As the wealthy and educated revel in vaccinated normalcy, the virus is festering—and biding its time.

(Originally published Oct. 13 in “What in the World“) A-yep, y’all got the Covid, ah see.

So the goundskeepers keep warning us as we sip old fashioneds spiked with our favorite shot(s) of mRNA. They point at the pernicious spread of this malignant virus on the verge of our luxuriant spread, their voices slowly muddling in with the crisp fall breeze and the rising warmth of a bourbon-infused afternoon.

Inoculation intoxication: As our comfort levels revive following a liberal splash of vaccinations, Americans elsewhere who’ve taken the pledge against science are still dying even as the overall pace of infections fall. California, that progressive bastion, just topped 70,000 infections, a grim capstone in a national death toll that has exceeded 735,000.

Fear, common sense and civic responsibility are no longer sufficient motivations for taking simple precautions against the virus. Now that carrots such as free beer, donuts and other junk food have failed, we have arrived among the most intransigent segment of the population: the ignorant, the willfully misinformed, the recalcitrant refuseniks—the booboisie, as Mencken called them. While their grasp of basic biology may be quaintly parochial, they are more cosmopolitan than you might think and include star athletes and even Europeans. As a result, more and more companies and countries are supplanting carrots with the stick of mandates, a switch that is encountering howls of outrage from backward-thinking individuals everywhere, and nowhere more than that bastion of backward thinking, Texas.

If only we could just let infection be its own reward for such simpletons. But as New York Times writer Emily Anthes reminds us this week (in an article that brings to the Times’ masses the frightening facts that Science’s Kai Kupferschmidt covered back in August), “With every infection come new opportunities for the virus to mutate.” The virus could become more infectious, more vaccine-resistant, or more deadly.

And for that reason, we really need to cork the Pappy Van Winkle, waddle over to the shed and pull out whatever tools it’ll take to stem the spread of this scourge in the farthest corners of the world. Left unchecked, the International Monetary Fund warned this week, the pandemic not only stands to kill thousands more, but wreak havoc on the global economy and exacerbate the kind of global inequality that underpins discontent, unrest and revolution.