Making Dr. Fauci the New ‘Enemy of the People’: The Senate’s Degrading, Disgraceful Show Trial

By and large, Capitol Hill and the media have moved on from last week’s Senate “hearing,” if that’s the right word for it, featuring Dr. Anthony Fauci. 

But the stench lingers over the questioning of an 85-year-old retired official who dedicated nearly four decades to protecting the health of Americans. It won’t dissipate any time soon.

What was it that the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee (HDGAC) paraded before their constituents? A hearing? No. An interrogation? Only slightly better. A witch-hunt? Nearer. A McCarthyite public burning? There you have it.

For the past several years, committee head Rand Paul has claimed that Fauci, while director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), approved research in China that could have produced COVID-19.

As the hearing began, the Kentucky Senator urged the witness to “come clean” about mistakes made early on—and, when Fauci on the advice of legal counsel exercised his First Amendment rights, threatened him with “consequences” for obstructing the “investigation.”

Aping President Trump’s foul-mouthed antics and degradation of his office, Senator Bernie Moreno of Ohio screamed “who the f— do you think you were” at Fauci, then had the temerity to demand that the immunologist apologize—rather than having the grace to do so himself.

As there are virtually no GOP public officials, even down to the local level, ready to defy Trump, I expected this berserk performance from the Republican Senators. In a way, it’s also probably part of the job description of members of the nation’s fallaciously named “greatest deliberative body” to posture and pontificate.

But I hoped for more from the nation’s media. Instead of examining how much truth actually resided in the accusations that Fauci misled the country, they engaged in tsk-tsking him for what they deemed insufficient humility and for shading the truth:

*Gal Beckerman’s Atlantic summary of Fauci’s private notes was headlined, “The Revelatory Cringe of Anthony Fauci.”

*Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan compared his appearance to “congressional hearings on la Cosa Nostra, and the head of one of the five families is fiddling with his diamond pinkie ring as he asserts his right not to incriminate himself.”

*Contrarian commentator Andrew Sullivan, starting off by urging readers not to blame Fauci for the coronavirus or the lockdown, concluded on a shrill rising note by saying that they should hold him responsible for “protecting his own ass at all times, stigmatizing those he disagreed with and basking in fame at champagne parties as others died alone, gasping for breath, only to be denied a proper funeral (like my own father).”

These and similar commentators failed to recognize a variation on a longtime Trump theme—one that should have struck close to home for them. The GOP HSGA committee members’ attempts to stigmatize Fauci parallel the President’s charges that the American media represent “an enemy of the people.”

That phrase, as several historians noted when the President began using it at the start of his first term, echoed similar words popularized by Joseph Stalin whose mere use, as successor Nikita Khrushchev said later, “made it unnecessary that the ideological errors of a man be proven.”

The attempted show trial of Fauci may have disheartened his supporters—and thrilled his critics—but would hardly have surprised aficionados of classic theater.

More than 140 years before, the Scandinavian playwright Henrik Ibsen had anticipated a community squabble over a health and environmental crisis—and the vulnerability of a medical professional who warns of the danger—in his fiery satire, An Enemy of the People.

Ibsen’s protagonist, Thomas Stockmann, blows the whistle on the contaminated water supply for his town's lucrative new baths, only to be foiled by vested interests who manipulate public opinion against him.

Unlike the journalists who rolled their eyes or clutched their pearls over Fauci’s resort to the Fifth Amendment or note about every celebrity praising his work, Ibsen never lost perspective on the full humanity of his truth-speaking doctor.

For all his idealism—and correctness about the spa—Stockmann is hardly selfless, let alone saintly. He expects the town to greet him as a hero—and when it turns on him instead, he denounces them all in increasingly vitriolic terms that only alienate them further.

While hardly embodying perfection, Stockmann demonstrates an integrity in sharp contrast to his detractors. He pays a steep price for his unflinching honesty, as he loses his job, his children are expelled from school, and his home is vandalized.

