By Chris Satullo

Whatever happened to “trusting the science”?

A more than trivial slice of liberal America cannot bring itself, as Emma Green put it so well recently in The Atlantic, “to let go of letdown.”

Even after getting vaccinated, these folks insist on living the same cramped and cautious lives they adopted when the pandemic flared last year. That’s their choice, but it’s a problem when they insist on imposing their neurotic anxiety on the rest of us.

As Green reports, they’re doing things such as: hectoring school boards not to return to in-person classes next fall; demanding sanctions against academics who write that parents can take their kids on trips this summer; insisting that businesses and governments keep wasting money on the pointless “hygiene theater” of disinfecting surfaces; and taking to Twitter to scold other vaccinated people for going mask-less outside on a breezy spring day.

Here’s what the science now says:

• A person with two doses of the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines fully on board (and no immunological disorders) poses virtually no risk to anyone else.

• Proven cases of COVID-19 transmission due to passing encounters with people outdoors are next to nonexistent.

• Cases of transmission of the virus due to contact with surfaces are also next to nonexistent.

• Most cases stem from prolonged contact indoors with someone who is shedding the virus, in settings with poor air circulation. 

In other words, some of the sacrifices and precautions many of us began dutifully enduring in March 2020 turn out not to have been necessary.

And that’s OK. Last year at this time COVID-19 was a mysterious invader on a rampage. It made sense for public health experts to urge upon us the full litany of steps generally taken to stem infectious disease. It made sense to don the full armor while medicine tried to figure out just how this deadly, shape-shifting trickster did its harm.

But now we know a ton more about how this virus finds new hosts – and we have vaccines that work dramatically better than any epidemiologist would have dared hope a year ago.

It turns out we didn’t have to wipe down our food when we got home from the grocery store. And that making businesses and transit agencies and schools spend hours and dollars disinfecting every surface was a well-meaning waste of those hours and dollars.

It turns out we didn’t need to go months or even full years not seeing our grandkids or grandmas. We could have just gotten together with them out in the backyard or in a park with masks on. And that we didn’t need to close the beaches and playgrounds and parks. We could have let them be used as long as people practiced the basics of distancing.

So, yeah, it kind of sucks to realize all that now. But it’s OK. We didn’t know. We couldn’t have known last spring. It made sense back then to be hypercautious, hypervigilant.

But now we know. Some of this stuff was always unnecessary. And vaccines have made some of the rest of it outdated. Hooray.

So why are so many of us having a hard time letting go of lockdown?

Turns out that progressives, in their own way, can be guilty of the same thing that Trump supporters were (rightly) accused of last year: letting political allegiances and social grievances distort their grasp of the science and their civic duty.

Thanks to Trump’s belligerent, dangerous idiocy about the virus, being vigilant about pandemic protocol quickly became for some of us a way to live out your principled resistance to everything the man stood for. This gave the sacrifices you were making more meaning. It made going stir-crazy feel righteous.

What’s more, the pandemic generated mounds of evidence for claims dear to many progressives. It exposed starkly the systemic racism in our health system and labor laws. It revealed the invaluable heroism of the ordinary working person. The clear urban skies of last summer showed vividly how our petroleum-fueled busy-ness fouls our atmosphere.  

It’s nice to be proved right. Progressives are particularly prone to getting addicted to that feeling. So, for some, it’s apparently hard to give up on the self-righteous highs the pandemic dispensed.

It’s even harder to admit that some of the “sacrifices” you made were just theater, not indispensable heroism.

Harder still, perhaps, to acknowledge that the Trumpists (while generally selfish and wrong about the virus) may have been right that some of the restrictions were over the top, that Anthony Fauci (while still a marvelous public servant) did bungle some of the decisions and messaging, that Trump’s outdoor rallies probably weren’t super-spreader events (just as Black Lives Matter marches were not, either).

It’s OK if you’re struggling a bit to adjust to the new scientific understandings, the new facts that the vaccines have put on the ground. It’s a lot. It’s been a lot, all of it, since January 2020. So much uncertainty, so much tragedy, so much risk, so many rumors and reversals of previous information. The human brain and heart can only take so much.

But here’s the key point I hope can be grasped by those who can’t let go of lockdown and don’t want to let the rest of us to, either:

The neurotic anxiety, habitual catastrophizing and self-righteous scolding you are beginning to display are not just about you. They could have effects that might not only cause economic and social harm. They might also prolong the pandemic – and even damage the progressive causes you hold so dear.

Here are some of the ways:

• Children need to get back to school this fall – for their own emotional and intellectual development and for the sake of their parents’ productivity. The experts you should trust the most say that, absent an explosion of a new variant the vaccines can’t handle, there’s no good epidemiological reason to keep school doors closed. Those who claim otherwise are distorting the science for political or self-interested purposes. Just like Donald Trump did.

• To achieve herd immunity, we may need a significant chunk of the 25 percent of adult Americans who don’t want to get vaccinated to change their minds. Claiming that the vaccines should not lead to any relaxation on pandemic restrictions surely doesn’t help persuade them. Neither does self-righteous scolding or shaming. That doesn’t work. Never does.

• Many of the vaccine resisters, if you talk to them (as progressives rarely do), describe their stance as rational resistance against what they see as the hysterical, damaging risk aversion of chicken-hearted leftists. The behaviors Green’s article describes just confirm their suspicions – while potentially undermining the credibility of progressive warnings about the damage things such as climate change, corporate greed and systemic racism are doing to America. Why hand Tucker Carlson delicious grist for his toxic musings?

Green ends her piece with a portrait of a progressive academic, a pandemic Cassandra who posts several grim poems about the ravages of COVID-19 every day. From her description, he seems like a good guy. I don’t mean to savage him.  He’s just in the grips of two common human logical pitfalls: the availability fallacy and confirmation bias. We all tend to exaggerate the importance of the information that cable news or social media just fed to us – and we all tend to notice, remember and overvalue facts that confirm what we already think.

A final point: COVID is now killing somewhat fewer Americans per day than traffic accidents did in 2020. This is not to suggest that 693 lives extinguished each day is just a shrug, an “Oh, well, what can you do?” It’s still an emergency demanding peak attention. But attention should be seasoned with rational risk analysis and prevention strategy.

If I wanted to, I could find every day an example of a traffic death about which I could write a heart-wrenching victim profile or melancholy poem. I could make it seem that taking to the highways is an insanely risky, irresponsible thing that no one should do.

But few people argue that we should all sell our cars and never go anywhere again.  We take the sane precautions we should so we can move around in the way our lives require – get cars with airbags, wear seatbelts, don’t drink or text while driving, don’t obliterate speed limits.

Vaccines and a better understanding of how to prevent and treat COVID are enabling us finally to move, slowly but surely, to the same kind of accommodation with a risk that may never fully go away but should never again ravage us as once it did.

Don’t resist that welcome movement.  Join in.

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Chris Satullo, a civic engagement consultant, is a former editorial page editor/columnist at The Philadelphia Inquirer, and a former vice president/news at WHYY public media in Philadelphia