this post was submitted on 03 Jan 2025
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Do you remember how Trump chose not to address COVID for political gains when it looked like it was hitting primarily democratic cities? I've seen some calculations that half a million more Americans died from COVID because of his reaction to it. That's treason on a level nobody has reached
https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2025/01/03/trump-to-be-sentenced-jan-10-as-judge-upholds-hush-money-conviction/?
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(24)00804-3/fulltext
I read another recently but can't find it. Any search with the words Trump and COVID is a tricky proposition.
After thinking about these a bit more, especially The Lancet article, I have a hypothesis.
For wealthy neoliberal elites, COVID was babby's first trauma, so they overestimate how badly it impacted the average worker. It was so much worse than anything that had happened in their privileged lives up to that point that by comparison it was a world-altering traumatic event that changed everything.
Working people are used to surviving hardships (especially medical hardships) while those in power ignore them. COVID and the Trump administration's lack of response was just business as usual. Compared to other widespread diseases that get routinely ignored and for which poor people routinely get denied care, COVID was minor (albeit more infectious) and easily forgettable.
That's my best guess for why the libshits can't grok why the little people reacted with such indifference while they lost their fucking minds.
That is part of it, but there is also a long-running thread of medical denialism in society. People want to believe their home remedies, homeopathic cures, chiropractic adjustments, or bleach enemas can cure things just as well or better than certified doctors can. To be fair to them, it has only been about 130 years since doctors learned they should wash their hands before surgery. The average person isn't educated enough to understand how safe, effective, and trustworthy vaccines are.
The other part of it is explained by the lottery. Millions and millions of people play the lottery regularly even though the odds of them winning are about the same as getting struck by lightning while getting bitten by a shark. The average person is shit at understanding odds. They think that they will be lucky enough to beat the odds.
That applies for avoiding Covid. They don't understand that being harmed by the vaccine is far fat less likely than being harmed by the disease. They think they can beat the odds by not getting the disease and still avoid Covid. Some won, but most lost.
Yeah. Medical and science denialism is a big problem. It gets fed when medicine and science are presented as absolutes with no room for debate or discussion, just blind fealty to experts. As a trained scientist who has worked professionally as a scientist for 12 years, I don't trust several disciplines because they project this attitude. I don't blame anyone for being skeptical of those who ask for blind trust in authority.
I'm a former scientist in the environmental field and we deal with similar denialism for similar reasons. As science and technology get more complex, the average person simply doesn't have the background to understand the problem, let alone possible solutions. A certain amount of trust in authority is necessary unfortunately.
I have to disagree.
If you tell people to trust authorities about climate change instead of fostering critical thought and understanding, who is to say that their authorities will align with yours?
Your assertion is a recipe for pushing people to believe misinformation because they feel that they can trust their pastor or their employer or the guy on the news more than some nerd.
I get your point but there is a middle ground. You can apply critical thought to the selection of authorities you can trust. You wouldn't trust an auto mechanic to tell you if your mole was cancerous even though you do trust them with your transmission, right? We need to teach people to recognize areas of expertise a person might have and reject opinions outside that area.
I'd still want the auto mechanic to tell me what's wrong with the transmission and how they diagnosed it. It's true that I'd expect them to know what tests to run for the diagnosis due to their experience/training, but I still want to know what they discovered and how in order to better understand what's going on with the vehicle and whether they are giving me a fair price for the repair.
Sure, but the explanation might be something like the conch spring isn't meshing with the radial flange of the Jefferson gear. That might not make sense to you while still being the correct answer. At some point you have to admit that you don't know enough to make an educated judgement and you just have to trust the expert.
For me, Trump's handling of COVID specifically and the COVID pandemic more generally were such a minor blip in the timeline of horrors and chaos that I witnessed and partook in and only barely escaped from between 2018-2022 that it's hard to register the pandemic as a significant event in that timeline.
I work with elderly people mostly so the absolute terror was probably magnified for me. Regardless of their politics, they knew they were the most vulnerable and it scared the shit out of them.
I was unfortunately very separated from society from 2018-2023, so I'm reliant on written records and memes to understand how others responded to it. As someone who missed it, I really get the impression that it was mostly the wealthy who freaked out, either from trying to process that our society's medical infrastructure is shit, or from being sociopaths who were selfishly upset that their workers wanted time off.
One of the groups that doesn't get talked about often in regards to COVID is the reaction of the gay community, especially the older ones who lived through the worst days of the AIDS epidemic. They took it VERY seriously.
Gay bars are so great. I'm straight but I used to go with several of my gay friends. I've never been hit on by more women than at gay bars lol.