Because new variants of SARS-COV-2 are impervious to existing vaccines, says Kluth, and pharmaceutical companies will never be able to develop new vaccines fast enough to keep up, we will never be able to get "back to normal."

"Get back to normal" means recovering the relative liberty we had in our already overregulated, pre-Covid lives. This is just the latest in a long series of crises that always seem to lead our wise rulers to the same conclusion: we just cannot afford freedom anymore.

Covid-19 certainly wasn't the beginning. Americans were told "the world changed" after 9/11/2001. Basic pillars of the American system, like the Fourth and Fifth Amendments, were too antiquated to deal with the "new threat of terrorism." Warrantless surveillance of our phone, e-mail, and financial records and physical searches of our persons without probably cause of a crime became the norm. A few principled civil libertarians dissented, but the public largely complied without protest. "Keep us safe," they told the government, no matter the cost in dollars or liberty.