H.L. Mencken, journalist and essayist, wrote in 1940, “Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one.”

Twenty years later, the same thought was reprised by A.J. Liebling of The New Yorker.

Today, these thoughts can be revived to apply, on a scale inconceivable in 1940 or 1960, to Big Tech, and to the small number of men who control it.

These men — Jack Dorsey of Twitter, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, and Sundar Pichai of Alphabet Inc., and its subsidiary Google — operate what, in another time, would be known as “common carriers.” Common carriers are, as the term implies, companies which distribute anything from news to parcels to gasoline. They are a means of distributing ideas, news, goods, and services.

Think of the old Western Union, the railroads, the pipeline companies, or the telephone companies. Their business was carriage, and they were recognized and regulated in law as such: common carriers.

The controversial Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act recognizes the common carrier nature of Big Tech internet companies by exempting them from libel responsibility. It specifically stated that they shouldn’t be treated as publishers. Conservatives want 230 repealed, but that would only make the companies reluctant to carry anything controversial, hurting free speech.

I think the possible repeal of 230 should be part of a large examination of the inadvertently acquired but vast power of the internet-based social media companies. It should be part of a large discussion embracing all the issues of free speech on social media which could include beefed-up libel statutes — possibly some form of the equal-time rule which kept network owners from exploiting their power for political purposes in days when there were only three networks.

President Donald Trump deserves censure, which he has gotten: He has been impeached for incitement to insurrection. I take second place to no one in my towering dislike of him, but I am shaken at the ability of Silicon Valley to censor a political figure, let alone a president.

That Silicon Valley should shut out the voice of the president isn’t the issue. It is that a common carrier can dictate the content, even if it is content from a rogue president.

This exercise of censor authority should alarm all free-speech advocates. It is power that exceeds anything ever seen in media.

The heads of Twitter, Facebook and Alphabet are more powerful by incalculable multiples than were Joseph Pulitzer, William Randolph Hearst and Henry Luce, or is Rupert Murdoch. They can subtract any voice from any debate if they so choose. That is a bell that tolls for all. They have the power to silence any voice by closing an account.

When Edward Murrow talked about the awesome power of television, he was right for that time. But now technology has added a multiplier of atomic proportions via the internet.

The internet-based social media giants didn’t seek power. They are, in that sense, blameless. They pursued technology, then money, and these led them to their awesome power. What they have done, though, is to use their wealth to buy startups which offer competition.

Big Tech has used its financial clout to maintain its de facto monopolies. Yet unlike the newspaper proprietors of old or Murdoch’s multimedia, international endeavors today, they didn’t pursue their dreams to get political power. They were carried along on the wave of new technologies.

It may not be wrong that Twitter, Facebook, and others have shut down Trump’s account when they did, at a time of crisis, but what if these companies get politically activated in the future?

We already live in the age of the cancellation culture with its attempt to edit history. If that is extended to free speech on the internet, even with good intentions, everything begins to wobble.

The tech giants are simply too big for comfort. They have already weakened the general media by scooping up most of the advertising dollars. Will the freedom of speech belong to those who own the algorithms?

Cry, the beloved building.

I have been lucky and have walked the halls of the Houses of Parliament in London, visited the Elysée Palace in Paris, the Bundestag in Berlin, and the Kremlin in Moscow.

But it is the Capitol, the building on a hill in Washington, that fills me with awe but it isn’t awesome or frightening, and doesn’t exalt in power.

The Capitol is at once romantic, imposing and egalitarian. Ever since I first set foot on Capitol Hill, the building has been for me, an immigrant, the elegant expression of everything that is best about America: open, accessible and shared.

Until terrorism changed things, anyone could walk into the Capitol without security checks. Taxis could draw up and let you out under the arches that designate the Senate or House entrances.

It hurt me in profound ways to see a mob, inspired by the rogue president and his lickspittle enablers, trash that hallowed place; try to lay waste to the temple of American tolerance, freedom, excellence and uniqueness; to treat it as an impediment to their coup, to their lies-fed catechism of overthrow.

To see any great building desecrated is painful, but to see it happen to the Capitol is to witness heresy against democracy, against Americanism, against our better angels and highest aspirations.

When Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris was engulfed in flames, I realized the building was a prayer: the elegant stone, wood and plaster embodiment of man’s search for God. By that measure, the Capitol is the embodiment of man’s search for fairer government.

As a reporter, the first thing you notice about the Capitol when you go there is how open it is once you have gotten through the metal detectors at the entrances. You walk the halls, ride the elevators and the little trains that run between the Capitol and the House and Senate office buildings, and eat in the cafeterias. The members have privileges, like their own entrances, reserved elevators and reserved train seats. But you can see legislators in the corridors and snack bars, conferring with aides, and often those who are there to get help or to lobby for a cause.

The work of government is at its most accessible to outsiders in the Capitol. Although there are tours, it is still best to roam the building alone, from the tunnels in the basement (where you end up when you take the elevator or stairs and go down too far) to the glory of the Rotunda. The tiled floors, paneling, frescoes, paintings and statuary are all art of the voice of the people, cobbled into a great building.

There are secret places in the Capitol, too. I once had lunch with Sen. Bennett Johnston (D-La.), chairman of the Senate Energy Committee, and The Wall Street Journal’s Paul Gigot in a dining room assigned just to the chairman of that committee — one that neither of us guests even suspected existed. The old Joint Committee on Atomic Energy had a near-secret set of offices accessible through a discreet elevator, unmarked and looking as though it might carry freight instead of nuclear secrets.

But mostly the work of the Congress, which is carried on in the Capitol and its adjacent office buildings, is surprisingly open, accessible and, in that, democratic.

My fervent hope is that freedom, which has been somewhat eroded over the years with new layers of security, isn’t further eroded after the Jan. 6 assault.

Looking forward, maybe the horror of government by the Great Lie will be held at bay. While we will never see an end to politicians’ fibs, we can hope that politicians will be called out for them, won’t have them respected as an alternative truth, which is the ignominious and extraordinary achievement of the Trump administration.

Trump laid the fire before the election, declaring there would be fraud, perhaps certain that he would lose. He lit it on Jan. 6.

The mob that stormed the Capitol isn’t to blame. The blame rests with those who have assaulted the truth over the past four years.

Blame Trump and castigate his enablers, from the talking heads of television to members of Congress like Republican senators Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley and Marco Rubio. They don’t deserve to sit under the Capitol dome. That is for those who care about America. It is a noble mantle.

When it comes to invention, we ain’t seen nothing yet.

The chances are good, and getting better, that in the coming year and the years after it, our world will essentially reinvent itself. That revolution already is underway but, as with most progress, there are political challenges.

Congress needs restraint in dealing with the technological revolution and not to dust off old, antitrust tapes. With the surging inventiveness we are seeing today across the creative spectrum — inventiveness which has given us Amazon, Tesla, Uber, Zoom, 3D printing and, in short order, a COVID-19 vaccine — you may wonder why the government is using antitrust statutes to try and break up two tech giants.

Conservatives think big social media companies are unfair to them. Liberals worry about the financial power of the Big Tech companies: The five largest have a market value of over $7 trillion.

The Justice Department has filed an antitrust suit against Google, and the Federal Trade Commission has filed one against Facebook.

The only tools it has are outdated, anti-competition statutes — some passed over a century ago. Sometime in the future, it may be desirable to disassemble Big Tech companies, but not when they are bringing forward new technologies and whole new concepts like autonomous vehicles and drone deliveries.

These need to happen without government shaking up the creators.

Antitrust laws on the books don’t address the internet age when global monopoly is often an unintended result of success; hugely different from Standard Oil seeking to have absolute control over kerosene.

Policy, though, may want to examine the role of Big Tech in relation to startups: the proven engines of change. When today’s tech giants were in their infancy, it was the beginning of the age of the startup as the driver of change. It went like this: invent, get venture-capital financing, prove the product in the market, and go public. The initial public offering (IPO) was the financial goal.

But the presence of behemoths in Silicon Valley has changed the trajectory for new companies. Rather than hoping for a pot of gold from an IPO, today’s startups are designed to be sold to a big company. Venture capitalists demand that the whole shape of a startup isn’t aimed to public acceptance but rather to whether Google, Apple or Amazon will buy that startup.

