Zero Masks on the House Floor is the Ultimate Republican Victory
Unmasked Democrats inexplicably gloat as they join their Republican colleagues in spreading the new COVID variant on national television
They like that joke about the popcorn. “Off to watch the vote,” they tweet, and there it is again: another Democratic official holding popcorn and smiling widely. The joke is that Republicans are in disarray, and the Democrats are sitting back and watching it. The joke is the Republicans took back the house, and the Democrats are sitting back and watching it. The joke is that we’re in the second highest wave of the pandemic, and the Democrats are sitting back and watching it.
For working people there isn’t a ton to celebrate these days; staffing shortages have led to widespread abuse and deteriorating employment conditions. Long COVID continues to push people out of their careers entirely. The market is down; inflation is up. And as we enter year four of the pandemic, there’s a shiny new variant spiking cases and hospitalizations wherever it goes. XBB.1.5 is highly vaccine and treatment resistant, but you sure wouldn’t know it from a glimpse at the House floor. Over in the world of nationally famous politicians, our barely-functional government is a source of giggles and memes, but certainly not an opportunity to model pandemic safety as thousands continue to die weekly.
COVID is still the third leading cause of death in the US, as it has been since 2020, and the majority of people dying now are vaccinated. U.S. life expectancy dropped precipitously for the third year in a row, wiping 24 years of hard-won public health improvements off the board and returning us handily to 1996 levels. You can be forgiven for not knowing any of this; despite the Squad’s constant presence on social media, they are too busy talking about everything from Republican chaos to their skincare routines to spare an Instagram story for the dead and dying public. They also apparently think masks are just so 2020; from AOC, to Bowman, to Casar, to Lee, it’s masks off and middle fingers up to the disabled comrades and allies who continue to beg for basic precautions.
XBB.1.5 didn’t originate in China, despite Biden’s last-ditch attempt to deflect blame by instituting an irrational testing requirement on incoming travellers from the newly reopened disaster zone (while refusing to push for a return to masks on our flights and allowing COVID to spread unchecked domestically, of course). No, XBB.1.5 hails from AOC and Bowman’s neck of the woods, New York. The XBB lineage is a recombinant strain, meaning the first XBB developed in an individual with two concurrent COVID infections, which then swapped pieces of their genetic code. This individual- the one with two simultaneous infections- is believed to have been somewhere in South Asia. XBB.1.5 is an XBB descendent; it evolved not too far from AOC and Bowman’s constituents in NY’s 16th and 14th districts. This descendent strain, much fitter and better at binding to hACE2 receptors, is the one right now wreaking havoc on the city.
Letting COVID rip has consequences, as we’ve known since well before Biden grinningly declared the pandemic over on national television. More spread means more opportunities for mutation; more mutation means more opportunities to become more fit, more resistant to our tools. As the Democrats willfully stamped out the last vestiges of community care and turned millions of left-leaning people against the masks they happily wore under Trump, COVID made our bodies its bootcamp. It copied itself trillions and trillions and trillions of times. It mutated randomly until one day in October, it struck gold; an unfortunate but inevitable development when your biggest pandemic control measure is denial.
Now XBB.1.5 is ascendant. On December 30, the CDC suddenly and belatedly released data showing that the “Kraken” variant, as it’s been affectionately nicknamed online, had spiked to over 40% of all total cases. Its prevalence more than doubled four weeks in a row through December, and its meteoric rise is making itself felt in the medical system. Hospitalizations nationally are higher than they’ve been since February 2022 and rising; COVID hospitalizations in NYC specifically have been steadily climbing since Thanksgiving.
XBB.1.5 has been designated a “variant of concern” by the World Health Organization, the first since Omicron, and it’s spreading faster than any variant since the original Omicron broke records last winter. As mentioned, it is more vaccine resistant than any previous variant; even the bivalent booster is only formulated for the BA strains, and provides limited protection. Additionally, it’s rendered monoclonals, another of our much-vaunted “tools,” essentially useless. Oh, and you know how we’ve all sort of just accepted that those rapid tests we got in the mail only kind of work? This week the CDC warned that the PCRs are increasingly inaccurate too!
So in summary, thanks to the “let it R.I.P.” approach, our monoclonals are no longer effective, our vaccines aren’t working well, our tests are inaccurate, and hospitalizations are spiking again. But over on C-SPAN, the Democrats are partying like it’s 2019; crowds of people mingle on the floor, argue, and gloat without a mask in sight. Some House members even brought their small children to the floor, apparently concerned that their babies just aren’t getting enough of that healthy, constant pathogen exposure at home.
The progressives’ lack of concern is upsetting; their lack of awareness is disturbing. Do they even know that COVID is gaining ground again? Does anyone on their staff bother to update them about the disease that’s killed 700,000 Americans since Biden took office? Since 2015, I’ve worked on progressive Democratic campaigns, losing sleep and sacrificing years to push for change within the party. Now I see what all our hard work has wrought: a bunch of feckless followers with no more backbone to stand up to Biden’s murderous non-response than their big-money establishment opponents.
Very early in the pandemic, I spotted a short news item about an anti-mask protest. I’d never heard of such a thing, and I laughed. The protest had clearly been astroturfed, and I thought the idea that the hacky, right-wing backed “movement” could catch on with any rational person, no matter their politics, was absurd. After all, I reasoned, this isn’t like a vaccine; it’s not a complicated medical tool with scary-sounding ingredients. It’s just an easy, risk-free intervention. Who could bother getting worked up about wearing a mask?
But propaganda is a powerful thing. As Walker Bragman has brilliantly covered, the Koch Network went into overdrive spinning webs of misinformation and doubt around obvious and historically validated medical measures, and boy did they succeed. They didn’t merely trick the public into continually pursuing a nonexistent “herd immunity,” they got everyone from Fox News to the New York Times wondering, hey, do masks work? Or wait, do they maybe make us even sicker? Wait a minute, does everyone secretly want to go back to their offices filled with COVID?
Are people who wear masks amidst one of the deadliest events in world history freaks?
Is openly practicing Eugenics just The Way Things Go?
Those of us who are familiar with the so called “Merchants of Doubt” treatment should be able to draw on what we learned from Big Tobacco and Big Oil and spot these tactics. That’s why it’s disappointing that progressive electeds appear to have heard the words “pandemic over” from a big-business backed politician and immediately accepted it as fact. That’s why it’s disappointing that so-called socialists apparently consider pandemic safety a matter of individual responsibility and the right of disabled people to be in public a privilege that can be rescinded.
On twitter and in the media, Democrats are gloating as Republicans publicly fail to discipline their party. But if anyone should be gloating, it’s the big money interests that spent billions telling Americans that we just have to accept this “new normal” of constant illness, declining health, and plummeting life expectancy.
To me, watching the progressives embrace the eugenicist logic of abandoning the most vulnerable in full view of the opponents they once called callous feels like the ultimate defeat. I don’t see what I once saw: an exciting young class of Congresspeople dedicated to putting people over profits.
Just another group of climbing politicians, ready to swallow corporate narratives over basic science.
Just a party out of power, out of touch, and out of excuses.
Just a bunch of losers.