Thread by @Loretta_Torrago

While @TheAtlantic's guest writers pen indulgent essays that insist a better pandemic is possible if only we gave up caring in exchange for unburdened frolicking, @edyong, the adult in the room, calls out entitled indifference for its murderous impact. 🧵
theatlantic.com/health/archive…

Despite a safety net w/holes drilled by racism & underfunding, @drlucymcbride, @ProfEmilyOster, @DrleanaWen & @MSmelkinsonPhD advocate abandoning mitigations to return to a pre-pandemic normal in which the US lost "~626,000 people more than expected [for] its size & resources."

Collectively, they dismantled an early embrace of collective responsibility and shared sacrifice arguing, absurdly, that no sacrifice was required.
Yong: "[I]ndividuals have to consider their contribution to everyone else’s risk alongside their own personal stakes."

Instead of protecting people from Covid, they took on the nonsense of protecting people from *fearing Covid* as if fear could be divorced from the dangers especially vulnerable people faced.
Yong: "[P]undits have mocked people ...for being irrational and overcautious..."

Because their wealth allowed them to control their risk, they ignored the many disabled, immune compromised, minority & low-income people who can't.
Yong: "Treating a pandemic as an individualist free-for-all ignores how difficult it is for many Americans to protect themselves."

To free themselves from social obligation, they reframed risk in terms of individual risk, never mind that infection was left to run wild.
Yong: The American ethos see, "people [as] responsible for their own well-being, ...Such ideals are disastrous when handling a pandemic..."

Of course, individual risk ignores the threat they might pose to others, which is to say, individual risk, in its staggering blindness, ignores the most basic fact of infectious disease: transmission.
Yong: "Each person’s choices inextricably affect their community ..."

The cheerleaders of indifference leave individuals alone, fighting for their lives in a world where unequal access to health care and systemic failures make that fight harder.
Yong: "By failing to address its social weaknesses, the U.S. accumulates more of them." See screenshot.

Yong: "Normal led to this. It is not too late to fashion a better normal."
All that stands between normal and better are the high-profile advocates of social murder.
End.

Thank you to @Janet_heise for correcting my frankly embarrassing error and with apologies to both the Ed Yong (@edyong209) who writes for The Atlantic, and the Ed Yong (@edyong) who doesn't. :)