I’ve heard this meme, if you’re scared, say you’re scared, for a long time, and it was the first thing that popped into my mind when I saw this column in The Philadelphia Inquirer:

The CDC’s new mask rules promise freedom. But to me they mean fear. | Opinion

I’m sorry to say, I don’t trust people to follow these guidelines safely.

by Alison McCook, For the Inquirer | May 14, 2021

Alison McCook, from her Twitter profile.

On Thursday, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) made a surprise announcement: Anyone who is fully vaccinated can now stop masking and social distancing, including often indoors.

Though many public health experts had said they thought we would need masks when indoors with strangers for at least another year, the nation’s health protection agency has declared that anyone who received the last dose of their COVID-19 vaccine at least two weeks ago can start living life the way they did before this god-awful thing began. Soon after, Pennsylvania followed suit.

To many people, this is a happy surprise: Freedom! Faces! Parties!

Not me.

I have spent the last 20-plus years as a science journalist. I believe in the vaccines, and that the CDC’s new advice is likely supported by the latest data. I believe in Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, who says he feels good about the CDC’s new decision and wants people to feel like we are approaching “normality.” But Thursday’s announcement from the CDC has filled me with fear.

Fear is a horrible emotion, and people are afraid to admit to fear; there’s a definite stigma associated with it. The Inquirer even illustrated the column with a photo of the Rocky statue outside the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the fictitious Rocky Balboa, played by Sylvester Stallone, is supposed to be an icon of fearlessness. We previously noted the Inquirer’s profile of murdered teenager, and basketball player, Quamir Mitchell, and how his coach, Adrian Burke said of him, “He wasn’t scared of anything.” That’s the kind of thing people want said of them.

But I have to give some credit to Alison McCook, the column author. Given the stigma that is associated with fear, it does take some courage to say, in public, that she was “filled . . . with fear.”

Miss McCook is vaccinated against COVID-19, but, under the definition that to be “fully vaccinated,” one must be 14 days past his final dose, she won’t be fully vaccinated for another nine days, on May 25^th, a day she stated she has marked on her calendar.

She does have her reasons. Miss McCook has a seven-year-old daughter, one too young to qualify for a vaccine yet. The Food and Drug Administration authorized, on May 10^th, use of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine for children 12 to 15 years of age.^[1]CNN noted that “Five states — Alabama, Iowa, North Carolina, Oregon and Tennessee — either allow some ages in that group to consent for themselves or leave requirements up to … Continue reading

But her greatest fear, her “biggest concern,” is that she simply does not trust that other people will obey the CDC guidelines, and wear masks if they have not been vaccinated. How, she asked, could she know that the person who comes close to her indoors, without a mask, is really one of the vaccinated?

That’s a fear expressed by a whole bunch of people, as we have noted previously. Jill Filipovic McCormick wants you to have to carry some form of #VaccinePassport, and President Biden tried to order people to either get vaccinated or wear a mask, something that might have been better received if he had asked rather than ordered. Given that he has no authority in this matter — the various mask mandates were all issued by state governments, not the feds — all that he can do is shout impotently. The New York Times reported that:

In the informal survey, 80 percent (of epidemiol;ogists) said they thought Americans would need to wear masks in public indoor places for at least another year. Just 5 percent said people would no longer need to wear masks indoors by this summer. In large crowds outdoors, like at a concert or protest, 88 percent of the epidemiologists said it was necessary even for fully vaccinated people to wear masks. “Unless the vaccination rates increase to 80 or 90 percent over the next few months, we should wear masks in large public indoor settings,” said Vivian Towe, a program officer at the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute.

The real problem is that too many in government, the CDC, the Democratic governors, and the political left, all used COVID-19 to stoke fear, to stoke fear to gain authoritarian control. Miss McCook’s fear is real, but it is a fear stoked by attempts to sensationalize this virus for fear’s sake, and for control. We shut down our economy, threw twenty million people out of work, restricted people’s to their homes, closed schools and churches, and millions and millions of Americans went along with it, all because of fear. Miss McCook lost her father, not to the virus itself, but because of the unreasoning fear of the virus, as the nursing home in which he was living was shut down to all visitors.

