COVID broke a lot of people. You know some of them. So do I. And it is sad.

I don’t generally make fun of the people who are still terrified of the disease. A few have genuine health care issues to deal with, but the vast majority of them have merely been gaslighted by the public health authorities and the MSM. It may seem bizarre to many of us who have been disillusioned by the media, but there are still many millions of folks who haven’t woken up to the fact that they have been lied to by the media on politics, medicine, climate, and anything related to The Narrative™.

Nothing we can say will pierce the bubble they live in. Screaming “DON’T YOU SEE!?” works about as well as yelling “CALM DOWN” does to somebody panicking. It never works. Never in the history saying “calm down” calmed anyone down. So we just have to be patient and polite, unless they are screaming at us or violating our rights.

If they are, it’s time to ignore them or slap them as happens in the movies. (Just kidding, just kidding!)

The Washington Post has a fascinating story about some of the COVID crazies and the lengths they will go to to avoid the unavoidable. They, along with the rest of us, have been or will be infected by COVID. It is a highly contagious respiratory disease. A nasty and dangerous part of life because nature can be nasty and dangerous, and eventually will kill us all.

Of course Jeremy Pelofsky and Christine Grimaldi want people to meet their new baby. This is their only child, after all, the long-awaited first grandkid on either side.

But first, some ground rules.

The visit will take place in the backyard. Anyone who wants to come over will need to take a rapid coronavirus test. And if guests want to hold the baby or go inside to use the bathroom, they’ll be asked to wear a mask.

These measures seem like common sense to Pelofsky and Grimaldi. They’re trying to keep themselves and their infant safe, plus they want to protect their elderly parents and do their part to reduce community spread. Not long ago, the couple felt that their precautions were in sync with much of the rest of society. But in recent months, their idea of covid common sense has grown painfully out of tune with the view that it’s time to throw caution to the wind and masks in the garbage.

These people are, of course, totally insane.

Making proper risk assessments and choices requires decent, reliable information. While perfect information is never possible, and there is nothing inherently wrong with reassessing as new information comes out, it is now quite clear that the powers-that-be are perfectly comfortable deceiving us, spinning, massaging the truth, and outright lying. But if you haven’t yet concluded that this is true, the result is something that appears to be akin to psychosis.

The Grimaldi/Pelofsky family, in other words, are behaving as if they are psychotics. I am not saying they are psychotic, because they are inhabiting a reality not created by their own minds, but rather by the hive mind as represented in the Left-press and the authorities.

Their baby–a baby!–has been vaccinated already and scheduled to get a 2nd. How a parent could inject a still experimental vaccine into a child whose danger from COVID is infinitesimal is beyond me. Vaccinating yourself, I can easily understand. It is simply a matter of making a personal risk assessment and living with the consequences. As a fat old man with heart disease I was advised to get the vaccine, the booster, and the next. I did.

I’m not getting another, and my doctor didn’t chastise me. They are no longer so trusting of the public health authorities either. Fool me once… I wish I had stopped earlier, but the jab is done and no use crying over spilt milk. Que sera, sera and all that.

There’s no reliable tally of the people who are “Still COVIDing,” but certainly they’re in the minority. A September poll by Monmouth University found that 22 percent of people are very concerned about a family member becoming seriously ill with covid, compared with 45 percent the previous September. And a quarter of Americans supported mask mandates and social distancing guidelines, down from 63 percent last September.

People who continue to take many precautions know that when President Biden said “the pandemic is over” during an interview last month, he was reflecting a popular attitude: The available vaccines and medicines have made things safe enough, for enough people, that we can finally close the book on 2020 and start partying — or, at least, living — like it’s 2019 again.

Which makes it that much more isolating for the people who are still in pandemic mode.

“People are making judgments without having a kind of community consensus, which makes it harder for people,” says Steven Epstein, a sociology professor at Northwestern University.

Now while I am all for respecting others’ risk assessments, and am very sympathetic to people facing genuine health risks due to comorbidities, I do think it is perfectly fair for people to place implicit social pressure on others to lighten up a bit. First, there is the question of justice; in a just world the fanatics who imposed their fears on the rest of us should rightly get a taste of their own medicine, although in vastly reduced amounts.

Giving them what they deserve would amount to cruel and unusual punishment, after all. In many cases they were cruel to skeptics; the least they could do is bear a bit of shame when others look askance at them.

But the other reason social pressure–mild social pressure in my judgement–is reasonable is something more important: we take social cues from each other in order to regulate our behavior. Social norms matter, and there is nothing wrong with looking askance at people who go far outside the norms. Shame is part of living in a society, and given how shameless people have become it is easy to see why a bit more of it would be healthy.

COVID maniacs are so single-minded that they have decided to give up so many of the things that make life worth living, and some of that is due to their own informed choices, but far too much is based in an improper sense of proportion spawned from the hysteria generated by the Establishment™. The damage done by people who have consistently deceived the public is utterly unforgivable, and it is frustrating in the extreme that nobody will be held to account.

People’s lives have been turned upside-down, and for the COVID holdouts there is little hope that things will ever be alright again:

There have been costs to her own approach. The family moved from Colorado to Delaware in late 2020, but Darling says her husband couldn’t take the seclusion anymore and moved back to Colorado. “He was just done,” she says. Her oldest daughter, a 21-year-old former theater kid who long dreamed of being a performer, has had to rethink her career path. And when one of Darling’s sisters had a new baby this year, the sister asked when Darling would come to meet the child.

“I said, ‘I really want to see your baby, I love all the pictures,” she recalls, “but are you going to take the week off before we come and then the week while we’re there?’ And she said, ‘Well, no. I can’t really do that.’” The visit never happened, Darling says.

She doesn’t fault her sister, or even her husband. “It is what it is,” she says. “I’ve seen big rifts — people who don’t even speak to their family members any more. I just need to be practical and know how I can keep my family safe.”

The dangers of COVID were real, and the disease was deadly for a slice of the population. But a vast number of people still hunkered down and living in fear are not at particularly high risk (some are, and deserve compassion), yet their lives are being constrained by an irrational fear. Few of these people were terrified by the flu, yet COVID was far far less deadly than the worst flu viruses. They had just learned to live with the risks associated with flu, but never will with COVID.

That is the Establishment’s™ fault, and we should never forgive them.

Never.