COVID-19: Safety Does Not Trump Everything, Here’s Why

by Wade Garrett

This first appeared in The Havok Journal on May 6, 2020.

Americans might not realize it yet, but we are being indoctrinated into a culture of fear.

Indefinite closures are inherent creators of fear. Humans have always feared the unknown, and under Covid-19 closures with guidelines that change by the day, there has never been greater uncertainty in America. Worse than fear of economic uncertainty, though, is that we are being taught to fear each other. We are being inculcated with fear. Coughing in public, however discreetly, is now received with looks of horror as people move away. Sucks to have allergies.

And the man at the center of the drive to make Americans afraid of each other is Dr. Anthony Fauci. Dr. Fauci is the immunologist currently advising the Trump administration on how to deal with COVID-19. He’s a renowned physician, and he is laser-focused on defeating the virus that has been running rampant across the globe since January.

And it seems the virus is all Dr. Fauci cares about.

He doesn’t care about your livelihood. He doesn’t care if you go bankrupt. He doesn’t care if you commit suicide because you lost your job and can’t support your family anymore. He doesn’t care if your family ends up homeless. Your problems are not his, he’s wealthy and can float along just fine. He only cares about defeating COVID. And that’s it. Dr. Fauci is happy to see another Great Depression, or the Greater Depression, as long as we’re following his ideas for curtailing the pandemic.

And the ideas he is promoting are cementing fear into America.

Fauci is a strong proponent of permanent social distancing. He doesn’t want humanity to touch each other from now until the end of time.

He said, “I don’t think we should ever shake hands ever again, to be honest with you,” during a recent Wall Street Journal podcast.

He reinforced this belief in an interview on April 8^th, “And just, as a society, just forget about shaking hands. We don’t need to shake hands, we gotta break, we gotta break that custom. Because as a matter of fact, that is really one of the major ways that you can transmit a respiratory illness.”

No shaking hands. Ever. And if you can’t shake hands, you definitely can’t high-five or hug or kiss someone on the cheek.

But, wait. COVID-19, according to Fauci and many others, will be with us for the long term. It is now a permanent fixture on the planet. It’s going to be seasonal, meaning every year a lot of people are going to get sick with it. This means, if Fauci and others have their way, social distancing is here for the duration.

So, if we can’t touch each other from now on, are we all just supposed to start wearing body condoms? I saw The Naked Gun. It didn’t look like it was adaptable to the entire planet.

In essence, Fauci’s (and many others’) recommendations create a whole class of American society. Let’s call them ‘untouchables.’ Remember the fear in the 80s and 90s of HIV/AIDS patients? Yeah, that brought us together in amazing ways, right?

Following the ideas of guys like Fauci, we can look forward to a society in which there will be those who get tested and are cleared of COVID-19, and there will be those who haven’t been tested. The “virus-cleared” caste of society can do as they please, while the untouchables will most likely be segregated from the healthy, tested, population.

And Americans will accept this type of intervention because, hey, it’s just to keep everyone safe, right?

If handshakes are not allowed, how can you justify sports of any kind? And in a New York Times article from April 29, Fauci says you can’t: “Safety, for the players and for the fans, trumps everything. If you can’t guarantee safety, then unfortunately you’re going to have to bite the bullet and say, ‘We may have to go without this sport for this season.’”

Obviously, sports themselves aren’t the issue, it’s the physical contact sports require. If the physical contact of sports is off-limits, how do you justify schools, movie theaters, concerts, bars, clubs, birthday parties, even sex, since Dr. Fauci says we shouldn’t touch each other at all? How do you justify any kind of community if Fauci says we have to be afraid of each other at all times or else you’ll contract the ‘rona?

Sorry, good doctor. Safety does not trump everything. The continued existence of humanity trumps everything and humanity is fundamentally community-centric. People by themselves tend to die quickly, which is why you see so few hermits. COVID-19 can’t kill us all. In fact, it only kills a tiny percentage of us.

On the other hand, one germophobe and his sycophants gleefully destroying American culture and reducing humans to cave-dwellers afraid to go outside and talk to each other will absolutely destroy humanity.

Everything is a trade-off. We could easily stop the tens of thousands of annual vehicular deaths by banning cars entirely. It’s an absurd idea, of course, because we accept tens of thousands of deaths annually due to car wrecks as a price of our way of life. But that’s what Fauci is doing, banning human touch to stop a virus that kills a few people.

Ben Franklin famously said, “Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” There’s no doubt COVID-19 can be deadly to some people, but we can’t afford to become fearful of each other, else we lose an essential American quality; trust in and reliance on our fellow Americans.