The press gets clicks and makes money from doom-mongering, and liberals are more than happy to sing the same tune. It’s sad to see but this constant focus on doom has little to do with reality.
It can be quite easy, reading the press, to believe that the pandemic will never end. Even when good news about vaccines started to arrive in the autumn, this grim narrative managed to harden. In the past month, you could read “five reasons that herd immunity is probably impossible”, even with mass vaccination; breathless reports about yet-uncharacterised but potentially ruinous variants, such as the “double mutant” variant in India, or two concerning variants potentially swapping mutations and teaming up in a “nightmare scenario” in California; get ready, some analysts said, for the “permanent pandemic”.
The contention that “herd immunity is probably impossible, even with vaccines” was conventional expert wisdom a few months ago, though it was obviously wrong and delusional. So it doesn’t get forgotten I’ve taken a few screenshots of that and other clearly unsound prognostications so I can rub it in their faces later on — because of course it’ll be memory-holed and then become a “conspiracy theory,” as is the way of things now.