The evidence is that acquisitions are doing well in the Big Techs, but that doesn’t mean that they won’t be stifled in time. Conglomerates have a checkered past.

Big companies have a lifespan which begins with white-hot creativity, followed by growth, followed by a leveling of creativity, and the emergence of efficiency and profitability as goals which eclipse creativity. Professional managers take over from the innovators who created the enterprises; risk-taking is expunged from the corporate culture.

That is when government should look at the Big-Tech powerhouses and see whether it is in the national interest to break them up.

Not on the old antitrust grounds, but because they may have become negative forces in the innovation firmament; because whether they are still creative or whether they are just drawing rents on previous creations or acquisitions, they will still be hoovering up engineering talents that might well be better employed in a smaller, more entrepreneurial endeavors or, ideally, as part of a startup.

The issue is simple: While the big companies are still creating, adding to the tech revolution which is reshaping the world, they should be left to do what they are doing well, from creating autonomous, over-the-road trucks to easing city life with smart-city innovation.

The time to move against Big Tech is when it ceases to be an engine of innovation.

Innovation needs an unruly frontier. We have had that, and it should be protected both from government interference and corporate timidity.

Happy and innovative New Year! Hard to believe in this time of plague, but much is changing for the better.

I reckon there are two Christmases: the one we celebrate on Dec. 25, and the one that happens when something goes terribly right in our lives.

Those rare but wonderful days of pure golden joy when something has gone too right to have been anticipated, when you hoot and holler, jump up and down for joy, and run around your house or office or down the street.

Well, I know when my Christmas next year will come. I can’t tell you the day or hang out decorations or send invitations to the party, at least not yet.

But it is coming, that second Christmas, and it is going to be big, like the end of World War II or the moon landing or when the Super Bowl was won by your team.

I can just remember the end of World War II, when Hitler was defeated — Victory Europe — and the huge public celebration with lots of kissing and hugging and embracing strangers.

For me it was quite innocent and I wish it had all happened, especially the kissing, 10 years later, but you take what you can get when you can. Even at age 5, I realized this was big stuff. That day in Cape Town, I saw the handsomest sailor in the world in his dress uniform, my dad, and I celebrated his survival.

The first time I got published in an adult newspaper as a contributor, that was unscheduled Christmas, and I ran around in an intoxication of joy, as excited as it is possible to be. I thought I had scaled the ramparts and would never come down. I came down. But the celebration was fantastic, a Christmas for sure.

Sometimes it becomes us to think of Christmas past, not those of Dickens’s Scrooge, but those things that happened. Perhaps it was the day when Cupid’s arrow found its mark, and you knew your life was changed for the better when you didn’t expect it — or felt you didn’t deserve it.

This is a somber Christmas in 2020. But there will be a day of joy in the not too far-off future.

That will be when it is clear that COVID-19 will no longer be on its killing spree; when we will have had our jabs, restrained our human contact, worn our masks and celebrated Christmas in a tender but reduced way, thinking on the meaning, on the happiness we have and not what we are postponing. Likewise, New Year’s will be subdued but as anticipatory as ever.

There won’t be just one day, alas, when we ring the bells, blow horns, and hug strangers. But there will be a day sometime next year when we can believe that the wicked witch is dead, that the virus is vanquished, and that life may return to what will be a new normal but nonetheless so welcome.

I wish it were all to happen on the same day, but it won’t. However, I think a day, one day, should be designated when it is clear that COVID-19, like polio, is in the rear-view mirror.

I yearn for that day: when I can go out to dinner, when I can see the faces of the noble clerks in the supermarket, embrace those who have borne the battle, manning the ambulances, the hospitals, and the nursing homes. A day when we remember those we have lost and celebrate those we have.

I would suggest we have a new national day of remembrance: VV Day, for Victory Virus. Happy, safe holidays to you.

President-elect Joe Biden’s decision to nominate Jennifer Granholm — former governor of Michigan, lawyer, politician and television host — to be the next secretary of energy is curious.

