Heather MacDonald wrote a thoughtful and anguished piece on Thanksgiving Day for the Spectator. She notes that the pilgrims would never have risked coming to America if they had subscribed to Anthony Fauci’s “stay safe” philosophy:
Nearly half the 102 occupants of the Mayflower died in their first year of settlement at Plymouth, sometimes at a rate of three a day. Such a mortality rate was predictable. The earlier outpost at Jamestown, founded in 1607, lost 66 of its original 104 settlers in its first nine months. . . . Other early settlement casualties included the outpost of Roanoke, which simply disappeared. Overall, for every six would-be colonists who ventured across the Atlantic, only one survived, according to one estimate. Trying to establish a new life in the New World was most definitely not ‘safe’.
The pioneers, motivated by their belief in a greater destiny guided by Providence, knowingly undertook remarkable risks as they set out across the continent, pushing west and risking hostile native tribes, deadly weather, injury, disease, and starvation. The spirit of the pioneers, that spirit that built a magnificent continental empire, is sadly dead, dead, dead.
Today, we are strangling American society in order to avoid a risk of death so infinitesimal — roughly 0.001 percent — for the majority of Americans that it would not have registered in any possible cost-benefit analysis governing both notable American endeavors and quotidian activities over the last four centuries. Our current Thanksgiving Day mantras — ‘Stay within your pod. Stay within your bubble. Stay within your household’ (in the words of a University of California, San Francisco, epidemiologist); don’t travel, don’t share food, don’t touch your family members or friends, speak only in hushed tones — make a mockery of the spirit that creates a country and sustains human life.
For healthy people under age 70, Covid does not pose a serious risk of fatality. The deaths are concentrated in the elderly population:
The average age of coronavirus decedents is 80, which is four years higher than the average life expectancy for US males in 2018 and just a year under the average life expectancy of females. Most decedents have underlying co-morbities. Up to two-thirds of coronavirus casualties may have died of other causes by the end of 2020. Forty percent of US coronavirus deaths have occurred in nursing homes and other long-term care facilities. Sadly, death is already the fate of virtually all residents of such facilities, however much we may understandably try to defer it.
And yet, to protect these aging people, cities like Los Angeles have imposed onerous, destructive economic shutdowns, such as closing even outdoor dining:
Without any advance warning, Los Angeles County shut down all outdoor dining on November 23, signing the death warrant for thousands of restaurants and casting thousands of workers back into unemployment. Restaurant owners had invested thousands of dollars into outdoor heat lamps and other outdoor dining equipment; they will now have to throw out thousands of dollars worth of food.
Los Angeles County has no evidence of any transmission among outdoor diners. It is reacting blindly to a rising case count, even though more than 72 percent of the new cases reported on November 21 were in the lowest risk category — people under 50 — and nearly half of the 34 county residents who died of COVID-19 on November 21 (per the usual over-inclusive count methodology) were over 80. Protecting those octogenarians does not require wholesale business destruction.
The panic-mongers claim that their hysteria is based upon science, but the opposite is true. The clearest case of denying science is the school closures. Covid presents zero risk of death to young children 9 years and under, and is less dangerous than seasonal flu for youngsters ages 10 to 21. And yet a nation seemingly without what we used to call “grown ups” has seen fit to close the schools:
The evidence is by now overwhelming that children have virtually no risk of dying from the virus, nor do they spread it to adults. A random sample of 16,000 students and staff in New York City schools yielded only 28 positive tests; none of those cases resulted in serious illness or death. The New York City school system, were it a free-standing community, would be among the nation’s safest places to reside. Nevertheless, the mayor, along with other mayors across the country, has now reshut the public schools, guaranteeing that the academic skills of black and Hispanic children will fall further behind those of whites and Asians. More racial strife and phony charges of systemic racism will follow.
