Over the past few months, world leaders have been pushing for the rollout of COVID-19 vaccines. People have started looking forward to the end of the coronavirus pandemic even as new mutations of the virus continue to appear, confident that herd immunity will soon take over.
But liberals are singing a different tune. In a recent article on Bloomberg, investment banker-turned-journalist Andreas Kluth warned that things might never go back to normal. In his article, Kluth said pharmaceutical companies will never be able to develop COVID-19 vaccines fast enough to keep up with mutations of the virus.
It would be wise to assume, said Kluth, that SARS-CoV-2 – the official name of the Wuhan coronavirus – has already mutated in most poor countries that have yet to receive COVID-19 vaccines, even if their youthful populations keep mortality manageable. This just means that people around the world should start planning for a "permanent pandemic," said Kluth.
But libertarian and political commentator Tom Mullen begs to disagree. Mullen, whose website proclaims he is working to dismantle the government "one lie at a time," pointed out that this push to make pandemic life permanent undermines people's liberties. But these narratives are nothing new.
Liberals tout defeatist propaganda that undermines freedom
In his fatalistic article, Kluth said SARS-CoV-2 can only be moving along one of two evolutionary paths. In one, the virus becomes more severe, infecting and killing more people, but its growth remains linear.
In the other path, the virus never ceases to mutate. It becomes more contagious but not deadlier. In this case, a constantly mutating virus causes exponential, not linear, increases in the number of infections and deaths.
Either way, the result is the same: safety protocols, such as mandatory mask-wearing and social distancing, are retained. In other words, the world may never "get back to normal," as Kluth puts it so succinctly. It is this idea of never getting back to normal that Mullen challenged in his own article.
If "normal" is viewed vis-a-vis the lack of protocols that now dictate people's lives, it becomes clear that getting back to normal means recovering the "relative liberty" that people already had prior to the pandemic. Mullen says "relative liberty" because people were already overly regulated by the government prior to the pandemic.
To Mullen, the coronavirus pandemic is just the latest in a long series of crises that somehow lead authorities to the same conclusion each time: people can no longer afford their freedoms.
Government rehashes same old crisis narrative
Mullen argued that the coronavirus pandemic wasn't the first time that the powers that be have used narratives that undermine freedom of movement, assembly and other civil liberties. Government authorities have long been terrorizing citizens into relinquishing their liberties under the guise of keeping them safe.
For instance, Americans were told that "the world changed" after 9/11. Authorities had people believe that they needed better protection against what they said was the "new threat of terrorism." And that protection came in the form of warrantless surveillance of calls, text messages, electronic messages, financial records and physical searches even without probable cause of an actual crime.
But it seems as if history is repeating itself. Mullen argues that the fearmongering that happened then isn't that different from the left's own fearmongering about many so-called crises, such as climate change. The story goes that in order to save the planet and beat climate change, people would have to ditch gasoline-powered cars, limit air travel and limit meat consumption.
In the context of the coronavirus pandemic, even the freedom to assemble and see friends and family members in the flesh may be permanently banned as well to keep everyone "safe." (Related: LA Mayor threatens to turn off power, water at homes where people are gathering in defiance of coronavirus orders.)
But these crisis narratives don't just assault civil liberties, added Mullen. They also lead to dire predictions that turn out to be false. Additionally, they lead to solutions that turn out to be ineffective.
For instance, environmentalists have been predicting end-of-the-world disasters decades before New York Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was born. Ocasio-Cortez made headlines in 2019 after warning that the world will end in 12 years if world leaders do not address climate change.
Kluth is no different. There is little to no sense of proportion when so-called experts discuss the pandemic, said Mullen. For instance, there have been breakthrough cases of people spreading SARS-CoV-2 even after inoculation. But even medical experts studying the virus don't fully understand such cases.
Similarly, health authorities have justified the need for lockdowns time and again by claiming that it is possible for asymptomatic people to spread SARS-CoV-2. Yet medical experts themselves find it difficult to estimate the contribution of asymptomatic COVID-19 patients to outbreaks.
Nevertheless, governments continue to enforce draconian safety protocols like lockdowns and mask mandates, the effectiveness of which are questionable at best. Such "solutions" demand more of people's freedom even though they haven't been proven to work, said Mullen. "It’s always all pain and no gain."
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