Re: COVID misinformation

How long will the lies about vaccinations, masks, and the pandemic continue?

I’m guessing that the answer to that is simply how long those lies continue to produce the desired political effect for the Republicans and right-wing loonies spewing them. Governors and AGS in red states are doing their damnedest to kill off their constituents by fighting mandates for common sense medical science regarding vaccines and masks. The contrast between deaths in red and blue states is a statistical reality. Republican politicians, pundits, fundamentalist televangelists, and Fox News talking heads are joining the paranoid fools on social media as daily sources of deadly misinformation.

Vaccinated people are 86% less likely to be hospitalized with the virus than are the unvaccinated. With over 95% of deaths now occurring among the unvaccinated, it would seem that debunking the fraudulent information would be an easy task, but dealing with the indoctrinated and willfully ignorant of this particular era of divisive paranoia and vitriol relies on more than science and the truth of numbers.

Rupert Murdoch was publicly vaccinated and encouraged all to follow suit, but primetime on FOX News has been an endless parade of anti-vax guests spouting dangerous unfounded nonsense for the benefit of Tucker Carlson’s and Judge

Judy’s guests. If it were simply a small niche audience that this delusional advice was aimed at it would be a blip on the big screen, but this is more of a blockbuster hit of seeding doubt in a majority of Republicans. Make no mistake there is a political narrative, that has no medical value or goal, the intent is simply to spin mistrust of the current administration and their efforts to save lives. Fearing a successful reining in of the pandemic by a Biden

White House, following the confusion and mismanagement by Trump, the Republicans would rather promote a depraved and indefensible fear of science and take the losses in life than chance a thankful electorate going into midterms next year.

This is institutional insanity, tribal identity established by accepting easily disproven and dismissed nonsense. The same motivations and reactions that have driven the stolen election claptrap and gibberish. A year ago Trump was falsely taking credit for the Pfizer vaccine only months after declaring the pandemic a hoax, later he was talking about bleach injections, and how it was no worse than the flu, now, with 750,000 Americans dead from COVID, he’s questioning the efficacy and safety of the vaccine, just to be in line with the narrative that his fake news friends have rallied support for. How many headstones will we need that should be carved “avoided vaccination”? Texas alone now has passed the 70,000 dead from COVID mark, and it is the red states that are racking up the higher infection, hospitalization, and death numbers. Nearly every death now occurring from COVID is an unvaccinated person. The rabid loonies are trying to use Colin Powell as proof that vaccination is worthless, But Powell had been fighting cancer for years and treatments had left him with almost no functional immune system, hardly an example of anything but a cherrypicked false flag.

The final outcome of this continued deceit by the right and the GOP will either be the wakening of the public at large to their cold-blooded and cruel attitude towards all but the political cash cows, or the dumbing down to willful lemmings of enough of the population to criminally doom this nation into democratic insignificance and representative obsolescence. This is a pandemic, not a test of loyalty to a narcissistic buffoon and the party he lobotomized for profit.

Richard Rawlinson,

Marysville