Since the start of COVID-19, Fauci has been lambasted not just in his hometown, like Stockmann, but nationwide. Even while heading the NIAID, he faced threats that became so frequent and alarming that he and his wife needed federal protection—a security detail that Trump has since gracelessly withdrawn.

MAGAnauts were quick to trace the assassination of Charlie Kirk to incendiary progressive rhetoric. They might ask themselves whether claims that Fauci was, as new movement member RFK Jr. claims, a “criminal” given to “lying about everything” might produce similar results.

The hypocrisy of such charges is rank, especially coming from legislators like Paul, Moreno, and Texas Senator Ted Cruz, whose self-regard during the Trump Administration has increased even as their usefulness in exercising their constitutional duty as a check on the President has radically declined.

Typical of how—well, infectious—such talk might be was NFL quarterback Aaron Rodgers, who demonstrated that the effects of his acknowledged three concussions might be worse than thought when he called Fauci an “absolute coward.”

If Rodgers truly wants to see an “absolute coward,” he might want to view Feb. 28, 2020 footage of an election-fearing Trump, a month into the pandemic, assuring Americans that “One day, it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.”

And if Senator Paul wants anyone to “come clean,” he can start with himself and explain why in March 2020, as the pandemic accelerated, he continued to work, travel and use the Senate gym for nearly a week while awaiting COVID test results that proved positive—forcing colleagues like Mitt Romney and Mike Lee to self-quarantine.

The Fauci browbeating in no way fulfilled any Congressional mandate to investigate, to ascertain facts so appropriate legislation could be passed.

It’s not just because it will be nearly impossible to discover the truth about conditions in China while that government tightly controls the flow of information—a characteristic of an authoritarian regime being adopted at a frantic pace by the Trump Administration.

Not, it’s also because Congress in Trump II—and, arguably, earlier—is no longer capable, and probably not interested, in enacting laws.

Instead, what Americans witnessed last week was a blame game that will frighten away exemplary medical professionals from entering the public health field lest they, too, like Fauci, experience abuse, calls for their imprisonment, and threats to their safety and that of their family members.

It is a particularly shameful aspect of the Age of Trump that public health—like sports, once thought to be a matter beyond politics, where Americans could unite in a common concern—has become just another front in the culture wars. 

Anyone who dares face a public aggrieved by job losses or deaths and inflamed by misinformation will indeed prove, as Ibsen’s beleaguered hero maintained, that “The strongest man in the world is he who stands most alone.”

(The image accompanying this post, of Dr. Anthony Fauci attends a coronavirus update briefing Tuesday, April 7, 2020, in the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room of the White House, is an official White House photo taken by Tia Dufour.)

Quote of the Day (Nicholas Christakis, on COVID-19 Vaccines)

“We were also lucky that highly effective and safe mRNA vaccines emerged so quickly. Covid was the first pandemic in history to feature the development of such a powerful vaccine while the pathogen was still at its outset. The efforts to make a vaccine could just as easily have resulted in abject failure or a very long delay, as with previous vaccine programs. A much higher mortality rate without vaccines would likely have resulted in greater consensus not just for lockdowns and mask mandates but perhaps even for military intervention, as imagined in the movie ‘Contagion.’”— Greek-American sociologist and physician Nicholas Christakis, “Four Years Later, Covid Isn’t Done With Us,” The Wall Street Journal, Mar. 9-10, 2024

Five years ago today, a San Jose, Calif., resident became the first COVID-19 death on US soil, though this would not be confirmed until the results of an autopsy were released two months later.

As bad as the scourge of COVID has been in the US—not just to lives lost but also to our psyches, economy, and politics—it would, as Christakis has noted, have been infinitely worse without a vaccine developed so quickly.

Now, despite some pointed questioning and trepidation, the Republican majority on the Senate Finance Committee unanimously approved the nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as the U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary, making it more likely that he will be confirmed by the full Senate. 