That fear struck her, and it struck her seven-year-old daughter as well:

 

For some reason, the drive-thru line at the donut shop took forever, and we inched forward for 25 minutes before it was our turn. As I approached the window with the employee handing over orders, my daughter spoke with alarm from the backseat: “Mom, he’s not wearing a mask!” Surely she must be wrong, I thought to myself.

Nope.

As I pulled up to the drive-thru window, the 20-something employee handed us her donut, smiled, and told us to have a nice day. She was right: He had no mask. It wasn’t pulled under his nose or chin, or hanging by its loop from his ear. It was totally absent. (But what if he has a medical reason for not wearing a mask? Yeah, not likely. )

I was stunned. I hadn’t seen a stranger’s teeth up close for months. Unsure what to do, I grabbed the donut bag and sped off, throwing it into the front seat and telling my daughter she couldn’t eat it.

I know that surfaces are not a major source of transmission; it was probably safe for her to eat the donut. But I was angry — I had just been assaulted by a toothy smile, and I wanted her to know that was not okay.

Assaulted? Assaulted? Miss McCook described it in terms almost as though her daughter and she had just barely escaped being raped

So we drove another 15 minutes back towards our local donut shop that has no drive-thru, dodged the indoor diners and got her donut (no sprinkles).

There’s been a lot to be angry about over the last few months. And I’ve always been bothered by people who refused to take COVID restrictions seriously. But at this stage in the pandemic, anyone’s laissez-faire approach sends me into a blind rage. I’ve been seething about that drive-thru for days.

Fear, and rage. This is what the left have been sending out through our society, and this is what Miss McCook has absorbed, and what she has transmitted to her daughter.

I get why people don’t want to abide by the recommendations anymore — believe me. But we are SO CLOSE to putting the worst of this behind us. SO CLOSE, PEOPLE! And every unvaccinated person who throws away their mask, takes a trip without quarantining, or invites friends over for dinner because they’re lonely, is making all of this harder on the rest of us. I’m dying to do those things, too — but because they are doing it, I have to wait even longer before I can. It’s like I’m stuck forever in that drive-thru line, watching cars cut in front of me and move up to the window, while I’m in the same goddamned spot.

According to the New York Times, people in my area are considered to be at a “very high risk” of exposure to COVID-19 (hospitalizations are up 42%), meaning we should avoid nonessential travel. During the five days my kid was off school, more than 4,000 Americans died of COVID. And have you heard of Michigan?

Yeah, I’ve heard of Michigan, and I wrote about it, noting that in masked up, highly restricted Michigan has a population with a higher percentage of vaccinated people, and still more than thrice the rate of new COVID infections of Texas, which had dropped its mask mandate and most other restrictions two months earlier.

I checked in with some other people I know who are mustering up the energy to continue to take COVID seriously, and they are feeling the same white-hot rage at rule-breakers that I am. One unvaccinated parent who also spent spring break at home told me some of her co-workers had recently flown to Jamaica and England. “Have you screamed recently?” she asked. When I told her my kid is always around, she suggested I lock myself in the car. “It will take a few times to let it go,” she added.

I’ll try it. In the meantime, I hope everyone enjoyed their spring break. If you aren’t vaccinated and went somewhere great, please don’t tell me about it.

In Frank Herbert’s Dune, Paul Atreides used the “litany of fear” to conquer pain:

I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.

I do not know Miss McCook, never met her, and the odds that I’ve even passed her on the street are vanishingly small. And perhaps some will think I’ve been harsh on her in this, but I think not. I honor her honest statements, statements of fear and of rage, statements not many would have had the courage to admit.

But Miss McCook is a victim, a victim of the propaganda spread by the fearmongers of 2020, those who were genuinely afraid, and those who wanted to use COVID-19 to push a political agenda. Fearful is no way to live, and nothing that you want to teach your children.