The idea circulating is that her primary assignment, in Biden’s mind, will be to speed Detroit’s development of electric vehicles.

That is hardly the job Granholm will find confronting her when she heads to the 7th floor of the Forrestal Building, a bare-and-square concrete structure across from the romantic Smithsonian Castle on Independence Avenue in Washington.

Secretary of energy is one of the most demanding assignments in the government. The Department of Energy is a vast archipelago of scientific, defense, diplomatic and cybersecurity responsibilities. Granholm’s biggest concern, in fact, won’t be energy but defense.

The DOE, nicknamed the Little Pentagon, is responsible for maintaining, upgrading and ensuring the working order of the nation’s nuclear weapons. A critical launch telephone will go with her everywhere. That is where much of the department’s $30 billion or so budget goes.

The energy secretary is responsible for the largest scientific organization on earth: the 17 national laboratories operated by the department. They aren’t only responsible for the nuclear weapons program but also for a huge, disparate portfolio of scientific inquiry, from better materials to fill potholes to carbon capture, storage and utilization; and from small modular reactors for electricity to nuclear power for space exploration.

The national labs are vital in cybersecurity, particularly to assure the integrity of the electric grid and the security of things like Chinese-made transformers and other heavy equipment.

The DOE has the responsibility for detecting nuclear explosions abroad, measuring carbon in the atmosphere, making wind turbines more efficient, and developing the nuclear power plants that drive aircraft carriers and submarines. The department makes weapons materials, like tritium, and supervises the enrichment of uranium.

DOE scientists are looking into the very nature of physical matter. They have worked on mapping the human genome and aided nano-engineering development.

Wise secretaries of energy have realized that not only are the national laboratories a tremendous national asset but they can also be the secretary’s shock troops, ready to do what they are asked — not always the way with career bureaucrats. Their directors are wired into congressional delegations, including California with Lawrence Livermore; Illinois with Argonne; New Mexico with Los Alamos and Sandia; Tennessee with Oak Ridge; South Carolina with Savannah River.

Verifying the START nuclear weapons treaty with Russia falls to the DOE as will, possibly, renegotiating it. Another job would be being part of any future negotiations with Iran over its nuclear materials. Likewise, the energy secretary would be involved if serious negotiations are started with North Korea.

An ever-present headache for Granholm will be the long-term management of nuclear waste from the civilian program as public opposition to the Yucca Mountain site in Nevada is adamant. Also, she will be responsible for vast quantities of weapons-grade plutonium in various sites, but notably at the Pantex site in Texas and the Savannah River site in South Carolina before it is mixed with an inert substance for burial in Carlsbad, New Mexico.

Then there are little things like the strategic petroleum reserve, the future of fracking, reducing methane emissions throughout the natural gas system, and bringing on hydrogen as a utility and transportation fuel.

DOE has been charged with facilitating natural gas and oil exports. Now those are subject to the objections of environmentalists.

Smart secretaries have built good relationships early with various Senate and House committees that have oversight of DOE.

James Schlesinger, the first secretary of energy, led the new department with a knowledge of energy from his time as chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, a knowledge of diplomatic nuclear strategy from his time as director of the CIA, and a knowledge of defense from his time as secretary of defense.

The only other star that has shone as brightly from the Forrestal Building was President Barack Obama’s energy secretary Ernie Moniz, a nuclear scientist from MIT who essentially took over the nuclear negotiations with Iran: He and Iranian negotiator Ali Akbar Salehi, a fellow MIT graduate, hammered out the agreement, which was a work of art, a pas de deux, by two truly informed nuclear aficionados.

Compared to the awesome reach of DOE in other vital areas, electric cars seem of little consequence, especially as Elon Musk with Tesla already has scaled that mountain, and all the car companies are scrambling up behind him.

When a nation goes to war its first step to survival is to protect the homeland against invasion. Every citizen is co-opted: It is their national duty.

We are on a war footing against COVID-19. It has invaded our homeland, and it is slaughtering us. Nearly 300,000 are dead and the vast hospital network in the United States is overwhelmed.

A dark cloud passes before our sun. Christmas promises more sorrow as we wait for reinforcements — in this case, the vaccine — to arrive.