That vote would put in charge of our nation’s health system not just an opponent of vaccine mandates, but an outright skeptic who in May 2021 petitioned the Food and Drug Administration to revoke authorization for COVID vaccines, according to a New York Times report published last week.

The vote also comes when U.S. epidemiologists have been anxiously watching an outbreak of avian flu. 

A prior RFK Jr. statement—that he would pause infectious disease research for “about eight years”—does little to ease concern that he would act quickly to contain a potential future pandemic or would fund medical research that would, like the COVID vaccines, help turn the tide against any avian flu disaster—or indeed, any pandemic that might develop in the future.

If that were to occur, Republican lawmakers on Capitol Hill will have an especially great deal to answer for in meekly kowtowing to Donald Trump’s demand that this nominee—like his other unqualified, even dangerous, Cabinet picks—be approved. Among the consequences would be the kind of nightmare scenario outlined above by Christakis.

In the period following World War II, the United States built a consensus for a public-health system that would not be buffeted by the winds of politics. Like so much else in the last decade, that support has become just another casualty in the culture wars. 

The insidious advancement of COVID-19 from pandemic to endemic, and the rise of RFK Jr. to such an important position of authority, are visible signs of how a virus in the body politic is rendering Americans physically sick, too.

(For more information on the challenges that presumptive HHS head Kennedy will face, I urge you to read Amy Baxter’s report this week for PharmaVoice.)

(The image of Nicholas Christakis that accompanies this post was taken by Paul Schnaittacher.)

Quote of the Day (Adam Ratner, on the Origin of the Recent Anti-Vaccination Movement)

“Early vaccine hesitancy mostly centered on pockets of resistance to the DTP vaccine, which covers diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis. The shift in focus to the MMR vaccine, which bundles measles, mumps, and rubella, got a big push in 1998, when a doctor named Andrew Wakefield published an article in the British medical journal The Lancet that hypothesized that children who received the MMR vaccine were more likely to develop autism. Its convoluted reasoning had to do with the way the viruses from the vaccine replicated in the intestine. The article was fraudulent, unethical, and wrong, and The Lancet later retracted it. Wakefield lost his medical license, but his baseless claims have had enormous staying power. With autism rates on the rise, worried parents were desperate for explanations, and Wakefield supplied an easy one.”—Pediatrician-author Adam Ratner, interviewed by Lorraine Glennon, “Dangerous Consequences,” Columbia Magazine, Winter 2024-25

The other day, scanning the profile of a friend of a friend on Facebook, I noticed that this proponent of homeopathic medicine also believed in something considerably more pernicious.

Memes she had posted supporting the anti-vaccination (or, in an undoubtedly poll-tested phrase, “medical freedom”) movement were even more numerous than those of herself and her family. I could only shake my head over this kind of fanaticism spreading through the digital world.

I wish someone could have sent her a link to Dr. Ratner’s interview with Columbia Magazine, though I’m afraid that, without the slightest bit of evidence, she would dismiss him as a champion of “Big Pharma” simply because he takes a position in direct opposition to hers.

I read the above quote from Dr. Ratner with great interest and dismay but little surprise. At one time, Andrew Wakefield’s faulty research would not only have been refuted, but also so decisively sidelined that few people would read it and even fewer spread it.

Now, of course, it’s all different. Even 15 years ago, anti-vax resistance was forming in the nascent Tea Party movement. COVID-19 turned these diehards into protesters.

Articles in yesterday’s New York Times by Apoorva Mandavilli and Francesca Paris, with accompanying graphs, add details to Dr. Ratner’s contentions. This time, anti-vax skepticism has moved beyond COVID to polio, measles, and other once-common childhood diseases that, too optimistically, were believed to be eradicated not long ago.

