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It looks – embarassingly – like New York Times editorial writers don’t bother to look at the newspaper’s comprehensive vaccine tracker feature. Or at least they didn’t bother when preparing today’s editorial calling for an end to a regulation called Title 42, “an emergency public health order that allows the government to turn away migrants at the nation’s borders during a pandemic.”

According to the edit, a big part of the reason is that “the Covid-19 pandemic is receding.”

But flip to the paper’s “Coronavirus in the U.S.: Latest Map and Case Count” section, and you see that one of the most reliable (though far from perfect) indicators of the pandemic’s virulence – hospitalizations – are no longer declining as steeply as they had been starting in early September. And the daily death count is showing signs of stabilizing after falling rapidly starting in mid-September.

Moreover, the numbers are likely to keep worsening in the coming weeks because winter is coming, and because the CCP Virus in all its variants is seasonal – like many other infectious diseases. In other words, now that the weather is getting colder, some kind of new wave seems sure to arrive.

Incidentally, the edit’s other stated prime rationale for ending Title 42 is just completely bonkers. The Times writes of evidence that’s recently surfaced of an official for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) supposedly making clear that “there was little public health rationale for instituting the policy, since the virus was already spreading in the United States by the time the Title 42 order was signed” in March, 2020 under the Trump administration.

In other words, a then-little known and therefore greatly feared disease was metastasizing among the American population, and it was – xenophobic? racist? choose your own disparaging adjective? – to minimize the odds that infected foreigners would make the problem even worse?

And in fact, this last argument illustrates the most fundamental problem with the editorial – and the paper’s overall position on immigration. Times‘ ownership obviously favors an Open Borders-like policy, which is of course perfectly fine and its inalienable right. What’s neither is its unwillingness to show some intellectual honesty and openly say so.

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