Roger Marshall, Woody Harrelson, Joe Biden saying COVID’s over doesn’t make it so | Opinion
Done right, politics is about the passionate placement of priorities. Done wrong, politics is about the passionate placement of priorities.
While someone’s right is another person’s wrong, everyone should agree: Don’t play political kickball when it comes to public health and safety.
But that’s what Kansas Sen. Roger Marshall, a Republican, an obstetrician, and a devout Donald Trump enabler does — and likes to keep doing.
If there’s a position to take that demonizes reasonable and scientifically supported COVID-19 mitigation, that’s Marshall’s bandwagon. Public mask mandates? “Draconian,” even as the virus raged in the middle of 2021. Recommending and providing approved therapeutics? Nah, Marshall chose to recommend — and take — the debunked hydroxychloroquine. Salute Dr. Anthony Fauci for his unceasing and tireless dedication for decades in trying to keep Americans from not needlessly dying? Nope. Marshall chooses to falsely view Fauci’s public service as a diabolical plan to steal all our silverware.
Marshall chose to prioritize spending money forming a 9/11-type commission to pin down his favorite theory that the virus originated in a lab in Wuhan, China.
Figuring out the origin of a deadly pandemic isn’t an unimportant task. But it’s not the task of the moment.
On Wednesday, instead of putting energy into extending the federal government’s COVID-19 health emergency past May 11, Marshall held a press conference. There, he leaped on the fact that the Department of Energy has joined the FBI in assessing that the virus most likely originated from a leak in a Wuhan lab.
The senator does this as more than 10,000 Kansans have died from the virus, and as Kansas reported more than 1,900 new cases over the last week — and that number doesn’t include people testing positive from at-home tests.
And let’s also be realistic about how much we really know about the origins of the virus. The Department of Energy pointedly said it has “low confidence” in the lab leak theory, and the FBI rated its own certainty as “moderate.” Meanwhile, virologists overwhelmingly continue to believe the origins were in nature, not a laboratory.
Marshall isn’t the only one to underplay and undermine concern for COVID-19. Just over a week ago, actor Woody Harrelson badly hosted “Saturday Night Live” and threw in a not-so-subtle dig at vaccine mandates. In a recent interview with The New York Times Magazine, he was more direct: “I don’t think that anybody should have the right to demand that you’re forced to do the testing, forced to wear the mask and forced to get vaccinated three years on. I’m just like, Let’s be done with this nonsense.”
The low bar of requiring COVID-19 tests might be nonsense to the actor. But we’re still not past needing them.
It’s not just celebrities. While Republicans get more air time for their relentless attempt to make us all believe that our lyin’ eyes are fooling us, President Joe Biden has also reduced COVID-19 as an inconvenience that we need to just get over. As he said last September in an interview with “60 Minutes”: “The pandemic is over. We still have a problem with COVID. We’re still doing a lot of work on it. But the pandemic is over. If you notice, no one’s wearing masks.”
Declaring the pandemic over because no one is wearing masks anymore is more than a little like Donald Trump repeatedly insisting the numbers of the infected would go done if we’d just stop all the darn testing.
Even here in Kansas City, where we’re giddy over air travel news about our new airport terminal, there doesn’t seem to be much thought given to how much coronavirus is flying in and out of town as the vast majority of flyers go maskless.
Distractions, misplaced priorities, inaccurate declarations and baseless shaming of people who still take COVID-19 seriously don’t eradicate the virus. And the rush to declare it ancient history actually keeps us from reducing its continuing hold on our society.
