Right wingers were dead set against lockdowns, and in the clear light of hindsight, they had a point. Lockdowns are not only extremely economically burdensome, they also have a high social cost that we have not yet recovered form. Lockdowns were necessary in places like New York where the initial outbreak was very bad, but perhaps they could have been avoided without too much cost in other places. In the clear light of hindsight, our side should have looked passed locking down to stop the spread and immediately prioritized stopping the spread without shutting everything down.
But the right-wing viewpoint overall has been opposition to any attempt to stop the spread, either on the grounds that everyone was going to be infected sooner or later, so let's get it over with, or on the grounds that any government action to stop the spread was tyrannical, and that the absence of government action was infinitely more important that the absence of pandemic. Also present in the equation is the conviction that since zero COVID is not a realistic goal, there should also be zero mitigation.
So it, granted that vaccines alone are not stopping COVID, is there any approach that right wingers would support?
Masks
Masks, by contrast, have a much lower social cost that shutdowns. Granted, they are somewhat hot and uncomfortable, but, for the most part, masks are indefinitely sustainable. Asian countries such as Japan have been able to carry on in a mostly normal fashion while wearing masks. In the early days of the pandemic, even Fox News personalities endorsed masks, largely because Anthony Faucci and oppsed them. But when Faucci and the CDC changed their minds, why didn't Fox hosts just gloat that they were right and the experts were wrong and accept their victory? The answer appears to have been, first of all, that it would remove masks as a culture are issue and, second, admitting that there could be a serious problem during a Trump presidency. So ever since CDC officials endorsed masks, masks have been intolerable tyranny.
Again, there are some legitimate objections to masks. One is that cloth masks are of limited effectiveness. That can be overcome by promoting surgical masks and (especially with the Omicron variant on the loose), N-95 masks. The other is the complaint that if we always have to wear masks, what is the point of getting vaccinated. So I will agree, there should be metrics as to when masks are and are not seen as necessary.
The biggest burden of masks, however, is to restaurants, bars, and gyms. Clearly it is not feasible to wear a mask while eating or drinking, and masks seriously inhibit strenuous exercise. So is there a feasible way to stop the spread of COVID in restaurants, bars and gyms without unduly burdening them and, if so, would right wingers agree to it?
Vaccine passports
The most obvious way to keep restaurants, bars and gyms to stay open without being major sources of spreading COVID is to require customers to present proof of vaccination. Republicans all over the country have been fighting that tooth and claw as tyranny and demanding that the unvaccinated not be treated as second class citizens. And, it should be added, there have been enough breakthrough infections, to say nothing of Delta and Omicron variants, to make clear that vaccine passports alone will not keep restaurants, bars and gyms from being sources of spreading COVID.
Testing
Then there is testing. Certainly if we had cheap and abundant rapid tests kits we would have a very useful tool in fighting the pandemic. Schools have found they can reduce absenteeism with no increase in contagion by testing students who may have been exposed and allowing them to stay in class so long as they test negative. The same technique could be used in work places as well. People are being encouraged to test before social gatherings. If rapid tests were cheap and abundant, restaurants, bars, and gyms could avoid being spreaders by testing customers. Ideally, people could even be encouraged to routinely self-test to see if they were infected.
In at least one sense, Biden has done us a favor here. By clearly mishandling testing, he has taken the partisanship out of the issue. Now we can all denounce him for not getting enough tests out. Nonetheless, I don't recall any great rightwing clamor for more testing until the failing became so obvious as to make the outcry universal.
And suppose we did have an abundance of cheap, rapid tests. Can anyone doubt what the result would have been? Does anyone believe that people who see masks, vaccine mandates, and vaccine passports as intolerable tyranny would submit to routine testing? And certainly if the goal is to have no changes whatever in one's routine as a result of the pandemic, any suggestion of regular self-testing would be intolerable.
Ventilation
Once again, this has been a major part of fighting COVID in Japan. And improved ventilation would have the advantage of not making most people have to do anything at all. I do recall one Twitter comment that this at last would be something that would not be controversial. Color me unconvinced.
Why would anyone oppose improving ventilation? Mostly because of the cost to business and the burden of regulation. Republicans generally oppose health and safety regulations as intolerable burdens to business. Furthermore, large chains would be better able to afford the upgrades and mom and pop operations. Of course, the cheapest and simplest way to improve ventilation is simply to open a window. But that can be quite uncomfortable depending on the season, and can let in flies and mosquitos. And presumably there would be down time while the systems were installed.
Speaking for me, I would favor a major government investment in helping restaurants, bars, and gyms upgrade their ventilation. But let there be no illusions that even this would escape the culture war.
Treatment
The one thing right wingers are absolutely in favor of when it comes to COVID is finding an effective treatment. And effective treatment is certainly good, so far as it goes. Still, it would be good to keep in mind the old adage that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Speaking for me, I would be in favor of a COVID fighting approach that is about 80% prevention -- whether in the form of vaccines, testing, ventilation, or masks when necessary -- and about 20% treatment when prevention fails. But then again, I am no expert. Maybe prevention will just be so full of holes that something closer to 50-50 would be more realistic. But the right wing view appears to be that any attempt at prevention is intolerable tyranny, and that our approach should be zero percent prevention and 100% cure.
Right wingers are currently in the process of gloating because all attempts at mitigation against Omicron have failed, thereby proving we should never have attempted mitigation in the first place, and should have focused entirely on cure. And right wingers can correctly point to many mis-steps in the search for prevention. But there have been plenty of others in the search for a cure. I am thinking if a recent tweet by ant-vaxer Jesse Kelly:
I’m not anti-vaccine. I might have gotten one. I wanted to wait and see how it worked. But then you shut down all other treatments. And then you insisted people shouldn’t be allowed to work without one. Now you insist boosters are needed. I’ve seen all I need to see.
If I’m standing in a room with ten doors and you tell me to ignore nine of them and only take one, I’m gonna be a little suspicious. If you then start threatening me if I don’t take that one, well now I’m never walking through it.
It is unclear what the other "doors" he is talking about refer to. Certainly people on his side of the aisle have decisively rejected the mask door. And, for the reasons cited above, just about any other prevention door. So is he referring entirely to treatments? Well, yes, plenty of treatments have been investigated and proven not to be effective. Hydroxchloroquin, for instance, or Ivermectin. Donald Trump's infamous speculations about using bleach can be dismissed as a brain fart, something so obviously dangerous that there was no need to worry about anyone actually doing it. Rather more alarming was an attempt by Ben Carson and Mike Lindell to promote oleandrin, and extract from the oleander plant, and highly poisonous. This struck me as more dangerous because most people would probably not know that oleandrin was poisonous and just might try it. Fortunately it never got anywhere.
And contrary to what Kelly says, there are other treatments now, most notably monoclonal antibodies. To the extent Ron DeSantis has done anything constructive in this pandemic, it has been in making monoclonal antibodies acceptable to right wingers. Except it turns out there are also problems with putting all your eggs in the monoclonal antibody basket. Monoclonal antibodies are of limited effectiveness against the omicron variant. Other treatments are coming down the pike, but they, too, are rolling out slowly. But if putting all your eggs in the vaccine basket has proven ineffective, putting all your eggs in the cure basket has its failings as well.
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