Bari Weiss Is Done With Covid

There were 825,000 new cases on Friday and a one-day death toll of 3,866, but whatevs.

“I’m done with Covid,” Bari Weiss told Bill Maher on his HBO show on Friday night, detailing all the specific hardships she has suffered during the pandemic:

1. Watching Tiger King.
2. Getting to the end of Spotify.
3. Spraying her Pringles cans.
4. Stripping her clothes off because she thought Covid would be on them.

“It’s ridiculous at this point,” she told Maher, who was so supportive of her take that he tweeted the full clip to his 10.8 million Twitter followers on Saturday.

Weiss, identified by HBO as the host of a podcast called “Honestly,” said we were in a “pandemic of bureaucracy.” Her biggest gripes were:

1. Cloth masks are not as effective as we would have liked.
2. Vaccinated people can still spread Omicron.

If Weiss truly wanted to live free or die, she would move to the “Free State of Florida,” where Governor Ron DeSantis remains committed to “protecting” its citizens from “federal mandates” and a “coercive biomedical apparatus.”

DeSantis, unfortunately, is not committed to giving protecting Floridians from disease and death. Or even to giving them the information they might need to decide how freely they want to let their kids or their vulnerable family members be breathed on by other freedom-loving Floridians.

But back to Bari Weiss and her fanboy Bill Maher.

MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan tweeted that, throughout the pandemic, his young children had been “more mature & less childish” than Weiss, Maher and the like:

(See also: Children Get It, a guest post by Alan Blotcky from last September.)

Jonathan Reiner, MD, Professor of Medicine and Surgery at The George Washington University School of Medicine & Health Sciences, tweeted:

I’m sorry Bari Weiss is really inconvenienced by the pandemic and I’m glad she’s done with it but 3600 Americans died yesterday and over 860k have died in the last 2 years. Yes you were told that vaccines would bring us out of this but 25% of this country refuse to vax. Grow up.

And that sums up the real problem.

For more than a year, we’ve had the tools to control the pandemic, to slow the spread, to reduce hospitalizations, and to stop most people dying.  (The video link at the top of the page highlights the people who are really “done with Covid”—and who truly deserve our continued thanks and support.)

But thanks to the concerted efforts of the GOP and Fox News to prolong the pandemic, we continue to have an unvaxxed adult population within the United States that’s the size a large European country. Our total unboosted population is still larger than the entire population of Russia.

Bari Weiss is correct that cloth masks are not effective against Omicron. That’s why the CDC now recommends N95s or KN95s. It’s why Biden is giving out N95s for free.

But she’s absolutely wrong that the continued calamity we face is caused by “bureaucracy” and evolving public health guidelines. The situation we’re in is caused by misinformation and the Neanderthal Thinking Biden warned us about ten months ago.

So if you want to be done with Covid, put on a better mask and get boosted. Or move to Florida and start bottling your own urine.