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Welcome to the commentary magazine daily podcast today is Wednesday, February 3rd, 2021.

I'm John Poghore. It's the editor of commentary magazine A-Breenwald is off today with me as always

associate editor Noah Rothman. I know. Hi John. And senior writer Christine Rosen. Hi Christine.

Hi John. So we are still in the midst of negotiations and public statements and contrasting public

statements about the upcoming pending Corona virus relief package. And we are also dealing with

the conundrum that while everybody is sort of continues to be in a state of panic about corona

in the public health world with talks about variants and the idea that we'll never get out of this.

And all of that the numbers the nationally the numbers of hospitalizations and deaths are now

you know basically half what they were two weeks ago. And yet we simply cannot accept

good news. We have an incapacity to accept good news. And I think there's two reasons for

this one is that the public health community is terrified that any any promulgation of good

news will cause people to stop doing what they're what they need to do. So you never want to have

a you never want to have a positive new cycle in that sense. And because the the world of people

who might be willing to accept that there's a good news so we can get out of this

has long since kind of dissolved into skepticism about how serious it is and whether

that's a pandemic and blah blah blah and so you have this kind of these kind of poles of

we all we always said that it wasn't as bad as you're saying when in fact it is as bad as they're

saying. And so they know nobody is in a position to accept that there is reason for optimism as

these numbers are going down of course vaccination numbers are going up and those two dovetail into

a very positive future because the Vax as the vaccination number goes up and we now have I think

33 million people have been vaccinated in the United States. That's more people than have been

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