Washington Post columnist, committed Biden fangirl, and Corona hysteric Jennifer Rubin spent the fall fantasising about vaccine mandates for Trump voters, and casting the unvaccinated as villains responsible for rising infections in the lesser vaccinated American South. On 12 August she complained about the high prevalence of almost entirely meaningless Corona infections among schoolchildren in Mississippi, and 1 September she wrote of “the variant spread[ing] in low vaccination states, fanned by MAGA governors who oppose vaccine and mask mandates.”

Well, we are no longer in late summer, when extensive climatisation favours high rates of infection in the hottest regions. Instead, we are in the depths of winter, and now a lot of heavily vaccinated blue states are leading the case counts:

Rubin has thus decided that “we can stop agonizing over ‘cases’ and focus on those who are hospitalized or at risk of dying.”

In the same column, she also praises the CDC’s softened quarantine restrictions, introduced of necessity in the face of spiking Omicron infections, as “far more reasonable. … The cumulative effect is to de-escalate the response to omicron for vaccinated and boosted Americans, for whom the risk is minimal.”

Bit by bit, Omicron is chipping away at containment.