The first line of defense against this common enemy, this indiscriminate killer, is a simple piece of layered cloth or paper held over the nose and mouth by cloth or elastic strings. It is a face mask, the simplest of defensive weapons.

But there is in the United States a tribe that has lost its head, reminiscent of Nicholas Monserrat’s great novel of 1956.

There are among us those who won’t defend their homeland, won’t wear masks, and accompany that treason by propagating a theory that to wear a mask is to grant a malign government total authority over the individual, and to bring about totalitarianism; or that to wear a mask is to cede manhood or endanger our way of life.

Worse, there are those who believe it is a political statement of solidarity with the outgoing administration, with the embattled president, and the raucous nationalism that is the core of his appeal.

Some won’t wear masks out of youthful chutzpah, believing this is a disease of the old and that the young and the healthy are immune.

This is a fiction they have been fed by those who should know better and most likely do know better, most of whom reside under Republican roofs, presided over by that Niagara Falls of disinformation, President Donald Trump.

While the nation is taking fatal casualties which it doesn’t need to take, while first responders and medical personal are thrown again and again into the breach, exhausted and scared, the Trump Republicans can’t bring themselves to join the battle.

While the signs of war — a war with a terrible count in deaths — rages on, congressional Republicans are foraging for scandals like pigs after truffles. Most of them still won’t condemn Trump for his super-spreader activities, like his rallies, parties and reckless behavior in public, which signal masks aren’t needed.

The trouble is that leaders of this headless tribe, this unacceptable face of what was the Grand Old Party, are so cowed that they won’t check the president.

The Republican Party used to be made up of muscular individuals, lawmakers who took their mandate seriously, not today’s pusillanimous followers.

Incredibly, most Republican members of Congress can’t bring themselves to admit that Joe Biden won the election and will be the next president. Had there been “massive voter fraud” this wouldn’t be so. The courts would have spoken other than as they have.

All of this has played into the anti-mask movement and its lethal consequences. The virus doesn’t ask party affiliation: It is an equal-opportunity slayer.

Then there is Trump’s great enabler in the Senate, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

Even as millions of Americans don’t know where the next meal will come from this Christmas besides a food bank, and rent and utility bills are unpaid, McConnell, and McConnell alone, will decide who gets relief, who gets the shaft for Christmas. He can just refuse to bring a bill to the floor and end it right there. His personal concerns are paramount, not those of the other members of Congress.

Not only does McConnell not wish to understand the gravity of the situation in the country, but he also seems to relish his ability to exacerbate it, to turn his job into a Lego game for his own amusement.

This will be a bleak Christmas lit by the hope that the vaccine will deliver us from despair and bottomless hurt.

But for the vaccine to vanquish the virus, we must get our shots. If the same idiocy that shuns masks prevails, the war won’t fully be won for years when it could be ended next year.

The sight of victory is the best Christmas present, and it is possible next year if we close ranks. Those who will bear the guilt are known. They are in Washington now.

This is the month when the national spirit should start to lift: COVID-19 vaccines could be administered by mid-December. While we won’t reach the summit of a mighty mountain this month, nor well into next year, the ascent will have begun.

It is unlikely to be a smooth journey. There will be contention, accusation, litigation and frustration. Nothing so big as setting out to administer two-dose vaccines to the whole country could be otherwise.

But the pall which hangs so heavily over us with rising deaths, exhausted first responders and overstretched hospitals, will begin to lift very slightly.

For the rest of foreseeable history, there will be accusations leveled at the Trump administration for its handling of the pandemic — or its failure to handle it.

But one thing is certain: Our faith in our ability to make superhuman scientific efforts in the face of crisis will be restored. Developing a COVID-19 vaccine will be compared to putting a man on the moon.

The large pharmaceutical companies, known collectively as Big Pharma, have shown their muscle. The lesson: Throw enough research and unlimited money at a problem, accelerate the regulatory process and a solution can result.

Even globalization gets a good grade.

The first-to-market vaccine comes from American pharmaceutical giant Pfizer. But the vaccine was developed at its small German subsidiary, BioNTech, by a husband-and-wife team of first-generation Turkish immigrants. (Beware of whom you exclude.)

