The disappearing Covid epidemic

This is a Reddit post, and may well have been generated by a Russian bot farm, but it pretty much describes the current right-wing orthodoxy in America regarding the subject:

It’s entitled “The Covid pandemic wasn’t a big deal.”

It was just a slightly worse cold, that ended up killing some old people. I got it like 3 times and wasn’t affected very much. I don’t even know anyone who died from it. It wasn’t a big deal, and people need to stop acting like we survived the plague.

The lockdowns and masks were nonsense, and I am glad my country of Sweden never did them. The best way to go back to normal was just to get it over with and get covid.

If you look you can find essentially identical sentiments from lots of Republican elected officials and thot leaders of various types.

One of the big ideological advantages of stupidity in general and anti-intellectualism in particular is that, once you dispense with any commitment to intellectual standards, you can just say anything with no regard to whether what you’re saying tracks with effeminate considerations like evidence or logic or rational coherence.

Between 2020 and 2022 about 1.5 million more Americans died than would otherwise have died in that three-year stretch. Another two to three million more lives were saved by the Covid vaccines. Covid was the worst public health catastrophe in the history of the nation. The Covid vaccines were one of the greatest medical-scientific achievements of all time.

All this has gone completely down the memory hole in Trumpland, even though or perhaps especially because the latter fact is literally the only thing the first Trump administration accomplished of any non-negative value. Not many people died, everybody who died was old anyway, and most of the people who died were killed by the vaccine, which failed to prevent the disease and regularly had fatal side effects. Covid was just a bad cold, and the socialist Democrats used it as an excuse to impose totalitarian pseudo-public health measures, that hurt more than they helped.

This is absolutely the Republican orthodoxy on this subject now. In this sort of mental landscape it’s completely impossible to debate issues such as which public health measures at the time were in retrospect worth the cost, just as it’s completely impossible to debate issues such as how to overcome vaccine hesitancy most effectively. Those are all legitimate public health issues, but you can’t debate real issues with people who have zero commitment to intellectual standards, which is an accurate description of the entire contemporary American right wing.

In this regard, as in so many others, Trump is both a cause and a symptom, or perhaps more accurately an accelerant of a fire that he didn’t start, and that his longed-for departure will not put out (I’m still going to get drunk on TrumpTod though).