On the plus side, wearing a gasmask in public is very on brand with the other slow-rolling apocalypses going on. Can’t brief in wild fire smoke and tiny metal particulates from cars if you’re filtering everything above and below (due to the weird physics of filters) 3 microns.
It’s hilarious how people will gladly huff in all kinds of pollutants but will point out your tofu and say “doncha know veganism is bad for you? Listen to Joe Rogan.”
I watched the government hamstring itself in response to covid. masks were mandatory unless you didn’t want to, vaccines were mandatory except for this one because something about this one in particular is special (the answer, of course, is that conservative babies threw an extra big fit about this one). i watched government officials claim that if a pregnant woman takes the vaccine her baby will be born with a full head of hair, a full set of teeth and eyes that are black from corner to corner. I watched them tell us to stay home, but we have to go to work, and we have to go out and support small businesses, but then we have to go right back home. I watched government officials say that the key to getting the numbers down is to test less, and tell people not to report their positive tests.
But I think the thing that gets me the most, the thing that has eroded my trust in government as an entity able to organize and manage a population rather than just in the bad actors that were in place during covid, is that IT’S STILL FUCKING HAPPENING. The answer to “How did the government handle the pandemic?” is “They haven’t yet.” We just did covid exactly the same way we did Vietnam: we realized that it’s expensive and people don’t like it, so we gave up and declared victory.
if a pregnant woman takes the vaccine her baby will be born with a full head of hair, a full set of teeth and eyes that are black from corner to corner
Watching people making claims that are this easily disprovable and getting away with it has been feeding my cynicism like nothing else. People are still having babies! My vaccinated friend had a baby and it was fine! Where are all the demon babies? Show me a demon baby so I can pledge my fealty!
Couldn’t agree more. And the government/media outlets all seem to treat covid like a forbidden word. You’ll see all sorts of stuff about how people are sick all the time and hospitals are filling up, but all the focus will be on RSV and flu with maybe one mention of covid (ignoring the fact that we KNOW covid weakens the immune system, so it’s contributing to the other two being worse than pre-2020). You’ll see it in articles talking about flu and RSV vaccinations as well. Covid is a forbidden word and only allowed to be said as an afterthought.
I’m disabled and this article I posted hit home in some real unfortunate ways.
Disabled people who are still shielding from Covid have far less trust in the government than the general public and are far more likely to believe it handled the pandemic very badly, a survey has found.
Are we in the middle of a counter-terrorism operation that gives the whole country COVID in an attempt to wipe out all those dangerous, disabled insurgents?
The reason the US is giving the whole country COVID is simply because the bourgeoisie are not human. the-deserter
That is to say, the only concern here is capitalist economic self-interest. We live in an era of quarterly earnings reports. Even though mass death and disabling is obviously bad for the economy in the long-term, sufficient disease response appears more expensive to the capitalist due to short-term up-front costs (same reason America still uses diesel locomotives). To the inhuman bourgeoisie, the “culling” of “expensive” disabled people is beneficial. This is also why assisted suicide in Canada has been expanded into a eugenics program.
Now I emphasize “concern” because there are two reasons for why the capitalist world system has gone with infinity COVID over zero COVID. They can be summed up as capitalism, however.
As mentioned, a perverse focus on the short term gets you perverse results.
Capitalism is inherently incapable of dealing with pandemics. You need a global, centralized response.
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