Non-coercive solutions should pave the way forward.

What we got in the real world was not the sort of indefinite, absolute lockdown that would have produced 71% unemployment along with the mass starvation that would quickly have followed. Instead we got a two-tier system of virus mitigation in which knowledge workers were a lot safer than anyone else. And that resonated pretty well with existing class loyalties; "my class is doing the pandemic right, the other class is doing the pandemic wrong" was a natural enough move to make in the situation, even if it wasn't exactly rational. Ideally, we'd want everyone to be able to work from home, and perhaps in the far future, we could do that.

Knowledge workers were safer, but as has usually been the case so far, the people who work with tangibles--including doctors and nurses--were absolutely essential to keep things running. It's easy enough to see why, other things being equal, they might tend to have different views about public policy in this area. (Note that knowledge workers are going to be found arguing on both sides here; exceptions make the world go round.)

I'm getting vaccinated today, and I have to admit that I'll be somewhat relaxing my anti-COVID vigilance once the vaccine has had time to take effect. I'll probably change my masking strategy from two-masks-let-no-air-pass-unfiltered to here's-a-minimally-compliant-piece-of-cloth-on-my-face. I'll see friends and relatives more often, and I'll be fine with coming back to the office whenever. Today will most likely be the day when life begins to return to normal for me. Or at least a few weeks from today.

One of the ideas worth thinking about is that a really robust, nearly anarchic market liberalism might be an ideology not for the past, but for the future: As technology improves, the drawbacks to coercive solutions for social ills become more pressing to more and more people over time. And this true across most ideologies; relatively few people really see coercion as a positive good, and we usually differ only in the priority that we give to preventing it.

It is not the case that a strict Rothbardian or Nozickian will accept any trade-offs in which coercion plays a part, but it's very clearly the case that others will. But only up to a point: if a new, non-coercive solution can be discovered that otherwise secures the same benefits, these people can often be persuaded.

Vaccination is exactly that type of solution. No one in the United States has been coerced, in the libertarian sense of that term, into getting vaccinated. Instead, somewhere north of 100 million people have already voluntarily navigated a wide variety of websites, hotlines, and vaccination centers, usually of their own initiative. They did so to put a stop to what had been--yes, don't deny it--a negative externality they'd been liable to produce in others. If we keep it up, that externality will soon vanish.

This is how it's done. This is the way of the future--to make the harms we do to one another, not illegal, but obsolete.