The Problem with COVID Contrarianism

Every day, a new Battle of the Pandemic seems to break out. There’s the Spotify controversy over podcaster Joe Rogan, accused of promoting COVID misinformation; there’s the protest by truckers in Canada against vaccine mandates and COVID-related restrictions. Late last month, the often-controversial former New York Times columnist Bari Weiss, a leading voice of “anti-woke” dissent, declared on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher that she was “done with COVID”—or at least with COVID-related restrictions—and wanted a return to normality. This was followed by an article on Weiss’s Substack blog by college student Janet Smith, a self-identified non-religious liberal who wrote that she transferred from liberal Bryn Mawr to Hillsdale, a conservative Christian college, because Bryn Mawr’s COVID restrictions were too onerous. While Weiss haters on Twitter rushed to attack the article for bad reasons (e.g. that it was ridiculous for a student to write an essay about something so trivial as a college transfer), the revelation that Smith had actually withdrawn from Bryn Mawr because of its vaccination requirement—something she didn’t mention in the article, and that her mother had discussed on Twitter—was a genuine blow to the story’s credibility. Read Full Article »