COVID-19 Is Over for the Vaccinated | Opinion – Newsweek

The following is a lightly edited transcript of remarks made by Nick Gillespie during a Newsweek episode of The Debate about COVID-19. You can listen to the podcast here:

Vaccines were a game changer because they allowed people to set their own personal risk level and get on with their business. People who want to wear masks and remove themselves from society can do so, but [vaccines] also allow you to be essentially free from bad outcomes. If you're vaccinated, you're not going to die or be hospitalized, with very rare exception. COVID in that sense is over, it should be over, and we should be working to get back to what life was like before the pandemic.

I'm a libertarian, not an anarchist, so I believe that there are certain public health moments where it will make sense for the government to impose mandates for some limited period of time. But other than speeding up production and distribution of vaccines, the federal government made terrible decisions. Between the FDA asserting monopoly control over testing, the conflicting information coming from the CDC and Dr. Fauci about mask wearing that was misinformation. I also don't like the idea of state and local governments deciding what is an essential business and what is a non-essential business. All of this is in the rear-view-mirror for the most part, because people can internalize their cost-benefit analysis of how to move forward.

Dr. Nick Gillespie is editor-at-large for Reason Magazine and host of The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie.

The views expressed in this article are the writers' own.

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COVID-19 Is Over for the Vaccinated | Opinion - Newsweek