We've hit 800,000 dead, and fifty million infected.
I saw someone on Twitter recently noting that this is now a conservative pandemic -- meaning far-right conservatives were responsible for the pandemic's constant growth over the past year.
This isn't entirely true, since some of us who have been vaxxed and boosted can still transmit the virus; but the claim contains a grain of truth. Over 90% of progressives have been vaccinated; less than 60% of conservatives have. (Source.)
It's worse in my state, where we have a blend of willful ignorance and rabid conservatism. Regularly on the Fort Smith Residents forum I see people repeating Fox news propaganda about the vaccine. It's pretty depressing.
And of course the conservative blogs I read (far fewer now than I did a year ago, since they are just too stupid these days) keep repeating the lie that Covid-19 is "just a bad cold," or that kids can't get or transmit the disease, or that the vaccine "doesn't work." I saw one blog author explain that a dear friend of hers had just died of Covid-19, and then in her next breath explain that this did not mean Covid-19 was a serious disease. No, it's still just a bad cold.
That sort of deliberate denial of reality is positively Orwellian. And more than a little depressing.
Anyway, it doesn't look good for this pandemic ending any time soon, that's all I'm saying.
1 comment:
I used to teach science-based news analysis to first-years, and one of the things I taught them was, as you say, to look for the tiny amount of truth in the falsehoods- the most convincing ones are almost true. It's a bad cold... for some people. Kids don't get as sick... on average. The vaccine doesn't work... as well as the measles vaccine, or to really prevent *everyone* getting sick.
Meanwhile, my work, where everyone was required to be vaccinated, had very small numbers of cases all semester. It's almost like vaccines help knock down transmission some.
(The pandemic is never ending! Animal reservoirs! Up to 40% of cases are asymptomatic! Nobody's government doing anything effective! I hate it.)
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