“Herd immunity”—the indirect protection for a population, achieved by vaccination rates of at least 95%--is being breached in geographic areas ranging from large urban districts to small rural ones.

Opposition to vaccination is being fueled by legislative efforts that soften vaccination mandates, as well as by podcasters, cable “news” propagandists, opportunistic politicians, and social media “experts” who claim to be “just asking questions” when they are utterly uninterested in any from vaccination advocates who would contest flimsy evidence.

Amid the multiple and massive horrors of the 20^th century, improved public health stands out as an unqualified triumph.  In contrast, vaccination doubters are responsible for spreading too many diseases that cause unnecessary discomfort and deaths. In this case, ignorance is anything but bliss.

Quote of the Day (Samuel Johnson, on Socializing)

“Sir, I look upon every day to be lost, in which I do not make a new acquaintance.”—English man of letters Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) quoted by James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791)

That comment from Dr. Johnson should be borne in mind when we try to calculate the losses incurred by the widespread isolation in the days after the COVID-19 outbreak.

Quote of the Day (Adam Tooze, on Proper Funding for Vaccine Development)

“To expect that funding [for vaccine development] to come from the private sector is unrealistic. The work is too expensive and high risk and the returns too uncertain. Philanthropy and public-private partnerships may work. But ultimately it is governments that should foot the bill. Unfortunately, in public policy, pandemic preparedness is all too often relegated to the cash-starved budgets of development agencies or squeezed into strained health budgets. Where such spending properly belongs is under the flag of industrial policy and national security.”— English historian and international security scholar Adam Tooze, “Vaccine Investment is a No-Brainer—So Why Aren’t We Doing It?”, The Financial Times, Mar. 30-31, 2024

(The image accompanying this post, showing a woman receiving the COVID-19 vaccine, was taken Jan. 16, 2021, at the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando, FL, by Whoisjohngalt. According to a 2022 study cited by the National Library of Medicine, at least 14.4 million COVID-19 deaths worldwide were prevented by the dissemination of the vaccine within the first year alone.)

Quote of the Day (The World Health Organization’s Maria Van Kerkhove, on COVID-19, ‘Here to Stay’)

“The worry is complacency. The worry is reduced fiscal space, mental space and political space to talk about COVID in the context of everything else. I am not suggesting that the world drop what it’s doing and focus [only] on COVID. That is not what WHO is suggesting. We’re saying, ‘Please don’t drop the ball.’ The virus is here. It’s evolving. It’s killing [more than 11,000 reported worldwide deaths between mid-December 2023 and mid-January 2024, with more than half of those in the U.S.]. It’s causing post-COVID conditions [also called long COVID]. And we don’t know the long-term effects. It’s a virus that is here to stay.”— Maria Van Kerkhove, now interim director of the Department of Epidemic and Pandemic Preparedness and Prevention for the World Health Organization, quoted by Meghan Bartels, “Rampant COVID Poses New Challenges in the Fifth Year of the Pandemic,” Scientific American, Feb. 6, 2024

Quote of the Day (Dr. Danielle Ofri, on COVID Vaccine Hesitancy)

“Covid cases and hospitalizations have continued to rise during the winter. As of early January, the average number of Americans dying weekly from Covid was over 1,700. And yet the Jan. 19 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report indicated that only 21.8 percent of adults 18 and older have received the latest Covid vaccine — less than half of the percentage of those who have gotten the flu vaccine….We in medicine are fairly good at responding to specific concerns; we easily marshal facts and numbers because this is the arena in which we are most comfortable. It’s tempting to shy away from the queasier realm of free-floating discomfort, but we can’t….As time-consuming and exhausting as these conversations can be, we have a communal duty to try to unmuddy the waters — all of us. If you’ve been hesitating about getting your updated Covid vaccination, you might want to put your heebie-jeebies front and center on the exam table at your next medical visit. They’re due for a checkup.”—Dr. Danielle Ofri, “Covid Vaccine Hesitancy Is Getting Worse,” The New York Times, Jan. 31, 2024

Nearly three years after the COVID vaccine was introduced into the U.S., hesitancy about it continues at an alarming rate. Even though many of us with underlying medical conditions would have been hospitalized or dead without the shots, the population as a whole remains at risk because of the low vaccination rates.

