Sorry, Charlie, but there’s no way to vaccinate yourself from responsibility.
During his Senate testimony this week, Dr. Anthony Fauci said that the earliest we would have an effective vaccine for coronavirus is the winter of 2021.
Yesterday the head of pharmaceutical giant Novartis wrote, “my guess is about one and a half to two years” for a COVID-19 vaccine.
And these are the voices of optimism. On Wednesday, the World Health Organization’s emergencies director Dr. Mike Ryan reminded us that there are many diseases, like HIV and the common cold (sometimes caused by a coronavirus), that we’ve never developed a vaccine for after decades of effort. There are other diseases with vaccines, like measles and the flu, that remain with us.
“This virus may never go away,” Ryan said.
His colleague WHO epidemiologist Maria van Kerkhove added: “We need to get into the mindset that it is going to take some time to come out of this pandemic.”
So what is Gov. Charlie Baker going to do a month, six months or a year from now when the virus is still sending Massachusetts citizens to the hospital and, yes, sadly, sometimes the morgue? More lockdown. What else?
Here’s “what else.”
Yesterday we learned that nearly 3 million more people applied for jobless benefits, bringing the official unemployment number to 36.5 million people. That’s approaching a quarter of the workforce.
Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell said Wednesday that 40% of U.S. households earning less than $40,000 a year lost their jobs in March. Forty percent.
Not that the “lockdown enthusiasts,” as Commentary Magazine’s Noah Rothman calls them, like Gov. Baker care about these things. Why should they? Politicians still have their jobs, as do cable news hosts and university professors. They’re part of the white-collar economy where 6 in 10 employees can work from home.
Among those blue-collar, Trump-supporting, knuckle-draggers with the kind of jobs where you can’t work and tweet at the same, only 1 in 10 can telework.
The response from the “indefinite lockdown” crowd is always “death and data.” New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo — who, by forcing nursing homes to take COVID-positive patients, caused more deaths than any unmasked protester — intoned, “How much is a human life worth?”
California’s Gov. Gavin Newsom is requiring counties to have no COVID-19 deaths for two weeks before businesses can open.
This is mathematically insane.
The odds of going two weeks without a coronavirus death after we get a vaccine is going to be a rare occurrence for most densely populated urban areas. Making “we won’t open until it’s safe” the standard, as Baker keeps implying, means Massachusetts will never reopen.
The painful irony is that, for the vast majority of working Bay Staters, they’re already living in a “virtual zero deaths” realm right now.
As much as lockdown enthusiasts repeat the word “data,” they rarely actually read it. If they did, they would see that as of Wednesday, there had been 259 total deaths among people under 60 years old. That’s 0.0047% of the under-60 population.
The total number of those deaths among people without a comorbidity is, based on available data, no more than 38, and perhaps as few as five. Out of 5.5 million.
In New Hampshire, the total number of healthy people under 60 who’ve been killed by COVID-19 is zero.
These are the facts on the ground, Gov. Baker. No vaccine is going to race in and rescue you, no one is going to absolve you of the sin of destroying so many businesses and hurting so many working families.
Common sense says the thing to do is to reopen Massachusetts for people under 60, while using state resources to protect nursing homes and the elderly. Economics says that if you don’t, you’re going to devastate Massachusetts families financially for years to come.
Science says that more people are going to die from COVID-19 either way.
I’d go with common sense and science, but that’s just me. The decision is yours, Gov. Baker, and no one else’s.
Sorry, Charlie.
Michael Graham is a regular contributor to the Boston Herald. Follow him on Twitter @IAmMGraham.