Even though the "open up" crowd are small and mostly irrelevant, fighting them is not a mistake, or something that just "gives them attention" (though it does).

They combine two tendencies that have been extremely damaging. The first is an unfalsifiable media contrarianism that now has a generation-long track record of destruction.

"What if fighting climate change is worse than doing nothing?" "What if anti-racism is the real racism?" "What if environmentalists cause fires?". These positions never change. They are only abandoned when they become unworkable.

We are now watching exactly one of these postures - "What if fighting the virus is worse than the virus? - fall down after weeks, not years. None of the adherents of that view have revised it, despite hundreds of thousands of people dying. Nothing can make them.

That first tendency is tied to the second: a fanatical opposition to the idea that anything at all can be a genuine market externality. COVID is exploiting exactly the weaknesses these *same people* have introduced: work instability, a diminished public sector, etc.

That is doubly dangerous: introducing the vectors of calamity, and then denying the calamity when it happens. It should be fought tooth-and-nail.