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Yeah, but are there many such people who keep at it out of contrarianism? There have always been some germaphobes and neurotics and hypochondriacs etc.
But yes, I agree that most people have moved on. It was first Ukraine but by now it seems to be climate/sustainability (Greta style) again, flight shaming etc. Also tied to the energy crisis in Europe. There's less bandwidth available for boring old stuff like covid with these new things coming up.
Contrarianism is probably the wrong term here, I just used it because I couldn't think of anything better on the spot.
The "zero-covidianism" is more like a honestly held ideology at this point. It's a new ideology, to be sure, still in the process of formation, but every ideology must be new at one point. We'll see how it sticks - the main point was still that it's not just normie "go-with-the-flow" thinking, these people are not going with the flow at the moment, and most likely never conceptualized it like the "flow" was what they were a part of.
For instance, local hardcore zero-covidists have, throughout the crisis, maintained that the Finnish government never truly wanted to fight Covid, that it was willing to let kids get long Covid (since Finland only had school closured for two months in 2020 and never after that), that the local health authorities are in thrall to Great Barrington Declaration, want to copy Sweden, believe in "herd immunity" etc. From that perspective, it would be easy to believe that it's just you and your pals trying your damndest to combat the mainstream ideology, which is "Feh, we'll only combat Covid when we are absolutely pushed to do so and want to return to "normality" as fast as possible", and the anti-maskers and anti-lockdowners are just a particularly loud and unpleasant version of this mainstream ideology.
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I don't think so. I think this is just the way public health people are. The entire culture of public health is about pushing for marginal improvements in expected longevity across large populations, which often means recommending things that look pretty silly on an individualized basis (e.g. the CDC admonishing against over easy eggs). It seems to me that this culture of pursuing some value of "health" at the population level is chosen by people that have a particularly neurotic bent to begin with and that the localized cultures at these institutions continues to push the internal logic of it, to the point where quite a few people in the profession really will refuse rare beef or feel that sunscreen is a strict requirement for going outside.
Of course, it doesn't escape my notice that quite a few people in the industry are obviously unhealthy at a glance, but the cognitive dissonance of that never seems to bother people all that much.
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