The publication of NYRA #45 marks the fifth anniversary of an event most of us would rather forget. Declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization in March 2020, the coronavirus long ago shed its nominal novelty. Last August, CDC officials reclassified the virus as “endemic”—an invisible, inexorable part of life and death in America.
Yet Covid continues to infect the insalubrious atmosphere of US politics. In the waning hours of his presidency, Joe Biden preemptively pardoned Anthony Fauci—a way of shielding his chief medical adviser from vindictive deep-state realists in the forthcoming administration. Days after Trump recamped to the White House, the CIA reversed its position on the lab leak theory and the military moved to reinstate servicepeople discharged for refusing the vaccine. With RFK Jr. presiding over the Department of Health and Human Services, skepticism has ousted expert consensus. Many are moved to concern, far fewer to political organization.
It is increasingly difficult to recall the urgency that defined those addled lockdown days half a decad…