Over two segments, Wednesday’s CBS Mornings served an important purpose in reminding many that, though we’ve moved on from the COVID-19 pandemic (while still acknowledging the lives lost and how little we knew early on), others like co-host Gayle King haven’t and instead feared going to a restaurant without a vaccine mandate and opposes the idea of “personal responsibility.”
Similarly, author and guest Michael Lewis lamented too many uneducated Americans have embraced a “freedom...to kill” others by exposing them to COVID-19 and refused to adopt a mentality of stricter measures.
Speaking to Dr. Celine Gounder, co-host Tony Dokoupil said there’s “a growing concern about a new subvariant of omicron, now the dominant COVID strain in the U.S....called BA.2 and, according to the CDC, it makes up more than 72 percent of positive cases nationwide.”
Dokoupil added another lament, stating that “governments of our country seem to be putting responsibility back on individuals to decide how to handle the pandemic.”
Gounder correctly argued the question for everyone is to assess their levels of personal risk when it comes to their health, job, and loved ones.
That didn’t sit well with King as the Democratic Party donor griped for those left still in a fearful world divorced from reality:
I just don't trust the personal responsibility. I don't think people take the — tell the truth about it. Now you can go to restaurants, you can go anywhere. They're not asking to see your vaccines anymore. So, you're in a room with a bunch of people, you don’t know if they're vaccinated, not vaccinated.
King then asked (which Gounder and co-host Nate Burleson both complimented): “How are we supposed to move in the world these days? Who are we supposed to trust? What are we supposed to do?”
Gounder tried to cushion the landing even though, a few moments later, Burleson brought up how the Shanghai lockdown amid rising cases and wondered if higher infections are coming to the U.S.
Lewis joined the show just over 30 minutes later to promote the paperback version of his book on the pandemic The Premonition that Burleson said, “investigates why the U.S. struggled with its coronavirus response despite being considered one of the best-prepared countries in the world.”
Of course, there was plenty of veiled Trump-bashing as Lewis said Americans haven’t “accept[ed] that [we] failed” and conducted a proper “postmortem.”
But worst of all in his smug view, too many foolish Americans “have dug in their heels” about not accepting mass, indefinite restrictions on our lives when they could have been convinced otherwise at “the beginning” if “the country...[had] been” better “led.”
To the chagrin of Lewis and King, there’s resistance to any talk of closing schools and mandating masks and vaccinations (click “expand”):
LEWIS: Instead, it's — it's divided. And if you come in now and you try to, I don't know, close schools —
KING: Yeah.
LEWIS: — in response to something more dangerous —
KING: Wearing a mask.
LEWIS: — wearing a mask, getting a vaccine, you've got people — their heels are dug in.
BURLESON: There’s a stubbornness.
LEWIS: There's a stubbornness. So, there's like a — a public education thing that didn't happen in the beginning that would be harder to do now because people think they know.
BURLESON: Yeah.
Dokoupil sought to pin down an explanation: “But isn't it that people do know something, and there are two political strains here and some people are valuing freedom over a pure public health approach.”
Lewis countered with this: “There's some truth to that, but what — freedom — freedom to do what?”
When Dokoupil said it’s to “do whatever they want,” Lewis said that it would the “[f]reedom to infect other people and kill them.”
Dokoupil and King agreed as Lewis unspooled how said Americans have “a perverted idea of freedom” and that the economy was bettered by the fact that we had such stringent lockdowns.
Channeling Tom Nichols, Lewis explained his thoughts on the need to find experts who can better communicate public policy (click “expand”):
LEWIS: [T]his a perverted idea of freedom, right? I mean, I think that it's — it’s — there was this false dichotomy that was introduced very early on that we were choosing between, like, the economy and health and the truth is it was never a choice. If you'd let this thing run in the beginning the way it ran in New York, you would have had neither. I mean, the — the constraints on the freedom actually enabled the economy to motor along a bit, so I think — like, that wasn't explained.
KING: Mmmhmm.
LEWIS: Anyway, all this is very grim. What was so interesting to me about this story — it’s — which all takes place kind of before the pandemic was it's amazing the talent we had that we didn't use.
KING: And —
LEWIS: People we had —
KING: — yeah.
LEWIS: — who were sitting in places waiting to be accessed —
KING: Who knew stuff.
LEWIS: — who knew stuff —
KING: No — no — you call them the experts. You said experts — your words — suck at telling their own stories. And sometimes they even have trouble making the information that they know interesting, that, quite often, can be very boring. So whenever there's a crisis, you say go to the L-6 person. The person who’s at level six. Don’t go to the top person. Go to the L-6 person who actually knows what they're doing.
Wednesday’s COVID fear porn and smearing of those concerned about the fallout from lockdowns and becoming more like communist China was made possible thanks to the endorsement of advertisers such as Nature’s Bounty and Sandal’s. Follow the links to see their contact information at the MRC’s Conservatives Fight Back page.
To see the relevant CBS transcript from April 6, click here.
