M. Brandon Godbey identifies what Americans ought to learn from the COVID-19 national freakout.
1) Incompetent bureaucracy: The CDC and FDA played hot potato with the COVID Crisis for months without any coherent strategy. It seems like the more government agencies become involved in the process the more muddled our future becomes. We have found that the medical bureaucracy, like all bureaucracies, eventually falls victim to entropy. At some unknown point in the last 20 years, it stopped functioning as a legitimate source of medical leadership. Today, it is a mass of purposeless tentacles that primarily exists for the sake of self-perpetuation.
2) The Corruption of “Experts“: Since the way to big money in the sciences is through government grants, the way you “hit it big†in science isn’t by finding empirical truth, it’s by repeating opinions that politicians want to hear. We have thus created a generation of quasi-scientists that feed off the government teat with the tenacity of even the worst parasites. When stressed by the pandemic, this system quickly devolved into competing scientific factions, each one pitching their own version of a doomsday scenario for the sake of money, prestige, and sheer professional vanity.
3) Feckless Politicians: Instead of leading in a time of crisis, governors and mayors are taking the path that absolves them from guilt instead what is best for citizens. Constantly in reelection mode, they make choices based on what they might be blamed for instead of what is right. When decisions are made through the “reelect me at all cost†framework, civil right quickly go out the window. Last night, my own governor reassured the Commonwealth of Kentucky that he was perfectly willing to use Gestapo tactics to record the licence plate numbers of those that attend Easter services and effectively put them under house arrest. Other governors have behaved in a similar manner, each one trying to one-up their neighbor.
4) Our Decadent Society: We have become a tragically unserious people, obsessed with celebrity and sorely lacking in critical thinking skills. Social media algorithms have spoon-fed us our own views over and over again. Mass media feeds our inherent cognitive biases, facilitating a surreal kind of mass paralysis that consists of one part hysteria and one part blind submission. We have become the grotesque inhabitants of the mindless hive from E.M. Forester’s imagination. The lessons of history lost on us, we behave like sheep walking to the slaughter, bleating in unison.
5) We are Coddled and Soft: Our lives are easy, and many of us have become detached from the world of hard-working men and women that make our lives possible. We want the truckers to deliver our food and the servers to bring it to us, but we gleefully clap when the economy that supports them is torn asunder. Our general lack of understanding of the collaborative nature of macroeconomics is appalling. Products arrive at our doorstep; food appears in front of us; entertainment is provided in multiple forms at any time or place. Yet the processes by which these miracles are created are so remote and alien to us that we are perfectly willing to watch them burn to satisfy our busybody natures.
OneGuy
I don’t disagree with the assessment but it does grossly understate the part that intentional propaganda and the propagandists in the media play in all of this. Not just the Covid-19 crisis but everything going back to the Vietnam war and no doubt even further back. We have been intentionally misinformed for decades because someone benefits from it. Millionaires and billionaires have had their wishes and dreams granted by our politicians who then spoon feed us the concept that these changes are good for us. For example; Since 1965 when we opened the flod gates on immigration we have “welcomed” 75,000,000 immigrants into our country many of whom are still on welfare, still committing crimes, still trying to change our culture to become their culture and still destroying our once great country. A lot of our congressmen and women embraced this travesty NOT because they believed in the whole “diversity is our strength” BS but because their dirty hands were crossed with silver.
Here is an interesting factoid that came out because of the Covid-19 crisis. Even after President Trump closed some of the air traffic from other countries that in the short period of time from Jan 1st until March 15th 40 million people flew into our country and most of them were foreigners. Did anyone check them and actually know who they were? Do we know why they came, what they did and if/when they went home? Has it occurred to you that this isn’t your country any more?
JK Brown
“The field of influenza virus transmission has largely lain fallow for decades since Andrews and Glover’s original experiments in the 1940s [11]. The paucity of data addressing the role of droplet nuclei in airborne transmission of influenza virus is responsible for substantial debate [20, 21]. Several lines of evidence raise the possibility of airborne transmission but fail to establish a definite role. ”
That’s from a 2009 study “Transmission of Influenza Virus via Aerosols and Fomites in the Guinea Pig Model”. Kind of surprising that a virus that kills 20,000-70,000 Americans every year, with millions of illness that keep people from work, millions of doctor visits with a cost for each and hundreds of thousands of hospitalizations….each year. Yet, research into how it is transmitted is basically pre-Pearl Harbor Attack. But influenza isn’t a sexy illness with lots of cash for such mundane things as transmission over sexy partially effective vaccines.
Oh, and have you heard much about the aerosol transmission in poorly-ventilated space with time-exposure? Have you seen the incidence of COVID-19 cases in NYC? Very subway commuter centric. Easier to feign wiping down hand holds every couple of days, than to install decent fresh air ventilation.
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