Biopharmaceutical research often takes place this way, akin to how it happens in Silicon Valley: Small companies innovate and invent, and larger ones gobble them up and provide the all-important resources for absurdly complicated and expensive clinical trials.

These contribute mightily to the cost of new drugs. A new “compound” -— as a drug is called in the trade — can cost up to $2 billion to bring to market; and financial reserves are needed, should there be costly lawsuits.

The development of new drugs looks like an inverted pyramid. Linda Marban, a researcher and CEO of Capricor Therapeutics, Inc., a clinical-stage biotechnology company based in Los Angeles, explained it to me:

“The last 20 years have shown a seismic change in how drugs and therapies are developed. Due to the speed at which science is advancing, and the difficulty of early-stage development, most of the early-stage work is done by small companies or the occasional academic. Big Pharma has moved into the role of late-stage clinical, sometimes Phase 2, but mostly Phase 3 and commercial development.”

In the upheaval occasioned by the pandemic, overhaul of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) looms large as a national priority. It must be able — maybe with a greater use of artificial intelligence and data management — to assess the safety and efficiency of desperately needed drugs without the current painful and often fatal delays.

Marban said of the FDA clinical trials process:

“It is the most laborious and frustrating process which delays important scientific and medical discoveries from patients. There are many situations where patients are desperate for therapy, but we have to climb the long and ridiculous ladder of doing clinical trials due to inefficiencies at the site which include nearly endless layers of contracting, budget negotiations, IRB [Institutional Review Board] approvals and, finally, interest and attention from overworked clinical trial staff.”

This situation, according to Marban, is compounded by the FDA’s requirement for clinical trials conducted and presented in a certain way, which often precludes getting an effective therapy to market. “If we simplify this process alone, we could move rapidly towards treatments and even cures for many horrific diseases,” she added.

War is a time of upheaval, and we are at war against the COVID-19. But war also involves innovation. We have proved that speed is possible when bureaucracy is energized and streamlined.

When COVID-19 is finally vanquished, it should leave a legacy of better medical research and sped-up approval procedures, benefiting all going forward.

There is a trust deficit in this country, and it may kill a lot of us.

We haven’t been trusting for a long time, but distrust reached its zenith during and after the recent election. The election, still contested, brought with it a massive overhang of distrust. Indeed, the past four years have been marked by wide distrust.

Distrusting the election results isn’t fatal. But distrusting the experts on the need to get vaccinated for Covid-19 is. Yet there are reports that as many as 50 percent of Americans won’t get the vaccine when it is available. That is lethal and a true threat to national security, the economy, our way of life, everything.

If we don’t get our jabs, we will continue to die from coronavirus at an alarming rate. Over 258,000 Americans have perished and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention projects 320,000 deaths by mid-December.

As I recall, it was during the 1960s that we began wide distrusting. By the end of the Vietnam War, we distrusted on a huge scale. We distrusted what we were told by the military, what we were told by President Lyndon Johnson and then by President Richard Nixon.

We also distrusted the experts. Just about all experts on all subjects, from nuclear power safety to the environmental impact of the Concorde supersonic passenger jet.

Beyond Vietnam, distrust was fed by the unfolding evidence that we had been the victims of systemic lying. This led to big social realignments, as seen in the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, and the environmental movement. These betrayals exacerbated our natural American distrust of officialdom.

The establishment and its experts had been caught lying about the war and about other things. It was a decade that detonated trust, shredded belief in expertise, and left many of us feeling that we might as well make it up as we went along.

Now the trust deficit is back.

If LBJ and Nixon fueled distrust in the 1960s and early 1970s, the current breach of trust belongs to President Donald Trump and his enablers scattered across the body politic, from presidential counselor Kellyanne Conway with her “alternative facts” to the Senate Republicans and their disinclination to check the president, even verbally.

The trust deficit has divided us. Seventy-three million did vote for Trump and many of those believe what, most dangerously, he has said about the pandemic.

