Jeanne Marrazzo, new leader of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, everyone:
Can I make a quick digression? We recently had a long Covid [research] meeting where we had about 200 people, in person. And we can’t mandate mask-wearing, because it’s federal property. But there was a fair amount of disturbance that we couldn’t, and people weren’t wearing masks, and one person accused us of committing a microaggression by not wearing masks.
And I take that very seriously. But I thought to myself, it’s more that people just want to live a normal life. We really don’t want to go back. It was so painful. We’re still all traumatized. Let’s be honest about that. None of us are over it.
So there’s not a lot of appetite for raising an alarm, especially if it could be perceived subsequently as a false alarm.
Edit - thanks for the help in bypassing the paywall.
It's the carrot and the stick, right? As socialists we generally want to move in the direction to positively reinforce the desirable behaviors in society, rather than the punitive carceral approach that we perceive as reactionary. But if you abstract away all personal connection to anti-social and reactionary tendencies in society then you're forgetting that society is actually made up of individuals, and individuals need to be motivated to stop engaging in harmful behaviors. You can't always do that with the carrot, so you'll always need the stick, even if only marginally.
Fairweather leftists can sometimes get so caught up in "DON'T TELL ME WHAT TO DOOOOOO" that it's hard to tell them apart from libertarians sometimes.