It is one of the follies and tragedies of our time that something which at heart is a public-health issue has become a political one. I don’t want friends or other readers to regard me as a scold on this subject.

But I would just urge vaccine holdouts to read Dr. Ofri’s article in the link above. It’s eminently non-judgmental yet reasonable. I hope it’ll make you at least rethink your recalcitrance.

(The image accompanying this post, of a person wearing gloves and a surgical mask while handling a COVID-19 Vaccine vial and syringe, was from the U.S. Census Bureau, and taken Jan. 27, 2021.)

Quote of the Day (Brilliant, Smolinski, Danzig and Lipkin, on Animal Virus Spillovers and Pandemic Prevention)

“Population growth in both animals and humans, industrialization, urbanization, and modernization have raised the risk that diseases will jump [from animals] to humans and spread. But modern advances have also given the world new tools to prevent, track, and contain infections, allowing us to stop spillover from turning into global chaos.

“In other words, spillover and outbreaks are inevitable, but pandemics are not. Humanity's greatest task now, therefore, is to do everything possible to sever the link between the former and the latter. It is a task made easier than ever by modern science, yet also one that requires crucial elements sorely lacking in the age of COVID-19—speed, cooperation, and trust.  Without overcoming these deficits, the chain will remain unbroken.”—Larry Brilliant, Mark Smolinski, Lisa Danzig, and W. Ian Lipkin, “Inevitable Outbreaks: How to Stop an Age of Spillovers From Becoming an Age of Pandemics,” Foreign Affairs, January/February 2023

Quote of the Day (Alfred, Lord Tennyson, on the Perilous ‘Dreamful Ease’ of Languishing)

“Let us alone. What is it that will last?
All things are taken from us, and become
Portions and parcels of the dreadful past.
Let us alone. What pleasure can we have
To war with evil? Is there any peace
In ever climbing up the climbing wave?
All things have rest, and ripen toward the grave
In silence; ripen, fall and cease:
Give us long rest or death, dark death, or dreamful ease.” —English poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–1892), “The Lotos-Eaters” (1832)
 
This poem, inspired by an episode from Homer’s Odyssey, came to my attention through an article last year by The Wall Street Journal’s Barton Swaim. The piece likened the situation of Odysseus and his men to the phenomenon of “languishing” experienced by so many during COVID-19.
 
The metaphor may have seemed appealing at first glance, with its sense of losing a purpose-driven life. But the strange creatures that Odysseus encounters were slothful and blissed-out from consuming narcotic-like fruits and flowers—more like the hippies of the ancient world—rather than the anxious people working at their computers over the past two years.
 
Moreover, Odysseus’ purpose was to get home, to Ithaca; the purpose of the COVID-anxious population since the start of the pandemic has been to stay home, until the danger abates.
 
One year after Swaim’s article, the United States is at a different stage of the pandemic, with many having returned to offices. But the life many of us remembered no longer exists, any more than Odysseus' circumstances did after 20 years away from Ithaca.

Last year, psychologists and economists hoped that, with the development of vaccines, Americans could progress from “languishing” to “flourishing.” But that has not quite come to pass.
 
And who knows? Despite the protests of politicians like New York Mayor Eric Adams, some restrictions from the first year and a half of COVID-19 might be put in place again, if the current surge continues. 

In that case, a different poetic metaphor for our time will need to be found—one that takes full account of the “dreadful past” that Tennyson, at this early stage of his career, so marvelously evoked.

