The Biden vaccine mandates will bring out basic truths about the pandemic.

By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. Excerpts:

"Natural immunity. Courts have already been asked to review employer mandates as applied to workers who previously had Covid. Our vaccines were never tested on this group; the immunity they receive after surviving the disease appears to be roughly as good as the vaccine. That’s already 150 million Americans for whom mandatory vaccination may be hard to justify.  

The age skew. For most people in most circumstances, the vaccine is a good bet and a no brainer for those whose risk from Covid is much greater than any risk the vaccine might pose. But the net benefit declines quickly as you go down the age table. A shot for a 75-to-84 year-old is 22,000% more likely to save a life than a shot for an 18-to-29. For the youngest cohort, the FDA has yet to resolve whether the very slight benefits of vaccination outweigh the very slight risks."

"In a story on Monday acknowledging that Covid won’t be eliminated, it will likely become endemic like the flu, this newspaper generously added that Covid was a disease “that many public-health authorities once believed they could conquer.”

This is not quite right. It was only in the miasma of their rhetoric that they seemed to believe this. Multiple strains of flu and cold-causing coronaviruses once emerged as novel pathogens and now circulate routinely. Any epidemiologist would have told you to expect the same of Covid, at least until they fell insensibly in line with the rhetoric demanded by the career imperatives of active politicians facing the prospect of re-election."