Vox's Kelsey Piper Is Indefensibly Ignorant About COVID-19
Comfortable Liberal Pundits Abandon Science for Vibes, Yet Again
Vox has long been a terrible media outlet that exists to mislead liberals into supporting corporate handouts and opposing meaningful government regulations under the guise of explaining, or "Voxsplaining," the news to gullible marks that need to be taught to look at politics from a tired old Fukuyama "End of History" lens: that life in America for upper-middle class White Americans in the 1990s was the greatest achievement civilization could ever realize, and it's what liberals and the Democrat party should strive for, forever.
Vox employs Kelsey Piper, who graduated in 2017 from the same Stanford that protects incompetent quacks like Scott Atlas, John Ioannidis, and Jay Bhattacharya. Shockingly, these sadistic "experts" are not who Piper is mad about when it comes to the COVID-19 pandemic. Kelsey claims to be an expert on the subject of "effective altruism," which believes taxes are cringe, and letting the wealthy have unprecedented control in directing wealth to solving the world's problems - something that simply does not work in practice. A modern corporate rebranding of the "Divine Right of Kings," or Ayn Rand's "Captains of Industry," that seeks to snuff out social activism, popular movements, and more democratic forms of tackling society's challenges - often with terrible implementations of automated Madlibs software masquerading as "artificial intelligence,” which can’t actually do any of the things it’s been sold as.
In the worldview of Vox pundits, the wealthy autocrats of Silicon Valley should be uncritically granted complete power over your lives and celebrated as heroes for it.
To be a successful pundit in America, it's not about being factually correct, but instead telling rich people how smart they are and how their narcissistic fantasies should not be questioned by the general public. From the very beginning, the wealthy were burning money lobbying against SARS-CoV-2 mitigations and have fought long and hard to saturate working American families with COVID-19, organizing the public to turn a blind eye to the virus and talk about the ongoing pandemic in the past tense. If you wanted to exploit this calamity to further stoke aggression against China? Great!
The Liberal Version of “Nuremberg 2.0” Fantasies
With this understanding, we can finally talk about Kelsey Piper's latest in Vox, which talks about SARS-CoV-2 in the past tense; a factually incorrect statement as you can still be disabled by a "mild" COVID-19 bout in 2025, and the mountains of evidence showing negative impacts on the brain, heart, and other organs continues to mount. Instead, Piper wants "a Covid reckoning," claiming "our Covid mistakes did lasting damage. No one wants to talk about it." Can you guess what Piper thinks the "mistakes" are, and what she casually excludes from the discussion?
Shockingly, Piper fails to mention Long COVID or the millions of Americans disabled by the virus - disproportionately women like the author - who are often abandoned by their loved ones to poverty, homelessness, and deaths of despair including suicide. As a wealthy and comfortable sycophant for the wealthy at the blog "The Unit of Caring," Kelsey wants a "reckoning" for the personal inconvenience she experienced, caused by public health mitigations implemented while massive numbers of Americans were being killed by COVID-19. At no point does Kelsey mention the growing mountain of research showing negative impacts on the brain, heart, and other organs caused by repeated COVID-19 infections, (CBC) or suggest a stronger approach to preventing SARS-CoV-2 transmission using proven engineering solutions.
Instead, Kelsey talks about COVID-19 solely as if it’s all in the past. She writes:
Covid touched the lives of every single American. Decisions that were made by public health officials dramatically transformed our lives.
You see, the virus didn't dramatically transform the lives of the Americans who lost loved ones, or were disabled by the virus - but instead, public health officials are who caused all the disruption. As hospitals in New York were being overwhelmed and mass graves were being filled, everyone should have prioritized "normalcy" and unimpeded economic activity instead of responding to the crisis. This is what Stanford quacks like future NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya have argued since 2020 on behalf of the billionaire class and have been greatly rewarded for it, with numerous liberal public health influencers endorsing Bhattacharya for the role of NIH Director:
Kelsey Thinks Kids Shouldn’t Be Protected…From a Virus that Came from a Lab?
Kelsey sprints through the entire roster of pestilence sycophant talking points, mischaracterizing limited stay-at-home orders and remote schooling as "lockdowns," whines about contradictions in PPE guidance that fails to acknowledge how preventing COVID-19 transmission is still essential, and how early restrictions on outdoor gatherings at the height of the crisis when much was uncertain under the shadow of a Presidential administration actively sabotaging the pandemic response. Piper's focus is instead on “incalculable damage to public trust.” Biden and his failed COVID-19 response, which included the mass infection tens of millions of unvaccinated children and their families, is not mentioned.
