If only I had a magic wand, I would henceforth consign all conspiracy freaks and vaccine refuseniks (78 million) to a desert isle where they could breathe free upon each other until God sorts them out. I know that sounds harsh, but I am fed up.

Right now, in the wake of the discovery of the variant Omicron, we are suffering fresh breakthrough infections of idiocy that prove, yet again, that the MAGA loons have learned absolutely nothing – despite a death toll of nearly 900,000, driven ever higher by the unvaccinated.

For instance, it’s a disgrace to the human species that Fox News hack Lara Logan can appear on camera and equate Dr. Anthony Fauci with Nazi doc Josef Mengele, thereby schooling the network’s credulous couch potatoes that someone who’s dedicated to saving lives is the same as someone who abetted the murder of six million lives. What a message for Hannukah week.

Elsewhere, Texas congressman Ronny Jackson (who was Trump’s White House doctor, and who, amazingly enough, still has doctor credentials) tweeted that news of the Omicron variant is just a Democratic plot to win the midterms in 2022: “Here comes the MEV – the Midterm Election Variant! They need a reason to push unsolicited nationwide mail-in ballots. Democrats will do anything to cheat during an election.”

I tend to doubt that the South African scientists who shared their evidence with the world, in the hopes of saving lives with an early warning, were thinking about what balloting options Americans might have one year from now.

That’s how the tinfoilers “think” – clearly it’s a tribal disease that defies treatment – as evidenced by Kari Lake, a Republican gubernatorial candidate in Arizona, who said of the Democrats, “They are going to try and sell us new ‘variants’ for the rest of our lives if we don’t tell them to shove it.” Another Fox host, Pete Hegseth, insisted that Democrats will keep cooking up variants on the eve of every election: “You can count on a variant about every October, every two years.” But their logic (and I use the word advisedly) makes no sense. Fox host Rachel Compos-Duffy said (lied) that the Democrats are exploiting variants in order to justify “more lockdowns,” but wouldn’t more lockdowns hurt the Democrats at election time?

There’s no point in parsing these people. They’ve whined that Trump didn’t get any credit for speeding some of the vaccines to market…then they decided to pride themselves on not getting the vaccine. They’ve periodically insisted that COVID-19 is overhyped, that it’s no worse than the flu…but now they’re complaining that President Biden isn’t getting it under control.

Of course he’s having trouble getting COVID under control – because the Covidiots refuse to cooperate. Urging them to do the right thing, to protect themselves and their fellow Americans, hasn’t worked. And requiring them to do the right thing, via federal mandates, triggers rants about their vanishing freedoms. The right-wing Wall Street Journal editorial board complained the other day that “Mr. Biden had no plan to deal with the large numbers of vaccine holdouts.” What, pray tell, would Rupert Murdoch’s minions suggest that he do?

Statistics don’t seem to matter. Only 59% of Americans are fully vaccinated – lagging far behind countries like Cuba, Costa Rica, Cambodia and Ecuador – and those who refuse the jabs are disproportionately Republican. The nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation reported in October that the unvaccinated are three times more likely to be GOPers than Democrats, and that the ratio has widened since spring, when vaccines became widely available. Indeed, the redder the counties, the higher the COVID rate.

It’s hard to foresee how we can fight new variants, and curb the virus long term, when so many millions of Americans are a clear and present danger to public health – and still function as dumpsters for conspiracy garbage. Biden said: “I expect this not to be the new normal. I expect the new normal to be, everyone ends up getting vaccinated and the booster shot.” Good luck with that.

I was thinking that perhaps Fiji, a nation of 300 islands, would be willing to take our Covidiots…But nah. Fiji’s fully vaccinated rate is notably higher than ours. A MAGA infestation would only lower its quality of life.

Dick Polman is a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia. Email him at dickpolman7@gmail.com