a best case vaccine scenario won’t bring back the nearly 300,000 who have died in the US of the novel coronavirus in the past 10 months, many of them wrongfully (because of failed leadership or, worse, leadership intended to cause death, doom and destruction), nor will it save the idiot fringe from itself. Those must be left to Heaven. But more of us won’t get sick, and far fewer will die, and the freedom to walk upon the face of the Earth without fear of an invisible assassin will be restored. When that time comes we might consider how dangerous life on the planet is anyway, and how much less dangerous it will once again become owing to science and heroic healthcare workers. We might consider living life a little different from the way we did before this black swan fell on us.

It’s also true that the lunatic fringe which allowed and encouraged and enabled the attempted coup are now, some of it, so inflamed as to suggest they might be better off…