The result has been the growth of diabolical myths about Covid-19. Taking seriously some, or all, of Trump’s outpourings on the coronavirus — from his advocacy of sunlight and his off-label drug recommendations, like hydroxychloroquine, to putting the pandemic out of mind as a “hoax” — fomented its spread.

We have been waiting for a medical breakthrough to repel and conquer Covid-19 and it looks as though that is at hand with the arrival of not one but three vaccines, the first of which should be available in about three weeks to the most vulnerable populations. The development of these vaccines represents a stupendous medical effort: the Manhattan Project of medicine.

But it will all be in vain if Americans don’t trust the authorities and don’t get vaccinated. It looks as though, according to surveys, 50 percent of the population will get vaccinated. The rest will choose to believe in medical fictions like herd immunity — a pernicious idea that eventually we will all be immune by living with Covid-19. It should be noted that this didn’t happen with other infectious diseases like bubonic plague, smallpox, polio, even the flu.

My informal survey of research doctors puts the odds on who will get vaccinated a little better than 50 percent. They conclude that one third will get vaccinated, one third will wait to see the results among those who got vaccinated early, and one third won’t get vaccinated, believing that the disease has been hyped and that it isn’t as serious as the often-castigated media says. Some of the “Covid-19 deniers” will be the permanent anti-vaxxers, people who think that vaccines have bad side effects; they believe, for example, that the MMR vaccine causes autism.

This medical heresy even as hospitals are filling to capacity, their staff are exhausted, and bodies are piling up in refrigerated trailers because there is nowhere to put them.

Without near universal vaccination, the coronavirus will be around for years. The superhuman effort to get a vaccine will have been partially in vain. The silver bullet will be tarnished.

Get a grip, America. Get your jabs.

Simple advice to innovators and policymakers: Don’t worry about collateral needs or they will distort your good growth and policy efforts.

If we look back, the development of the automobile had collateral effects beyond the ability of the auto pioneers to conceive. Yet there were those who would have restricted automobile development because they worried about the collateral effects, including that there wouldn’t be enough gasoline, oil would run out, cars were dangerous and the fuel stations would explode.

The lesson wasn’t that those were minor concerns, but that they were giant and reasonable concerns that didn’t take into account that there would be as much creativity in solving those problems as there was in creating the primary product in the first place.

If the Wright brothers had worried about how we would keep aircraft from colliding with each other, well, we would have more trains and passenger ships.

The message is that innovation begets innovation. Invent one thing and then invest in something else to support it.

Yet there are reactionary forces at work in the creative arena all the time.

To continue with the automobile example, there are gainsayers to the electric car everywhere. Sometimes they are driven by economics, but often they are just worried about great change.

I can hardly pass a day without reading alarmist pieces about the disposal of batteries, a possible shortage of lithium from friendly suppliers or that there won’t be enough charging points.

To all that, I say piffle.

History tells us that these seeming problems will be solved by the same inventiveness that has brought us to this time when we are seeing a switch from the internal combustion engine — faithful servant though it has been — to electricity.

The danger is rigidity.

Rigidity is the seldom-diagnosed inhibitor of good science, good engineering and good policy. Rigidity in policy, or even just in belief, restricts and distorts.

A rigid belief is that nuclear waste is a huge problem.

I would submit that it is less of a problem than many other wastes we are leaving to future generations. Rigid concerns and rigidly wrong radiation standards led the electric utilities to turn to coal, and now to wind and solar to move away from coal and its successor, natural gas.

Medicine is beset by rigidities and it always has been, from excessive use of bleeding therapy to surgeons who believed it was ungentlemanly to wash their hands.

Those who suffer from less common diseases — Myalgic Encephalomyelitis, also known as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, is one — are impacted by medical profession rigidities. The doctors try to fit disease into what they know and treat patients with known but inappropriate therapies.

Even great innovators like Henry Ford weren’t without their crippling rigidities. Henry Ford was opposed to 6-cylinder engines and wanted all cars to be black.

Political rigidities are perhaps the most pernicious.

I would suggest that the fear of the bogeyman of socialism has prevented us from developing a sensible healthcare system; one that is less expensive and has better results. It doesn’t have to be modeled on Britain’s National Health Service, but it could borrow from Germany or Holland where the health system is universal but provided by private insurance.