Quote of the Day (Samantha Montano, on the Scientific Opportunity Lost During COVID-19)

“In early 2020 some thought the pandemic would be just the sort of focusing event that wakes up world leaders to the risks of sleeping on the climate crisis. Maybe they would use this ‘window of opportunity’ to draw obvious parallels, so that one global crisis inspired action on the other. Perhaps the U.S. Congress would finally admit the need to reform—and massively expand—our emergency management system to one that prioritizes risk reduction rather than reactionary measures. One that meets the needs of frontline and marginalized communities who experience disproportionate disaster impacts and are kept from accessing adequate aid.

“None of this has happened. Not only is the government not applying the lessons of the pandemic response to other disasters, but even within the pandemic itself, many elected officials have failed to apply the lessons learned at the beginning.”— Samantha Montano, assistant professor of emergency management at Massachusetts Maritime Academy, "We Didn't Get Serious About the Climate Crisis," Scientific American, March 2022

Quote of the Day (Emily St. John Mandel, Anticipating a Civilization Gripped by a Pandemic)

“No more diving into pools of chlorinated water lit green from below. No more ball games played out under floodlights. No more porch lights with moths fluttering on summer nights. No more trains running under the surface of cities on the dazzling power of the electric third rail. No more cities.”— Canadian novelist and essayist Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven (2014)

Two years ago this week, the New York metropolitan area prepared to shut down as COVID-19 spread.  Few people could have predicted the pandemic’s impact on American healthcare, business, technology, culture, politics—and, in the fissures it created among friends and family, even relationships.

We did not quite reach the nightmare that Emily St. John Mandel wrote in her novel Station Eleven. But, even as New York and other cities now prepare, tentatively, to loosen restrictions and “reopen,” who can say what may happen in the near future?

The COVID-19 variants Delta and Omicron should have taught people that, just as animals can evolve, so can viruses. 

But from the first, a hard core of Americans have engaged in successive forms of denial about the coronavirus: that it even exists, that it’s not as bad as others from the last decade or so, that it’s been confined to a certain geographic area, that social distancing, masks or even vaccines aren't needed to combat its spread, or that it could it couldn't damage one’s self or one’s family.

Pray that we have something like a return to the cherished sights and sounds of civilization celebrated in the passage starting this post. But above all, pray that neither COVID-19 nor any future disease surprises us again.

(The accompanying photo of Emily St. John Mandel was taken on Dec. 2, 2017, by librarie mollat.)

Quote of the Day (Noel Coward, on the Urge to ‘Go Out and Be Social’)

“I've got to be bright
And extremely polite
 And refrain from becoming too loose or too tight
And I mustn't impose conversational blight
On the dolt on my left
And the fool on my right.
I must really be very attractive tonight
As I have got to go out and be social.”—English playwright, composer and bon vivant Sir Noel Coward (1899-1973), “I’ve Got To Go Out and Be Social,” in The Noel Coward Reader, edited by Barry Day (2010)
 
In Coward’s youth—in fact, in the youth of many early in this century—the instinct to “go out and be social” during year-end festivities was seemingly ineradicable. For the last two years, going on the dinner-and-party circuit has been far harder to sustain because of COVID-19.
 
Here’s hoping that in December 2022, the way of life that Coward tweaked will return, and that his witty verses will be understood and chuckled over again.

Quote of the Day (Ann Radcliffe, on ‘The Best Security Against the Contagion of Folly’)

“A well-informed mind is the best security against the contagion of folly and of vice. The vacant mind is ever on the watch for relief, and ready to plunge into error, to escape from the languor of idleness.” — English Gothic novelist Ann Radcliffe (1764-1823), The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794)

What stuck out for me in this quote was the word “contagion.” It may have been a metaphor when it was written. 

But these days—as COVID-19, aided more than a little bit by misinformation, has not only stubbornly hung on but even formed variants—the term is literal as well as symbolic.

