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Hi everybody, I'm John Dunven and welcome to Intelligent Squared. So here are three words

I am sure you have been hearing. Done with COVID, done with COVID. It's a hashtag. It's also

a signal sent by Democratic governors who have ended mask mandates this winter. And it's

a sentiment that is increasingly shared and voiced aloud that as a society, we just

can't stand a defensive crouch indefinitely with mask mandates and vaccine requirements

and metaphorical flashing emergency lights. We failed to defeat COVID and it is not done

with us, so we'll just have to learn to live with it.

Well, if that is a sound choice now, and of course that is very debatable, could we have

made that same choice a year ago? Or what about two years ago when we barely understood COVID?

And when the next serious pandemic wave hits us with COVID or something else, will that

put us right back into an emergency state requiring once again lockdowns and mandates and

those metaphorical flashing lights? Well, those are questions we are going to debate right

now. Our debaters are John Tierney, who has grappled with these questions as a science

journalist and a writer for city journal. And in Bal Shachem, a scientist and researcher

in behavioral science at St. Louis University, who has researched in the last couple of years

has focused very much on the effectiveness of some of the mitigation efforts.

...