I share her concern. There is a long, detailed history of the "othering" of a population leading to all sorts of horrors.  However, it is wrong at a more mundane level, as well.

Public discourse surrounding the pandemic seems to focus solely on vaccination as a means of achieving herd immunity. Those who have recovered from the disease and have natural immunity, are being completely ignored.

But why?

Natural immunity.

The most frustrating thing to me, the past year and a half, has been the constantly changing narrative and the dismissal of formerly well-understood scientific truths. Natural immunity is one of those concepts from freshman biology that many seem to completely disregard these days.

I think this is a natural effect of the "cult of expertise" we have in the United States. Seemingly, anyone with specific credentials is automatically deferred to, regardless of how competent they are… or more insidiously, where their financial interests lie.

If more of us were willing to think critically about the "science" in the news these days, we could be more confident in managing our health. A healthy, confident population willing to argue and drag its feet on accepting medical treatments with which they aren't comfortable is hard to push around.

A population willing to do anything to just "get back to normal" is not.

We're not going "back to normal." 

As early as April of 2020, Daisy wrote that we were never getting "back to normal." And I agree.

But we can move forward a little more well-informed.