post
The two big Covid arcs we saw were an immediate rejection of Covid precautions by the right, followed by a re-alignment of Democrats in 2022 after the Biden administration pushed hard to downplay the impact of Covid and the need for precautions.
Both of these strains of thought should be anathema to the left. Yet we see largely the same attitudes from leftist politicians and organizations:
- “You shouldn’t be guilting your comrades over their refusal to mask”
- “People with disabilities do not automatically die when a coronavirus particle enters their airway”
- “If everyone in a room is asymptomatic and IMMUNIZED, then risk of spread is low. Immunization >> masking”
- “If you guys want to get really sad, check out r/ZeroCovidCommunity. It’s filled with people who are shut ins who lost their family, friends, and jobs because of their fear of catching COVID.”
- “It’s 2025, not 2021. If you’re worried about your health you can wear an N95.”
- “There’s solidarity and then there’s indulging. If you are immunocompromised to the point you require to be in a room where everyone is masked then maybe you need to sit this one out until you are feeling better. You cannot force a majority to the will of a very small minority.”
- “Choosing to wear a mask to protest a genocide to protect your identity is one thing. Forcing everyone to wear a mask to protect one or two individuals that if they are so sick they should be at home [is different.]”
These are all comments from DSA members today, but I’m not cherry-picking. They’re representative of the US left (and the left in other countries) on the whole.
I don’t understand how this became leftist dogma. Covid minimization was clearly driven by the needs of capital, and the left should reflexively reject it. Accepting it means workplace and public space health and safety is gone, a whole host of people are essentially banned from participating in society, vulnerable minorities are no longer protected, and you no longer have the personal right to not be infected with a biohazard. This is all anti-labor and discriminatory.
I’ve seen people try to spin masking as a mark of white privilege and a restriction of the freedoms of non-white people. As if throughout the pandemic, non-white people haven’t been at the highest risk of getting Covid and having long-term health problems as a result.
Outrage over the genocide in Gaza is righteous; but somehow the Covid genocide is irrelevant.
Masking is annoying and an extra expense. People generally don’t want to do it, nor do they want to have to take other safety measures that restrict their activities. They were willing to go along with these measures for a time, but this was always on the assumption that they’d go back to normal sooner or later, preferably sooner. The balancing of the desire for personal safety and the desire to go back to normal eventually tipped towards the latter largely because of peer pressure, what experts and authority figures said, and the media environment all shaping the risk assessment of COVID.
Vaccines become available, and they’re pitched as a silver bullet solution, the path to go “back to normal”. Joe Brandon comes out saying “pandemic’s over, stop masking, get the fuck back to work”, his admin pressures the CDC to come out saying “stop masking”, the media all say “stop masking”, and liberals, between a combination of deference to experts/authority figures and a desire for COVID to actually be over, all went back to normal. The number of people who are skeptical of the CDC in left-wing ways is probably under 5% of the population. If 19 out of 20 are no longer masking (being generous), most of that left over 5% will just go along with it without questioning things.
Those who do question things have their risk assessment distorted because every source you’d expect to tell you about a deadly virus that can permanently disable people is treating it like it’s magically no longer a big deal, and every person in their life is pressuring them to stop. This is coupled with the active removal of eg tests and wastewater data which makes it even harder to tell what’s actually going on.
Then we got to the point where just about everyone’s back to normal (probably around 2023?), and instead of media deliberately saying not to take any precautions, it just stops being covered entirely. The most COVID “coverage” I see now is stuff like a youtuber/twitch streamer/podcaster having to take a few weeks off due to COVID (or my favorite, a non-specific cold when you know they didn’t test) and then having a perpetual cough. The average person no longer thinks of COVID at all until they see me wearing an N95 and ask “hey what’s the deal”.