The Big Surprise of the Pandemic

Jonathan Last: “The big surprise of the pandemic—the one thing that nobody saw coming—was the resistance to the vaccines. This was a failure of imagination. No one imagined that 30 percent of the country could watch 674,000 of their neighbors die and still refuse to take a free, life-saving vaccine.”

“No one fully understood the power of negative polarity. Understood that one tribe of Americans hates their neighbors literally unto death. Hates them so much that they would rather risk their own lives than be perceived as doing what ‘the elites’ tell them.”