Ditch the rigidity and start fixing the patient — in this case, the whole system.

Our educational system is plagued with rigidities. At the lower end, the public schools, children aren’t getting the basics they need to function in our society. At the high end, the universities, there is a new kind of aristocracy where the favored faculty are coddled, shielded and underproductive, while the cost for students is prohibitive.

Our most productive, most gifted graduates are compelled to align their careers with jobs that will pay enough to free them from the debt burden we start them in life with. This might cause a bright student to go into computer science when he or she longed to study astronomy, certainly a less well-paid future.

Rigidities kept women from seeking new roles and responsibilities, and from seeking their own personal and professional identities rather than have them defined by the outside, male-dominated society. Homemaking, yes; corporate management, no.

Rigid doctrine is always at work and is an unseen impediment to future innovation in science, social structure and, above all, in politics.

Watch for it.

It is coming to us as a diabolical enemy: malign, merciless and murderous.

The second wave of COVID-19 will be killing us today, tomorrow, and on and on until a vaccine is administered not just to the willing recipients, but to the whole population. That could take years.

We haven’t been through anything like this since the 1918 influenza pandemic. Not only is COVID-19 set to kill many more of us than it already has, but it also is likely to have huge collateral damage.

Think restaurants: 60 percent of the individually owned ones are set to fail. Think real estate: The damage is so far too great and expanding too fast to calculate — all those office buildings sitting empty, all those shopping centers being vacated. The real estate crisis is beginning, just beginning, to be felt by the banks.

Think education: A year has been lost in education.

Our cultural institutions, from small sports teams to all the performing arts, are on death watch. How long can you hold a theater production company together? How do you save those very fragile temples of high culture, including ballet, opera and symphony music? What of the buildings which house them?

Now looming are the malevolent threats to Thanksgiving and Christmas. These festivals, so cherished, so looked forward to, such milestones of every year and our lives, are set to kill many of us, gathered in love and joy.

Families will assemble in happiness, but that diabolical guest COVID-19 will be taking its monstrous, lethal place at our tables — at the very events that in normal times bind us together. Death will share our feasts.

These are words of alarm, and they are meant to be.

Nearly a quarter of a million of us have died, choked to death by the virus. Projected deaths are 110,000 more by the new year. Yet our leaders have spurned the modest defenses available to us: face masks and isolation. There is little usefulness in assigning blame — but there is blame — and it points upward.

But there is localized blame, too.

Blame for what I see on the streets, where young people stroll without protecting themselves and others from the deadly virus. Blame for what I see at the shops, where customers gain entry without the modest consideration of wearing a face mask for a few minutes.

There is blame for pastors who have insisted on holding services that have spread COVID-19 to their parishioners. And there is blame for those who have rallied or taken to street demonstrations. The virus has no political affiliation, but politics has befriended it in awful ways.

The mother lode of blame must be put upon that increasingly bizarre figure Donald J. Trump, president of the United States, elected to lead and defend us.

Trump couldn’t have vanquished the pandemic, but he could have limited its spread. He could have guided the people, set an example, told the truth, unleashed consideration not invective.

He could have done his job.

When we needed information, we got lies; when we needed guidance, we were encouraged to take risks by myth and bad example. A high number of his own staff has been felled.

On Jan. 20, 2021, President-elect Joe Biden will step into this gigantic crisis. Even if the first doses of a vaccine are being administered, the crisis will still be in full flame, taking lives, destroying businesses, subtracting jobs and changing the trajectory of the future.

There will be good, but it will take time to arrive. It will be in innovation in everything, from more medical research to start-ups and lessons learned about survival in crisis.

It will impact immigration. Only the willfully unobservant won’t note that a preponderance of the health authorities featured nightly on television weren’t born here, and their talent is a bonus for the country.

It should be noted that Pfizer’s landmark COVID-19 vaccine wasn’t developed in that U.S. pharmaceutical behemoth, but by a husband-and-wife team in a small company in Germany. Both are children of Turkish immigrants to that country.

In all countries, immigrants have had the adventurous spirit that is the soul of creativity. Let them in.