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Have you ever been COVID-shamed online? Maybe you posted pictures of you and your family at a park and got reamed by someone for not being at home. Maybe, heaven forbid, you even dared to express a view on social media that strays from the ‘accepted opinion’ of months of mandated quarantine and government-enforced shutdowns until not a single solitary individual is infected with the virus.

If the wrong people get wind you’ve expressed such an opinion, you’ll reap the whirlwind, I can promise you that. I’ve been there and done that. Fortunately, however, my work in conservative and right-of-center media gives me some pretty thick skin that makes me virtually immune to criticism. I simply don’t give a flying flip what anyone, especially the left, thinks about opinions I sincerely believe reasonable evidence suggests are correct. And that’s a good thing for you, because I’m about to tell you how to shake off their COVID-shaming stupidity like water off a duck’s back.

Indeed, COVID-shaming is the latest way leftists try and fool the general public into mistakenly thinking they are somehow “good people.” It’s a win-win for them because they can pretend they actually care about human life and, via these ridiculous shutdowns, accomplish all their goals, all in one fell swoop. It’s almost admirable, actually, for its level of evil genius. When it comes to never letting crises go to waste, why kill one bird when you can kill two?

From the safety of their beltway townhouses, leftists point their judgemental fingers at anyone who isn’t meeting their definition of “social distancing” or who, worse, expresses any opinion about the ongoing Wuhan coronavirus pandemic that they disagree with. And trust me, they’ll ‘disagree with’ pretty much any opinion that doesn’t involve them getting to stay cloistered away in their homes, presumably living off what they believe will be the government teat for the next, oh, 18 months or so, give or take a few days.

As examples, these negative responses to a tweet I made last week questioning the continued wisdom of allowing medical professionals like Dr. Anthony Fauci to “dictate the ruination of the entire U.S. economy & impoverishment of millions in order to fight coronavirus” was my first real experience in online COVID-shaming:

“So you want more dead.”

“Yeah F@#K SCIENCE!”

“Wow, not only is your idea completely lacking in any kind of human decency, it's also idiotic.”

“Or your alternative would be a thriving economy purely coming from the funeral business.”

“LOL you moron. Dr. Fauci will survive long after you and the Twitiot In Chief are long gone. But hey I've got a great challenge for you Scottie. Go take a tour of an ER, ICU and the makeshift morgue at your favorite hospital and get back to us.”

“Who is this human skid mark?”

So yeah, that was fun (Seriously, it was. I laughed reading most of them - thick skin, remember?). As you can see, the COVID-shamers can get quite emotional. By pretending to care about the “lives” we’re supposedly saving with these state-enforced shutdowns and criticizing anyone with a different take as somehow morally inferior, leftists have found endless opportunities to preen and virtue-signal. However, as is normal with the left, there is no substance behind their bloviating.

Here are several of their most ridiculous retorts, and how to counter them:

“You want grandma to die.”

Some version of this theme is endlessly parroted by the death-obsessed COVID-shamers, as if any return to normal economic activity means an automatic death sentence for those most vulnerable to the virus. Of course, the first response is that none of us want “grandma” or anyone else to die of coronavirus. Second, the vast majority of “grandmas,” unless they have certain preexisting medical conditions, will recover just fine even if they catch it. The question is, can we reasonably protect “grandma” while at the same time protecting vulnerable Americans who will be irreparably harmed by a looming Second Great Depression? The answer isn’t just “of course,” it’s also “we must.” We’re at the risk of losing far more lives in the long run than we ever would have saved with these draconian measures.

“You just care about the stock market.”

This COVID-shaming technique is geared at a tried-and-true leftist tactic - class-warfare, insinuating that conservatives who want to reopen things simply care about their stock options or their 401Ks and consequently don’t care about lives. First of all, we do care about lives (see above). Second, most working people have some sort of retirement plan, so not wanting those to crash and burn is a normal human reaction. One CAN care about saving lives AND economics at the same time. It doesn’t have to be an either/or situation. Yes, lives come first, but again, there is a point where extreme efforts to ‘save’ one group of lives will lead to the casting aside of others (see below). How many people would die long-term in a newly poverty-stricken country? Some of us don’t want to find out.

“Gazillions will die.”

Yeah, this one is super easy. ‘Gazillions’ will NOT die. Not even close. Dire death projections for this virus have been whittled down to the point where, at present, the toll is likely to be less than a normal flu season. And many of those early models took social distancing into account already, which means this virus is likely far less deadly than anyone thought at first. But we’re still acting like it’s the literal end of the world. Not to be cynical, but might there be other motives at work?

“The virus will decide when things return to normal.”

Those who parrot this phrase got it from Dr. Fauci and other authority figures, as if the virus somehow has a brain and gets to decide things. News flash: PEOPLE decide when to stop doing stupid, useless, over-the-top, society-destroying things to try and protect itself from a virus that has a death toll only slightly higher than the seasonal flu. That’s because people, not viruses, have brains. Duh, right? It’s amazing that a non-medical expert like me should have to explain this to the likes of Dr. Fauci, but here we are.

“You first!”

This one really cracks me up. As if those of us who want a return to normal aren’t willing to take the risk of contracting the virus ourselves. That’s the point, you pencil-necked twits. I don’t want to contract this virus any more than I would want the flu or a cold. I’ll take reasonable precautions, and if I do get it I’ll quarantine myself so I don’t spread it to others. But I’m not worried about it and I’m more than willing to take the ‘risk’ to save countless American lives, far more than this virus would have ever taken if allowed to run rampant.

“You don’t care about science.”

Leftists love ‘science,’ as long as they think it supports their ridiculous policy proposals. It never does though, and the Wuhan virus is no different, especially since the ‘science’ has been almost universally wrong since the beginning of this outbreak. Yes, we should continue to learn more about how the virus is transmitted and the toll it takes on humans. As we have, we should work on vaccines, testing, treatments, and ways to reasonably reduce the spread of this and any other transmittable disease. Science is a good thing. However in this case math - as in numerators and denominators - can tell us enough to know that what we’ve done is entirely too much.

“If one life is saved it’s all worth it.”

This is another commonly used phrase, but it’s also one of the most absurd. If “one life saved” is worth any action, why not stop driving to ‘save’ the 1.25 million car accident deaths worldwide each year? Sure, flying is the safest form of transportation statistics-wise, but if we had stopped it in 1970 we’d have ‘saved’ the 84,000 people who have died in the past 50 years from aviation accidents. Or how about the 2.3 million who die every year from occupational accidents and work-related diseases? If those lives ‘saved’ aren’t worth stopping work entirely, I don’t know what is. I mean, we’d all exist in soul-crushing poverty and die from starvation or some third-world disease but hey, ‘one life,’ right? Of course, life is precious, but when the heavy hand of government takes historic, unprecedented measures to put one victim group over all others, creating additional victim groups in the process, that “one life” saved ultimately comes at the cost of many, many others.

So no, there’s absolutely no reason to give one inch of moral high ground to the COVID-shamers. Their motives are suspect, their morals are lacking, and their arguments are, well, just super, super lame.

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Follow Scott on Twitter @SKMorefield