This was always a moral issue, one we should have faced decades ago. But this pandemic has shown us that we’ve given a totalitarian country control over the supply of many things that we need to survive, like N95 masks and basic pharmaceutical products.

How much more would we be willing to pay for goods essential for public health and the national defense to be produced here? And how could we properly value and protect those who do that work?

Can we put truth and science before political correctness?

As a woman who has worn a size 10 for my entire adult life, I have benefited from the body positivity movement.

But I refuse to pretend that obesity is not a public health crisis — one that this virus has made searingly plain. A new study suggests that obesity is one of the major predictors of whether the coronavirus will land someone in the hospital. The study has not yet been peer-reviewed, but it jibes with what many doctors have observed.

Can we still rely on the journal Nature for unbiased scientific expertise if it apologizes for “associating the virus with Wuhan and with China” and calls such an association “erroneous”? The journal did so on the grounds that racists are using the coronavirus as an excuse to discriminate against Asian people — something that appalls anyone with a conscience. But there is no dispute whatsoever that the virus emerged in China and that, by suppressing crucial information about the outbreak, including heroic whistle-blowers who tried to warn the world, the Chinese Communist Party hastened its spread.

You can see the way our scientific thinking has been corrupted in those on the right who insist this pandemic is God’s vengeance against urban hedonists, and those on the left who claim this is payback from an angry Mother Earth. These are the arguments of ideologues using science as a hammer. The fight to reclaim the skepticism that science relies upon is a life-or-death one.

Meanwhile, I don’t want to hear another thing about the healing power of crystals for as long as I live.