Coronavirus, week 76A: Neoliberals vs nutbars, big biz vs nutbars

The header applies to the first piece in this week's roundup.

So, let's start there. At the Atlantic, which has had decent to good stuff by Ed Yong and others, Yasmin Tayag says stop calling it a pandemic of the unvaccinated because it's not productive. So what? It's A. True; B. Fun. NOT calling it that won't be any more productive, will it?

Her piece, IMO, goes further off the rails from there, saying that vaccine mandates can also be counterproductive. Well, ANYTHING "can be" counterproductive if you believe the only final answer is continued coddling. I don't.

Otherwise, her framing of how to reach out to the unvaccinated presumes they're rational actors. I don't do that, either. Given that the likes of Jason Kimball are claiming that the COVID self-induced death of denialist Gregg Prentice was "really" murder, they're not even close to rational actors, as his whole Facebook feed clearly shows. Shit like this shows the old neoliberal fiscal, neoliberal in larger thought Atlantic of years and decades past remains that way at bottom line.

Meanwhile, big biz like the Business Roundtable and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce LIKE the mandate. They probably recognize, contra Tayag, that the resisters are NOT rational actors, that the compulsion is needed and that Biden's doing the dirty work for them.

(Note: I originally forgot to truncate items I left on here before I decided to split this blog post into two. They are here.) 

Finally, Tayag forgot to discuss tribalism. When a hospital in Missouri, last month, as Delta (we hope) peaked, created a private vax room so that antivaxxers couldn't be seen by family, antivax friends and tribalists, etc., as they got the shot, that's Tribalism 101. It also undercuts her claims to "they're really thinking." It also undercuts the likes of Jonathan Bernstein at the "here" link in the paragraph above that this is still really about vax-hesitant, not antivaxxers. No it's not. Whether it's wingnuts like the two of them, or never-Trumper (at times) wingnuts like National Review, also cited in the piece just above, they're making these claims for their own tribalist reasons.