| | | It's an illness in our country. Trump's reaction was to fire up his base, as with the GOP propaganda network (Fux Gnus). The only way to keep the story away from his abject failure to act in a timely manner is to continually focus the blame somewhere else. (Extra credit: Can anybody post me a link of any time in his life, ever, even as a baby, when he acknowledged responsibility for a bad outcome he created?).
What you describe is at it's root religious zealotry and profound faith in snake oil demagoguery and extreme rejection of critical thinking, of expertise, of science, of math. Look at all the people HERE on SI who could not, when the number of infected was only 5000, understand how we'd ever get to 50k, let alone a million and rising.
Rational thinking scratching the veneer of delusion by even a single angstrom blows apart the premise that a billion people without the aid of chat rooms and world wide TV/radio/leaflets dropped by satellites all coordinated their actions to dislodge a person from the US White House for whom the vast majority have no feelings about whatsoever. Only narcissism and projected egocentrism would lead somebody down that rabbit hole.
And to cover up the failure of millions to die, millions of health care workers stopped following the rigorous practices learned in over a hundred countries over multiple generations to suddenly all start falsifying death certificates in a non-standardized way in order to ... in order to .... in order gain... what? A raise? So they can come home from a 12- or 16- hour shift and know they did their part to violate their profession? Their personal integrity?
It is pretty sick that they only way they'd have been 'happy' is if a hundred million were lined up for cremation. Instead, the world had a coordinated and successful (thus far) response and they will be vilified by willfully ignorant and lazy zealots for decades.
By the way, in general you are correct about a new vaccine, but only if the delivery mechanism is new. If it is not new, but previously 'vetted' with humans, then a safe vaccine can emerge far more quickly (e.g. how they put out new influenza vaccines each year).
The one I referred to is here, and this indeed is promising: nytimes.com |
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