The non-grownups who seem to be running America’s biggest cities have seized on case counts as justification for their vicious war on independent businesses and the middle class generally, but gross case counts are almost completely meaningless. When young people catch the virus, that is actually helpful, because the young are not going to be hurt by the virus and are going to develop immunity which will eventually broaden out into herd immunity:
Case counts have been the object of veneration for months, despite their near meaninglessness. The obsession with the case count is an implicit admission that the death rates have been a disappointment, for [the death counts] are falling rather than increasing. Currently, infections among the young make up the lion’s share of new cases; in Ann Arbor, Michigan, for example, 61 percent of confirmed and probable cases are connected to the university there. Most of these cases among the young are asymptomatic: the infection is so mild that the infected person is unaware he even has it. These infections are being picked up thanks to mandatory testing in college and school settings. It is not just the young, however, that are frequently asymptomatic. Across the entire population, a whopping 40-45 percent of cases are initially unknown to their bearer before a test comes in positive.
A rising case count among the least at-risk population is not something to be feared, since it heralds the approach of herd immunity. Males in the 20-29 age bracket without underlying conditions have 99.9997 chance of surviving a coronavirus infection; females in that age bracket have a 99.9998 survival rate. The risk of death is 630 times higher for individuals age 85 and over compared to 18- to 29-year-olds.
The non-grown-ups running America seem to have lost sight of the fact that risk is part of life, part of everything we do. And, for a healthy society, life is worth the risk:
A mature civilization understands that risk is part of life and that there are higher purposes — even mere sociability — than avoiding death at all costs. No great venture can be accomplished if staying safe is life’s only guiding principle. Now, however, our elites mock courage and perseverance, explicitly repudiating the virtues that built this country. President Trump, upon leaving the hospital after a coronavirus infection, admonished the country to not ‘be afraid’ of the virus, in the Washington Post’s words, and to not ‘allow it to dominate’ our lives. That eminently reasonable exhortation, once expected in a leader, is still being denounced by public health experts and the media nearly two months later. If Americans do not repudiate this ethic of fear, future Thanksgivings will be even bleaker than this year’s.
In an interview with Steve Bannon, MacDonald expands on the article, and mentions some other factors, such as the role of feminism in the hysterical and anti-scientific risk aversion that seems to be controlling America at this moment:
There’s never been a more civilization-crushing mantra than “stay safe.” It is spirit-killing, entrepreneurial killing, depressing, and it is not the way America was founded. If Anthony Fauci had been advising King James in 1620 when the pilgrims set forth for the new world, they never would have left. We never would have had a Thanksgiving holiday for the current-day Fauci and his peers in the public health establishment and the media to cancel 400 years later. Our early American colonists, and frankly the people who gave us Western Civilization for thousands of years understood that risk is a part of life. . . . The pilgrims set off anyway, because they had higher aspirations than staying safe—belief in religious freedom, entrepreneurship, a sense of adventure, and desire for greater freedom.
Today, we are shutting down our prosperity, we are killing off business, we are killing our economy, for a single-minded and absolutely hysterical focus on a greatly over-hyped risk. We are reacting more like the Salem Witch trial frenzy, with a whole host of imaginary threats and witches and pariahs—like the people who don’t wear masks outdoors where there is zero chance of transmission, Steve. You cannot get the Coronavirus outdoors, the circulating air disperses it to a point of negligible viral dose.
This mentality, if it is not stopped, if we don’t rebel against the tyranny of these “experts” who are using phony science to shut down the schools and outdoor dining in Los Angeles, this civilization is over.
Bannon asks her where this absurdly risk-averse philosophy comes from:
That is a very profound question and I argue that it is the result of the feminization of our culture that has come out of the university, the safety-ism ethic—I wrote about it a year ago—on American college campuses you have a bureaucracy dominated by females. The faculty are increasingly dominated by females. They are crushing traditional male virtues of courage, risk-taking, perseverance.
We saw this when Trump left Walter Reed Hospital after his Coronavirus infection—the most thrilling moment of his presidency—he took off his mask on the balcony and said, “I’m the leader, I have to go forward, I’m not going to huddle in my attic or in my basement, we cannot let this Coronavirus stop us, we have to move forward.” Those are traditional male leadership values.
The most extraordinary moment in the last four years was that the elite establishment, both the media and political leaders denounced him for telling America that we will get over this, we will move forward, do not give in to fear. . . . Now we have the female ethic of maximum risk aversion, and a hatred of those male virtues of courage and risk-taking.
Heather Mac Donald on the Feminization of American Politics revealed by the response to the coronavirus