I know that they're dissuading me from submitting to it

REASON: Stop saying we can’t go back to normal after vaccines

The United States will have COVID-19 vaccine doses for every adult in America by late May, President Joe Biden announced Tuesday, moving the timeline up by a glorious two months. It may take some time after that landmark moment to get all those shots into arms, but availability by Memorial Day means we can justifiably hope for normalcy by Independence Day. The end of the pandemic is really, truly nigh.

But you might not know it from the baleful tone of many recent public health recommendations. Even after vaccination, so much of the present messaging says, you must keep wearing a mask. Keep social distancing. Keep not seeing your loved ones. Keep living your strange and difficult half-life.

"Currently, we do not have enough data to be able to say with confidence that the vaccines can prevent transmission," National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci said last month. "So even if vaccinated, you may still be able to spread the virus to vulnerable people," he continued, and therefore you should continue to wear a mask and socially distance. Don't go back to normal, he advised, even after you've gotten the shot that is supposed to put things back to normal. In fact, we may still be in masks in 2022, Fauci added a few weeks later. Guidance from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), expected to be released this week, strikes similar notes.

This is not how we should be talking about vaccines and the return to normalcy. However good the intent—and the intent is almost certainly to discourage reckless behavior that could undermine the vaccines' impact on disease transmission—the effect is discouraging and detrimental. Insofar as it might dissuade some people from getting vaccinated, advice like Fauci's might even be dangerous.

I see no advantage to being vaccinated right now, so no, I’m not willing to spend hours on the phone to get an appointment, then drive an hour to a vaccination site and waiting for still more hours in line, just so that I can keep my mask on when visiting mostly-empty restaurants populated by panic-stricken customers.

That’s the situation here in Maine, anyway, where there have been a negligible number of deaths, almost exclusively confined to nursing homes, where I do not reside.

I suppose I’ll have to get vaccinated eventually because the once -derided “wild conspiracy'“ theory that a COVID passport was going to be required for all everyday activities is now becoming the new reality, and I do want to move about the country. But they’re talking about finally releasing vaccines to private practitioners, possibly by September, so I’ll wait ‘til then.

Or maybe I won’t do it at all. Professor Reynolds points out “Some people don’t want to go back to normal” (there was some public health guru in the news this week demanding that we all wear masks during flu season — the “new normal”) and those “some people” are rapidly consolidating power. In which case, it’ll all be pointless, so screw it.