State of the union. For years now we’ve been told the greatest threat we face is people speaking to each other on the internet, and last week, with the Biden administration’s entrance into that conversation, the belief finally began its inevitable shaping of our politics. Combatting hate speech, as defined broadly enough to include disagreement on sensitive cultural issues, curtailing “conspiracies” about the virus, including its possible origin in a Wuhan Lab, stemming a fascist coup against the government, led by one presumes the shroomer starseed self-defined shaman who took the internet by storm last January 6th in a giant, horned helmet: there are no shortage of reasons to finally “fetter” America’s most dangerous conversations. Presently, we’re told the country has been terrified into a state of anti-vaxx hysteria due to a massive, coordinated disinformation campaign led by a handful of should-be criminal actors on Facebook. President Biden accused Mark Zuckerberg of murder, his press secretary requested a coordinated, cross-platform cancellation of every influential wrongthinker on her list (???), and I was left rather confused by the relative silence concerning the alarming admission, denied by neither Facebook nor the Biden administration in later clarification, that the White House is now coordinating with private companies on the topic of what information is and is not “true.” Meanwhile, in Congress, Biden’s colleagues in the Democratic Party are presently — and entirely separately, I’m sure! — discussing the topic of whether or not these same private companies should be dismantled.

Okay, before we get into the relationship between Facebook and the White House, let’s take a breath and parse the implicit first question in this most recent push for speech controls: are we all about to die from Covid (again)? Vaccination edition.

As of today, NPR reports around 161 million Americans have been fully vaccinated — or 48.6 percent of the population, they’re quick to add. Less than half! But that’s 48.6 percent of the entire population, deceptively including children who aren’t eligible for vaccination, and every healthy person under the age of 40 who isn’t obese, which is to say tens of millions of people who aren’t currently at any meaningful statistical risk of dying from Covid. In ten-year brackets over the age of 50, vaccinations range in the 75% to 90% range, with the elderly in our most densely-populated states ranging between 90% and 100% vaccinated. Now, the Delta variant is on the rise, and it’s far more communicable than OG Covid, but there’s no consensus it’s more dangerous.