February 25th, 2021.

But I think the reason that this matters is that at some point, the federal government will have to decide when the pandemic is over.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

And while I think we might want that decision to be grounded firmly in some sort of epidemiological reality,

I think the very real possibility is that this determination will be fundamentally like

sociological and political.

Yeah. Welcome to the death panel.

So today, the day we're recording this is May 11, 2023.

And at the end of the day today, the official declaration of a federal public health emergency for COVID-19 in the United States will end. So to mark this occasion,

we have something a little different and unusual for you today. Yeah. You know, we've talked a lot

about how exactly we wanted to mark the end of the public health emergency. You know, we've talked a lot about how exactly we wanted to mark the end of the

public health emergency. You know, do we focus on this angle? Do we want to focus on that angle?

Is this another opportunity to simply repeat ourselves that this isn't over until everyone is safe?

And in the end, something unusual happened. So as we were talking on Monday in the patron feed about the way that this moment,

the end of the public health emergency, was likely to engender a lot of attempts to make or really

deny meaning from these last three years and to attempt to close the book on the ongoing

crisis, we thought to look back ourselves.

And one of the things we wanted to reflect on was this rather clunky terminology that we came

up with together many years ago to explain what was going on around us and what we saw,

which we referred to as and have been using since as the quote-unquote sociological production of the end of the pandemic.

So Ardy and I listened back to a set of conversations that he, Phil, and I had in early 2021 when this first became a central theme of our analysis.

...