Quote of the Day (Sir Francis Bacon, on Helps to ‘Overcome the Necessities and Miseries of Humanity’)

“[L]et us hope… there may spring helps to man, and a line and race of inventions that may in some degree subdue and overcome the necessities and miseries of humanity.”— English author, courtier, and philosopher Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626), “The Plan of the Instauratio Magna,” in Charles W. Eliot, Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books (1909-1910)

The most prominent among all these “helps” today are the vaccines developed, in near-record time, to deal with COVID-19. All the more reason, then, to feel frustration over the many people who have still chosen not to be vaccinated.

In his advocacy for inductive reasoning as part of the scientific method, Bacon was the herald of a more enlightened age that lengthened lifespans and improved quality of life. We now have to ask whether the tides of disinformation previously confined to politics are now reversing the gains he helped bring about.  

When public health becomes just another entrenched front in the never-ending culture wars, you can say goodbye to any hope to a return to the everyday life we once knew.

Photo of the Day: Stranger in a Strange Land—or, Back in Midtown

A week and a half ago, for the first time in 14 months, when COVID-19 restrictions went into effect, I ventured back into New York City. In meeting friends for lunch, I was as curious about what I was about to encounter as I was apprehensive, given the rapidly changing and confusing guidelines issued by the Center for Disease Control (CDC).

The bus ride through northern New Jersey into the Lincoln Tunnel contrasted strongly with what I saw and heard even only a few weeks ago, though the evidence for a change in ridership habits was still apparent. In the spring of 2020, with the lockdown in place, I walked by buses that, though once standing room only, now had only one or two passengers during the morning rush hour. So few people were on board that it made me feel as if I were viewing a ghost bus.

Though a good deal more people were on board the New Jersey Transit bus I took that Monday morning, plenty of seats remained—even with the four seats behind the driver roped off. (The driver was additionally protected with a glass shield.) I was relieved to have the opportunity for social distancing.

As late as last fall, friends were still telling me that pedestrian traffic in Times Square had diminished markedly—especially during the Christmas season so critical to retailers.

Stepping off the bus and out of the Port Authority terminal, I did not feel as crestfallen as I might have at year’s end—there were a good number of people on the streets. Still, something had changed, in a way that this shot, which I took from Times Square, looking uptown, can’t convey.

I didn’t get my first real sense of how much was different until I met my friends at an English-style pub in the Garment District pub. Though still anxious about being inside, I took comfort in the considerable distance between our trio and the closest customers in the restaurant.

In fact, one of my friends at the table indicated that, in this same restaurant, at a comparable hour, he would have been lucky to get a seat here before the pandemic.

Analysts are talking about the pent-up demand that restaurants will experience from people anxious to celebrate the end of isolation with friends. I am sure there is something to that—and indeed, compared with the desperate situation at this time last year, when so many restaurants were gauging how to move towards a take-out model, the situation is vastly improved.

But I suspect that restaurants in many cities such as New York will still find surviving a difficult matter. Many will depend on lunchtime spending by the white-collar sector to supplement expenditures by friends and families.

Even with tourist bookings accelerating, the damage to the office sector will continue—at least until Labor Day, when many companies will be able to put their post-pandemic plans in place and see how early returnees to old spaces are faring.

I believe that some of the damage to office space will be permanent. Over the course of a year, companies have proven that they can operate remotely if need be. They no longer have the need to have all their employees in their buildings five days a week. Some companies reduced their workforce so dramatically during the pandemic that it will take years to reach their former levels--if even then. This means that fewer workers will be making lunchtime purchases.

In some ways, the post-pandemic city may be better. My friend Rob, for instance, looked forward to fewer people on subways during rush hour. “Who wants to get on trains packed like sardines?” he noted. “After all, there is a quality-of-life issue involved here, too.”

You can forgive New Yorkers who blinked at what they saw all around them as the restrictions came down. Everything looked familiar but wasn’t—much like the post-pandemic city whose dimensions we won’t be able to grasp for weeks, months—even a few years.