Instead, Kelsey endorses fiend of the Pandemic Accountability Index, Zeynep Tufekci of the New York Times:
The sociologist Zeynep Tufekci, one of the better pandemic commentators, wrote earlier this week about how we were lied to about the possibility of a Covid lab leak.
Zeynep is a sociologist with no medical or scientific credentials. She has long been an opportunist who has often gotten basic facts about SARS-CoV-2 wrong, endorsed pro-infection quacks, and refuses to admit fault. Here’s a few prime examples:
Denied airborne transmission of SARS-coV-2 in 2020
Insisted “kids are not COVID superspreaders” and that the flu is worse for kids in September 2020 - suggesting 9 is larger than 123 (child flu vs. COVID deaths)
Endorsed “real experts” such as Marc Veldhoen, that peddled anti-vax myths like “Immunity Debt” and publicly threatened to assault a woman
Insisted COVID-19 infections provided lasting “population immunity”
Endorsed the fictional concept of “hybrid immunity”
Claimed Jay Bhattacharya is “qualified” to serve as NIH Director
Time and time again, Zeynep has constantly underestimated the virus, and laundered anti-vax ideals and cranks into the mainstream as legitimate, while branding those disabled by COVID-19 as “a vulnerable different subset” with zero evidence to support such an outlandish claim. So now Zeynep has pivoted to insisting on fueling the fire that SARS-CoV-2 leaked from a Chinese laboratory, while failing to mention that the loudest voices who insist upon this also wanted to infect every American with it in Spring 2020, and other basic facts, such as:
The history of pandemics comes from viruses that emerged in nature
The “evidence” for a lab leak is largely circumstantial
There have been numerous lab leaks in the past that you’re unaware of
Yet, Zeynep is a major calm-mongering “expert” whose sole focus is promoting herself. So it’s not surprising that Kelsey considers Zeynep “one of the better pandemic commentators.” What does Piper have to say about SARS-CoV-2 in kids, which has already disabled countless children?
I think that masks work to prevent the spread of disease, though I also think we made the wrong tradeoff in requiring kids to wear masks
Oof. Another anti-vaccine quack talking point laundered into mainstream liberal thought, that we shouldn’t have bothered to protect children from a virus which has killed thousands of them and disabled countless more. Many of these kids would bring the virus home from school and infect their parents with COVID-19, who would then die - this story played out hundreds of thousands of times. Kelsey makes no mention of this needless tragedy.
We’ve Gotta Blame Someone
Kelsey goes on to try and put a nice bow on this calamity:
It was a massive, collective world-altering event — and now that it’s over we barely talk about it
People were still being disabled by COVID-19 in 2024, and you can still be disabled by the virus in 2025. Millions of Americans are suffering without a cure, much less treatment, and they cease to exist in Kelsey’s mind as their government, employer, and loved ones abandon them. This viral burden will continue to grow as pundits like Kelsey mislead the public into nakedly embracing the virus over and over - vaccine booster uptake has plummeted since Biden and liberal pundits insisted COVID-19 is in the past, and as immunity wanes, reinfections will continue to grow the number of Americans disabled by this virus.
Kelsey continues to erase this growing population of newly disabled Americans in her closing paragraph, ironically contributing to the same problems she decries:
So Covid’s long-term effects will reverberate through the country: lower trust in institutions, an absolute unwillingness to think seriously about preventing the next pandemic, failing schools, and rising isolation. And all that will unfold without any real clarity on how we got here and how we can make sure it never happens again.
All this because liberals weren’t enthusiastic enough about supporting a conspiracy theory championed by people who insist SARS-CoV-2 is harmless and benevolent, and wanted to protect their kids from a deadly & disabling virus. We have “lower trust in institutions” because the Biden Administration abandoned their responsibility to Americans in order to prioritize “normalcy” and construct an artificial end of the pandemic, regardless of the endless harm this would cause. Liberal pundits like Kelsey Piper were more than happy to aid in this crusade and are desperate to rewrite their own history now that Trump and his anti-vax goons are in power.
Our schools are “failing” because unmitigated disease outbreaks disrupt education, and the evidence of repeated COVID-19 infections causing cognitive and neurological impairment continues to mount. “Clarity” only comes from acknowledging that the virus, not “public health officials,” has caused serious and lasting harm.
Piper’s insistence on turning a blind eye to this fact only makes these problems worse and further legitimizes the scourge that is the anti-vaccine movement and their crusade to get more American children sick, disabled, and dead. It has to stop.