Quote of the Day (Albert Camus, on ‘Refusing to Bow Down to Pestilence’)

“He knew that the tale he had to tell could not be one of a final victory. It could be only the record or what had had to be done, and what assuredly would have to be done again in the never-ending fight against terror and its relentless onslaughts, despite their personal afflictions, by all who, while unable to be saints but refusing to bow down to pestilence, strive their utmost to be healers.”— French Nobel Literature laureate Albert Camus (1913-1960), The Plague (1947)

Camus wrote his novel The Plague as an allegory of the authoritarianism that had enveloped so much of the world in the era between the world wars. In 2020 and 2021, what he saw as metaphor became reality, as COVID-19 often seemed to encourage the fear and ignorance underlying reactionary movements.

With restrictions against the disease increasingly crumbling this week, it is important to absorb Camus’ lessons: that we forget what happened in this mortal struggle at our peril, and that the only way to check both disease and authoritarianism is through eternal vigilance born of the need for unillusioned, unblinkered truth.

Photo of the Day: Good Advice on an Outdoor Table Sign

In my hometown of Englewood, NJ, I glimpsed this sign on one of those restaurant tables increasingly popping up with the weather getting warmer. 

But the advice it offers, I think, is evergreen—good at all times, no matter what the season, though remembered more forcefully now than at any other point in most of our lifetimes.

Photo of the Day: Carnival, Overpeck County Park, Bergen County NJ

This afternoon, I took the attached photo while visiting—or rather, for the longest time, attempting to visit—Overpeck County Park, not far from where I live in Bergen County, NJ. That effort proved so fruitless that I had to park quite a way off, in a lot near a theater.

I thought at first that the throngs outside were merely there to enjoy the warm spring temperatures. But I soon learned otherwise: Unbeknown to me beforehand, this was the third and last day of a carnival being operated to benefit the Teaneck Armory.

In years past, the sight of a crowd at this kind of event would not have bothered me in the slightest. With COVID-19, however, I could not view so many people close to each other, even outdoors, without feeling some residual dread, even after last week's much-trumpeted (if ambiguous) easing of restrictions.

I dearly hope I’m wrong, but we shall see. Somehow, that gray, cloudy sky in this picture seemed an appropriate background for my fears.

Quote of the Day (David Brooks, on the ‘Distrust Doom Loop’)

“Once it is established, distrust tends to accelerate. If you distrust the people around you because you think they have bad values or are out to hurt you, then you are going to be slow to reach out to solve common problems. Your problems will have a tendency to get worse, which seems to justify and then magnify your distrust. You have entered a distrust doom loop.”— Columnist David Brooks, “Our Herd Immunity Failure,” The New York Times, May 7, 2021

Photo of the Day: The Three Hopes of Spring

I took this photo a couple of days ago, when—much to my surprise—this group of flowers appeared in my backyard.

I do not possess my late father’s green thumb, so these shot up from the earth with no tending by me. I think of these as an example of stubborn hope—the instinct in nature and people for rebirth, even without our best efforts—even when so much conspires against it.

There is a second kind of hope, false hope—the illusory belief that matters will advance far beyond the need for us to supervise or take precautions. In other words, it’s the difference between pleasant surprise that a few flowers will spring up after abundant rainfall and an expectation that an entire garden can grow without the need to plant seeds or to ward off creatures that will nibble at or rampage through the resulting product.

This past weekend, I saw more people than I’ve glimpsed in more than a year in restaurants. These throngs, of course, are the result partly of climbing temperatures, partly of pent-up demand after a year of isolation, and partly of relaxed rules for gathering together.

In the coming months, we’re going to see if these crowds and others sure to follow have come out due to stubborn hope or false hope. I’d feel much better if our lives take a turn for the better through a third type of hope, realistic hope: that matters can and will improve as long as we remember that a good outcome is a product of human care rather than human wishfulness.